Financial Times interview
Carter is interviewed by The Financial Times. He talks about the launch of LittleMonsters.com and how data from the many South American fans led to the expansion of a tour there.
Our bet is on the future of micronetworks. Facebook wasn’t wired to build a relationship between fans and artists. It’s more about communicating with family and friends and old girlfriends or your classmates; 51m likes doesn’t mean we’re going to sell 51m albums or concert tickets. [It’s a] misconception when people talk about a direct relationship between artists and their fans or brands and consumers through social media. The reality is that these platforms own the relationship. So as much as you can talk directly to a customer or a fan, you still have this intermediary . . . that controls the data. And at any given time, if they turn it off or they change an algorithm, like Facebook did with its newsfeed algorithm last year, it changes the way you’re able to communicate with that fan or customer
About his abilities as an artist:
I stay away from the arts . . . writing songs, being creative – those are downloads from god. You can’t do data analytics on art.
The importance of hiring outsiders:
My COO didn’t come from the music industry, my vice-president of creative was actually a schoolteacher. It was important we had people who came from an outside perspective, who didn’t come from selling CDs.
