Widening Access Memories

I’ve been watching, with awe, the sheer marketing genius behind the release of the new Daft Punk album, and wondering what I can learn from it.

There’s been surprisingly little written about the marketing plan, what does exist seems to fit neatly within the meta-PR (PR about PR) genre.  Gearóid Cashman of Harvard PR (no, not that Harvard) notes:

“[T]he biggest story here is the unprecedented level of engagement from the audience – people taking the initiative to use the limited content given to them to create their vision of what it meant to them.”

This made me think a little of the idea of culture jamming – appropriating fragments of culture and reinterpreting them to make sense of the world around us. Very ds106.

More plainly, Brock Clauser of Stream Companies says:

“[T]hey have used older PR tactics to play into our new social world.”

But to me, it’s what they have sold, rather than how they sold it, that is where the genius lies.

Somehow the release of an album has become important, in an era where apparently the single is everything. Even Ian Astbury of the Cult says so.

Somehow a cultural artefact that repays, and indeed demands, sustained and repeated engagement has become popular in an age of “instant gratification and quick fixes”

I wonder for how many people Random Access Memories is their first experience of a complete, realised album as a single experience. It’s certainly been the first time for a long while that I’ve noted stuff like repeated motifs and chord progressions, coherent soundworlds, thematic unity and all the other boring stuff that is why people still listen to the whole of Dark Side of the Moon rather than just the hits.

Daft Punk’s marketing team have sold us the idea of an album as an event. As an experience.

And I wonder if Higher Education needs to come up with a way to do something similar.

I realise I’m on fallow ground drawing an education/music industry parallel. But we are seeing a move towards selling short blasts of “education” as a product, rather than as a longer experience.

And the old widening participation arguments, around encouraging people to try this experience that otherwise wouldn’t consider it, is being nearly eclipsed by this new model.

If we talk about education as a product, as a key to a better salary, then shorter, quicker, less personally affecting means of acquiring it become more popular.

(The pricetag is a red herring here, education still costs the same as it always has, but more of the costs are now visible to the end user rather than being covered invisibly by government support)

I want higher education to be personally affective. I want it to change peoples ideas and outlooks. I want it to expand minds and challenge preconceptions. Which I suspect is another way to say I want it to be messy, difficult, unfashionable and not for everyone.

Who is going to sell a whole course in a market swamped by silly homogenised “tasters”? And how?

PS: … and if “Fragments of Time” isn’t yacht rock I don’t know what is.  Koko’s fire is still burning. Smooth music will never die.