Wired 2012 talk
At Wired 2012, Carter says that despite Little Monsters allowing Gaga to connect with her fans in an unprecedented way, the music industry doen’t care:
They’re not using the data. I can sit down with the guy from Spotify, and he shows me this spike on Fridays as people listen to Gaga before going to the clubs. When I go to South Africa I know to include this song in this set, because I know that’s a fan favourite, and also to take this song out. We’ve never had a direct relationship with an audience. When someone buys a CD we used to count them as a fan, but we never knew if they hated the CD and threw it out the window.
He says that Gaga used social media early because her music would not get played on the radio:
She didn’t look like a typical pop star, and the music was more four to the floor dance music, so radio wouldn’t play it. She’s at 30-something-million Twitter followers now because she had a headstart over everybody. The types of messages she sends are very authentic, so when she sends messages her fans engage. We started buying fan artworks, and including that in our actual merch line in the tour, because we found fans like art from other fans. They know what they want more than we know what they want.
However the media doesn’t define the message:
It’s like a download from God. We were in a meeting with Google, with Gaga and Larry Page, and Larry said to Gaga, ‘Do you ever a/b test your music?’ She replied, ‘Did Picasso ever a/b test painting?
