Standing Around

I like music, and I like numbers. What do the two have to do with each other?

Last year, I read Ian Ayres’s Super Crunchers, which describes the ways that companies are using math to help guide their business. It’s a breezy read, and very light on the technical details, so I would recommend it to most people.

The first thing that struck me about the book is its clunky title. I mean, never mind that “super crunchers” is already inelegant… the full title is a cheesy business seminar-like Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart. Fortunately, the book brilliantly defends its own title.

Ayres thought that since the book is about numbers, he should use quantitative techniques to come up with a title. He assembled a list of candidate titles, and then placed Google text ads, one for each candidate. He then counted a click on one of these ads as a “vote”.

Google Ads works by cycling through variations of an ad that you write, and it keeps track of how often an ad shows, which pages it appears on, which pages clicks on the ad come from, and how often those clicks happen.

Using this information, you can get a sense of how effective each ad variant is by looking at the click through rate — ie, how often someone clicked on the ad when the ad showed up in a search or on a website.

I should also mention that there’s a fair amount of scientific evidence that suggests people are very inaccurate when self reporting their preferences. I won’t go into it here, but there’s a highly entertaining talk on TED by Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce that has to do with the problems of self reporting. The gist of it is that if you ask someone what he likes, he will give you a different answer than if you plot down a bunch of choices and have him pick his favorite.

In other words, asking “what is a good name?” is much different than “which of these names is the best?”

I decided to take a similar approach as Ayres with Standing Room. I whittled down a huge number of possible names (suggested by a friend who has had freelance gigs naming things — yes, that job actually exists!) down to a list of about a dozen, and placed identical Google ads for each name, except for the name itself.

So, each variant looked like “Standing Room / A hub for music as it should be — live, vibrant, and accessible”, except that the “Standing Room” varied for each candidate.

These were the candidates (in alphabetical order):

• Ahem (Ahem)
• Bullroar
• Catch Act
• Hook and Eye
• Livecast
• Pinspot
• Playback
• Pretty Bird Sings
• Ready Set
• Showchase
• Showsquall
• Standing Room

I ran the ads for a bit over a week, with almost 200,000 impressions. In the end there were clear losers, and a few clear winners, however the top spot was #1 by only a single vote.

Which do you think were the most popular? Standing Room was actually a favorite of mine, as well as Ready Set, and Bullroar. Though I didn’t favor Playback, I thought it was going to be a strong contender. Amongst my friends, Pinspot seemed to be a darling.

Well, the results (with the number of clicks in parenthesis):

1. Standing Room (6)
2. Livecast (5)
3. Bullroar (4)
4. Ahem Ahem (4)
5. Ready Set (3)
6. Catch Act (3)
7. Pinspot (3)
8. Showchase (3)
9. Pretty Bird Sings (2)
10. Playback (2)
11. Hook and Eye (2)
12. Showsquall (0)

And the rest is history.

This sort of analysis is what I want to bring to performance. I want to look for questions where people didn’t think there were questions and answer them.

In New York, it’s common that a venue will book a band and require a blackout period — the band can not play for a few weeks before. The fear is that performing more than once in a short period of time will dilute the ticket sales of both sets.

It’s also common for bands to establish a month long residency at a venue, in which case they’re guaranteed a performance slot every single week.

So does it hurt to perform a lot, or not?

The data exists to answer this question, but nobody is looking at it or keeping track.

It’s an important thing to know. What if it’s the case that frequent performances do not dilute ticket sales? That means venues are needlessly hurting bands, and by extension, themselves.

That’s the sort of thing that I hope Standing Room will be able to illuminate in time. There’s a boundless number of things to discover and understand — once you figure out what the questions are.