Fandom and Captain Ahab

After reading a great post by Lizy Cole on fan culture I thought it reminded me of Captain Ahab and how he is beholden to popular opinion, to the "fandom" of his own ship and there high opinion of him. This was clearest for me when Ahab first confronts the crew about going after Moby dick, working them into an emotional frenzy--appealing to there fanaticism you might say. Indeed, Captain Ahab was very much aware of the "power of the fans" that Lizzy so eloquently laid forth.

She had some great things to say about fan culture. It really is a culture. And social network feedback has come to gain massive amounts of power. On youtube you can usually look through a number of comments to see what the consensus on a video is. And sometimes I find myself swayed by what everyone else thinks. Which is exactly what Lizzy said...the opinions of the other fans are what new fans immediately look for. 

That is why some companies create false reviews, etc., they are trying to sway people. I think that is a dangerous concept and highly unethical. 

But back to my main focus...the fandom can have huge sway on the actual thing they are fans of. Indeed, Captain Ahab knew he had to win the crew over, that he couldn't expect to catch the whale entirely on his own. So he pitched the idea to them in a certain way, formulated and intentionally structured so as to bring about the outcome of gaining there support to catch the Whale. 

Bands also have to keep their fans in mind when pitching themselves. The object is to sale the song. So they need to figure out how to pitch themselves to fans in order to (1) get fans and (2)then get those fans to actually purchase the song.

On the youtube front, the band AWOLNATION had a video for a popular song of theirs---"Sail"--

that had less views than a fan made video (that was actually a parody of the song) 

 I can imagine this would be highly frustrating for the band, to have there song accepted more as a comical product than the serious product they wanted it to be (comical songs never sell as well as serious songs, just look at how much money the rapper Froggy Fresh is making compared to a band like Arcade Fire, both having similar view counts on their videos on youtube, but the serious product is--BELIEVE ME-- making a lot more money). 

AWOLNATION ended up making a mashup of all the fan parody videos. Fan's have a lot of power over the thing they are fans of.