It���s Not Their Pop Idol, but a Bot

Ben Sisario of the New York Times on the sudden popularity of bots in the music industry:

50 Cent, Aerosmith, Snoop Dogg and Kiss have all deputized chatbots as their automatic, ever-alert greeters on Facebook Messenger, handling the flood of inquiries that would overwhelm any human.

Three things stuck out to me as interesting signals here:

Chat is emerging as a distribution channel. Bands are using chat to share pre-release clips of singles. (���Based on the data we���re seeing, it���s not crazy to think that a year from now it���s going to be [the music industry���s] No. 1 distribution channel,��� according to Matt Schlicht, CEO of chatbot-builder Octane AI.)
Bots are moving beyond transactions and broadcast/marketing to start to manage common fan communications. (���Chris Mortimer, the head of digital marketing at Interscope, said Messenger was now a critical way for his artists to reach their fans. ���Right now, a Facebook Messenger inbox is what an email inbox was before the spammers got to it,��� he said.���)
Bots may have even more promise as proxies for people than for brands/services. The emotional connection some fans feel with these bots is remarkable.

That last point reminds me of Rafa�� Cymerys���s experiments with automating his friends on Slack: ���Behind most automated messages there’s a real person. Why not make it clear from the start? This will give the recipient a reference to a real person.��� This approach may have legs beyond entertainment stars.

Cultivating this hero-by-proxy approach in bots relies on voice and tone that is true to the person (and personality) you���re ���automating.��� Which brings me to my favorite line of the Times piece:

Not all celebrity bots are quite up to the level of verbal verisimilitude, however. Aerosmith���s, for example, responds to virtually every inquiry with ���Rock on.���

NY Times | It���s Not Their Pop Idol, but a Bot. Fans Cheer Anyway.