Preservation

—  It’s hard work to capture time as it’s passing, to freeze it, analyze it, and package it for the future, and it’s probably even harder still to retrieve it further on down the road. But is anything more vital, more poignant? At the end, if the scenes of your life—the moods, the people—have blown by so fast you can’t recollect them, or you were simply distracted, what do you have? Better not to have let them slip through in the first place.

I’m thinking about this cause I’m thinking about the interview I just had with Jamie DiVenere, a New York-based media consultant specializing in archives. Maybe if I asked sweetly, Jamie would take the VHS tape of my two-year-old son riding a self-propelled plastic motorcycle, and the one of my daughter’s first hit in softball, and digitize them for posterity, but that's not really her thing. For companies, Jamie makes sense of the scattershot, organizing the random as she helps monetize the memories and vital moments in history. Jamie recently finished just such a digitization assignment, The MTV Vault Project, for MTV and VH1, two brands of Viacom. Memory preservation, yes. But MTV can also now sell that content, or at least not have to pay external stock licensing sources for content it owns but can't find because they didn’t know what they had within the context of the archived assets. I want my MTV? Even MTV wants its MTV. 

Audio Marketing

—  It’s said that we form our musical tastes early on—for life. We can pretend later that we’re really into jazz or chamber music, but it turns out nothing will ever move us the way the Beatles’ “Something” moved me in October 1969, or Drake’s “God’s Plan” moved kids this year, even if we were too young to get the song (at all, in my own case). For the record, I was only eight years old in 1969, so there was still some wiggle room. I filled it with bubble gum, glam rock, punk, and that guy from the Jersey Shore, more or less in that order.

Earlier this month, Spotify, the music-subscription service, tabulated data about my current listening habits. In a very pleasant and creative way, Spotify shared the numbers back with me online (this is Spotify’s 2018 Wrapped campaign). The personalized interactive 2018 Wrapped experience is awesome. Turns out I had spent 22,074 minutes on the service this year, 600 of those—the most—with Sarah Shook & the Disarmers. I had listened to non-mainstream artists 104% more than the average Spotify listener. Spotify Wrapped is a fun and, even better, personal marketing campaign.

Belinda Lopez, Director of Integrated Production at Spotify and a member of its award-winning in-house agency, recently explained how it all comes together. She also (you have to read to the end, no cheating) dished her top four songs for New Year’s Eve. As I write this final OPEN Topics of 2018, I am familiar with one of them (everybody is), but not the other three. New Year’s Eve in Nashville, I’ll be listening to Belinda’s faves, expanding my cultural horizons. In New York’s Chinatown, Todd will tune in, as will Chloe across the river in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Mia, many hours ahead of us in Hamburg, Germany, will certainly have her headphones on. Happy New Year, everybody.