What drives digital activity often differs from what business plans for. Because consumers are people not sheep. Sounds extreme? Well look at how remix culture and user generated content have driven uptake of broadband & 3G...

By Michael Nutley of



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Three years ago everyone was asking the question "what is broadband content?" because we were all trying to work out what would fuel the mass uptake of high-speed Internet connections. Now the question is equally important, for exactly the opposite reason.

As it turned out, a new type of content wasn't what was needed to push broadband into the mainstream. But now there are more broadband connections in the UK than dial-up, the question of what people are going to use them for is increasingly significant. Because increasingly the content that looks most powerful and compelling is the content that people are producing themselves.

People motivated by community

It's certainly already happening in mobile. Interviewed for a feature in NMA this month, O2's I-mode architect Jag Minhas explains that once the service has been jump-started by involving established content brands, the second phase of the strategy will be to promote user-driven content innovation. This is because the content people find most exciting is from those closest to them in their communities.

Elsewhere Levi's Antidote project is taking fanzine content that would normally only be distributed locally and distributing it across Europe, while the BBC, with its Backstage initiative , is encouraging people to "use our stuff to create your stuff". And if you doubt the degree to which users are willing to create their own content, you just have to look at the figures from a Guardian/ICM poll at the beginning of this month, showing that a third of 14-to-21-year-olds have launched their own blog or Web site.

User-generated content + remix culture = a new digital landscape

If this user-generated content came only in the form of blogs and fanzines, it would still be causing concern among the established content players. What's really disturbing them, though, is the meeting of user-generated content and remix culture.

In the past 20 years we've witnessed a fundamental change in the way people think about music. Sampling and remixing have created a culture where there is no such thing as a finished work; everything is a work in progress, or the starting point for a new work. And as the tools required to sample and remix other forms of content become available to a mass audience, we can expect to see the results of this attitude spread. In fact the BBC has already acknowledged as much with the announcement of its Creative Archive. This aims to allow people to take BBC content, which, after all, they have already paid for, and use it in their own projects, as long as they are non-commercial.

Connecting commerce & rights with the remix mindset

This cuts to the heart of the matter. Of course the people who produce the content in the first place should be rewarded for their work, but the content production and distribution industry is going to have to come to terms with the fact that remixing is one of the ways their audience wants to interact with their products. And as we've seen with file-sharing and the music industry, the best way to respond to changing consumer behaviour is to provide a high-quality, legal, commercial framework within which it can exist, rather than to demonise and legislate against a large part of the audience, thereby driving them underground.

In fact, the building blocks of such a framework already exist. Copyleft and other forms of protection for content creators are already in use, allowing non-commercial reuse of content. Apple's integration of its music production software, Garageband, into iTunes means that bedroom musicians can bypass the record industry to sell their work, but it also creates a way to monitor commercial use of samples in Garageband-based creations. And music recognition software such as Shazam carries the promise of being able to spot samples embedded in other works.

The commercial benefits of embracing user-generated content are beginning to emerge; for example introducing mobile blogging cut churn by 70% for four operators. In order to reap those benefits, companies are going to have to renegotiate their relationship with the people who they expect to generate this content. The alternative is simply to be left behind.

Michael Nutley is the editor of New Media Age.

NMK Event: User Generated Content: The Real Deal? – November 8 2005
Speakers from: Four Docs (Channel 4), MoblogUK, Scoopt, Microsoft (MSN Spaces), Lateral (on the Levi's Antidote project) and Futurescape.