Nancy Baym

by: Nancy Baym

One of the big questions raised by social networking sites is what the heck those “friendships” really are. In this paper, written with my former Ph.D. student and now Ohio University professor Andrew Ledbetter, we examine this in the case of Last.fm. Based on a large survey of users, we pose the question of what predicts how strong or well developed Last.fm friendships are.

by: Nancy Baym

Hi there. Remember me? Ok, so I’ve been an epic blogging fail lately. But there’s a good reason! I’ve been writing full length things. Like the 2 papers I’m about to share here.

by: Nancy Baym

Prince may be eagerly suing everyone who posts live videos of his shows on YouTube, but the Swedish label Songs I Wish I Had Written, headed by Martin Thörnkvist, one of the leaders of music-business think tank The Swedish Model, is taking the opposite strategy.

by: Nancy Baym

Along with Radiohead (though in fact far beyond them), Trent Reznor is often held up as one of the heroes of new media music promotion. This raises the usual litany of questions: Could this work for a new band without a huge following? Is this unique to him? Is this THE FUTURE? Blah blah blah?

by: Nancy Baym

One of the most read posts I ever wrote was this one about sneaker fan efforts to get Nike to manufacture the McFly seen in Back to the Future II.

They got their wish. Kind of:

by: Nancy Baym

The European Interactive Advertising Association recently released a study showing that sports fans are twice as likely to use the internet while watching TV than are ‘average’ internet users. As the report on this posted at Netimperative explains:

by: Nancy Baym

The worlds of politics and fandom have been merging for some time, and it’s never been clearer than in this US election cycle where “user-generated content” from YouTube debate questions to Obama girl videos to Facebook groups to political blogs have been so important and inescapable.

by: Nancy Baym

Metallica have offered a rationalization for demanding that those invited to a listening party take down the reviews of the album they wrote. Oops, just some underling’s dumb move, honest. On Metallica.com, they write:

by: Nancy Baym

by: Nancy Baym

Last week, Coldplay made their new single “Violet Hill” available free for one week (one week? lame) for download from their official website. Last.fm tracked its listens and what a lot of them there were: