It's Social, Social, Social At LeWeb 2011

PARIS — “Launching a product during LeWeb week is like whispering during a death metal gig — very difficult to get heard,” tweeted The Next Web’s Martin Bryant a few days before LeWeb 2011 kicked off last week. It is true, the Parisian tech conference has become a giant among events of its kind. This […]

PARIS -- "Launching a product during LeWeb week is like whispering during a death metal gig -- very difficult to get heard," tweeted The Next Web's Martin Bryant a few days before LeWeb 2011 kicked off last week. It is true, the Parisian tech conference has become a giant among events of its kind. This year it lured 3,000 or more delegates and created a lot of noise.

Yes, we were essentially bombarded with launch announcements last week. Spotify launching Last.fm-meets-Pandora service Spotify Radio, Deezer launching its music streaming service in 200 countries and Karl Lagerfeld launching an online fashion collection with Net-A-Porter, to name a few.

What crystallised through plenty of startup news was that the official conference theme "Social Local Mobile" was wisely chosen as a roundup of 2011.

Take the media, for instance. When Ogilvy Mather's Thomas Crampton asked the audience "Who here thinks Twitter is media?" a fair three quarters raised their hands. This raises the old question: has "old school media" given way to more social, local, mobile ways of sharing news?

"Traditional media has a very difficult time producing truly local content in an economical manner. They can hardly make money from it and so cover local things less -- local publications are going away," said President of AOL Brad Garlinghouse.

"The news used to be delivered to you? You don't want that anymore," Bruno Patino of France Televisions Group added. "We want to engage in social conversation. What is changing is the control of the system [the media] used to have. We're still in the game, we just don't control it anymore."

Continue reading 'It's Social, Social, Social At LeWeb 2011' ...

Since traditional media has started to embrace networks like Twitter or Reddit, the Social Local Mobile aspect of storytelling is changing grounds. Social means reaching a great scale even if the story happens locally, the panel at LeWeb decide.

The thing is though, sometimes we exaggerate the "social" a bit, don't we? Not all of exactly started cheering when Spotify decided to team up with Facebookso we could thus be informed of every single freaking song our friends ever listened to.

Point taken. What turned out to attract the biggest crowd of all three days in the conference hall at LeWeb was an appearance of Facebook and Spotify investor Sean Parker. The entrepreneur-turned-investor (of course we all remember Napster?) was asked the inevitable question what made him think the crowd would welcome the Spotify noise on Facebook.

Parker admitted that the team "wanted to force the product to go social". However, artists would eventually benefit from the social aspect, seeing as it would help rather unknown musicians to gain an audience based on recommendations.

"The record industry has collapsed over the last 10 years and went from a $45 billion to a $12 billion worldwide industry. That's the [music industry's] biggest problem."

Record labels are unable to take risks because the industry is much smaller, Parker said.

"There's something wrong with distribution system. [Record labels] are unable to take risks with some great artists that come to them because they have to stick to the familiar. They have to let bands get much further along in their career before signing them and some amazing artists don't even think there's a future for them in making music. It motivates me internally to want to fix the industry of music so that great art is finding an audience."

Going social sure isn't the answer to everything, but LeWeb made it quite clear that it will remain one of the big themes of 2012.