By Lee Henshaw

Working with record labels, promoters and record shops, I'm conducting a commercial experiment in taste.

At Into-it, we are inviting music fans to install our Chrome extension and tell us the music they’re into. In return, we’re transforming The Guardian and The Independent for them by replacing the banner ads with personalised notifications about new releases and tours.

We only launched a few months ago but we already have over 100 artists on the extension. This week, we're adding Lorde, Haim, Oasis, Mac DeMarco, Addison Rae and Hotline TNT. I've recorded this video for you so you can see the extension in action.

In this article I’ll explain why UK music companies and online publishers are getting behind the idea that when it comes to display advertising, the only way to know what music someone is into is to ask them.

33 is the magic number
33 is the average age at which we stop listening to new music in the UK.

This is when we close our ears to artists we've never heard of - when our tastes calcify, if you will.

Music discovery starts in adolescence - think about those songs you loved at 13 or 14 that are still with you now – and peaks at 24. From around 30, our interest in new music starts to drain from us with the regrettable inevitability of warm water leaving a bath.

Why is that?

Well, there's a prosaic answer and a profound one.

Give or take, 33 is the same age at which we get married for the first time, have our first child, or get our first mortgage. So when you're in your early thirties and your friend says - "Do you fancy coming to Victoria Park to see Charli XCX?" - you might be inclined to say no.

Experiencing new music gets squeezed out by events.

There is something else at play, though.

When Steve Jobs turned 30, he wrote this on the invite to his party: “For the first thirty years of your life, you make your habits; for the last thirty years, your habits make you.”

This is what's known as the explore-exploit trade-off.

The trade-off between seeking new information - this is when you explore - and making decisions based on what you know - this is when you exploit.

Exploring is listening to the new Fontaines D.C. album. Exploiting is putting the Arctic Monkeys on again.

Mathematicians explain the explore-exploit trade-off with their 37% rule - the idea that we spend 37% of the available time exploring our options before deciding which ones to exploit. If you live to be 82, at 33 you are 37% of the way through your life.

The two most popular news websites in the UK for 18- to 33-year-olds are The Guardian and The Independent, who are together presenting the music industry with a radical new way of promoting releases, tours and merch to fans.

Transforming news websites
20 years ago, 40% of the UK's total advertising spend went to magazines and newspapers and their websites. 

Today it’s 4%.

40% to 4%.

If you'll allow me to take you back in time - to the mid-1990s - I think that's where we'll find the origin of this crisis.

In the mid-90s, I worked in music in Manchester.

I was there when the late great Mancunian music industry entrepreneur Tony Wilson streamed the first British gig on the internet. The Dust Junkys and The Space Monkeys at Manchester's Cyberia cafe, sometime in 1996.

Tony Wilson founded the Hacienda nightclub and Factory Records, home to Joy Division and the Happy Mondays. The film 24 Hour Party People is based on his life. Tony often spoke about praxis - praxis, he'd say, was the idea that you do something because you want to do it and after you've done it you find out all the reasons why you did it. 

This definition of praxis, to me, captures the ethos of the mid-90s internet gold rush - lots of companies figuring out the reason for doing something by just doing it. The mid-90s was an exciting time in online publishing. The means of production were suddenly in the hands of the many, not just the hands of the few. A hip-hop fan in Glossop could publish a website as easily as the head of Conde Nast in New York.

However, this was also the time when the American online publishing industry demonstrated the colossal failure of imagination that triggered the decline of online publishing. 

What did they do?

They invented the banner ad. 

We should have seen it coming.

The great media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted it in his 1964 book, Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man.

He said this: “the content of any medium is another medium”.

He pointed out that when a new medium emerges, it fills itself with material from the medium that came before it.

At the start of the 20th century, silent films were recordings of stage plays. In the 1920s, music-hall performers recorded their live routines for radio. When television arrived in the late 1940s, its schedules were filled with the same acts and formats from radio. Websites in the mid-90s resembled newspapers and magazines. We used the new technology to create something that resembled the old thing.

Before we knew it, the banner was introduced to the cookie and hand in hand they skipped into the new millennium, ushering in the age of surveillance capitalism, the first time in advertising’s history that the technology used to deliver the ads trumped the creativity of the people making them.

With creative directors asleep at the wheel, adtech as it became known pursued its own big idea: reducing customers to data points and trading that data. Advertisers stalked us with ads, pushing us into the ‘uncanny valley’, when a robot is so lifelike, it creeps you out. The inevitable backlash began with readers using ad blockers to express their displeasure.

It was also becoming clear that this was a rigged promotional channel, or what economists call ‘a market for lemons’. The sellers of banner ads knew much more about the quality of those banner ads than the buyers. Buyers didn’t know if they were getting a ‘peach’ or a ‘lemon’.

When you are a buyer in a market for lemons, when you are faced with all that information asymmetry, there are only three things you can do:

One: Tell the seller to prove they're selling you a peach.
Two: Somehow prove that you're buying a peach.
Three: Just walk away.

That's precisely what most industries did.

40% went to 4%.

The music industry was no exception.

But thirty years after the invention of the banner ad, publishers are partnering with music companies to explore whether the very thing that caused the publishing crisis can be replaced with something better, with personalised notifications that improve things for everyone.

The Intention Economy

I got the idea for Into-it from reading a book, The Intention Economy by Doc Searls.

In the 2010s, I ran a book club for people working in marketing. We'd meet up every now and then to discuss books about advertising. It was a bit dry. It wasn't for everyone. In fact, the first rule of book club was that you didn't need to read the book. Otherwise nobody would have turned up.

One of the books we read was The Intention Economy by Doc Searls, a writer from the early days of the internet who imagines a web where individuals, not platforms, set the terms.

In the intention economy, power shifts to customers who express their wants and advertisers respond accordingly. It flips the advertising model on its head.

Doc argues that the intention economy is "the only evolutionary path out of the pure guesswork game that advertising has been for the duration.”

The intention economy is made for the British music industry.

We spend more per person on digital advertising than any other European country, making us natural innovators. According to ExchangeWire, 76% of us working in marketing see personalisation as the top benefit of ad tech compared to 44% in the rest of Europe.

We also see privacy as the biggest barrier to adopting adtech. And no wonder: so-called personalisation in online advertising has so far come at the cost of privacy, with adtech rooting in our bins to track and target us without our explicit consent.

Into-it is different. It’s not about surveillance. It’s about permission. That’s the promise of the intention economy right there, personalisation with privacy baked in.

We don’t use cookies.

We don’t track fans.

We respond to intent.

We are taking our baby steps – we fall over every day – but the early signs are encouraging. The average click rate on our notifications on The Guardian and The Independent, for example, is 5.9%, which is 118 times higher than the average click rate on a banner ad, showing that our notifications are both expected and welcome.