Fellow Futurefeed Twitterer and London-based social media expert Neil Perkin is always good for an artful reminder; I found the video below on his most recent post. Nice one, Neil - thanks for sharing!
This egged me to predict (or rather... post-dict;) that 2010 will be all about Mobile:
Mobile Broadband Take-Off
Mobile Devices 2.0 (readers, tablets etc)
Mobile Communications X.0 (Google Wave, Twitter, apps etc)
Mobile Reading (what... news to you? Start with my free Music 2.0 book, here;)
Mobile Content ?.0 (drastically new, cross-media models... such as the tablet will offer)
As to the video: says its creator James Theophane: "Each
phone is individually addressed by a computer to cofunction and create
a choral arrangement. Assigning each phone a tone, the mass is
transformed into an aural form that appears to come alive, shimmering
and flirting for onlookers."
Techdirt's brilliant Mike Masnick wrote about this a few weeks ago: Corey Smith achieved massive success as an indie artist apparently based on some ideas outlined in my 2005 book "The Future of Music" (co-written with my buddy and BerkleeMusic chief Dave Kusek). Very cool! It feels really good to hear this; and to find that some of our work actually falls on fertile ground. May there be a lot more of this in 2010!
If you have similar stories please feel free to share them. If you want to read my follow-up book, Music 2.0, please go here to order it (dead-tree or PDF), or here to read it on your iPhone or blackberry (for free;).
"One of the things that he discusses in the podcast is that what really got him started down this road was realizing that it could be done. He read Dave Kusek and Gerd Leonhard's excellent The Future of Music, and it made him realize "hey, this is possible." And that, alone, made a huge difference. It's amazing what you can do once you realize that something is possible -- and one of the great things we've seen in writing about Corey and numerous other musicians and their success stories is that they, in turn, inspire many other musicians who realize that it really is possible to do quite well despite the naysayers and the doom and gloom. There are a bunch of people who seem to have a vested interest in tearing down the success stories (in many cases because they profit from having naive musicians sign over their lives), but the obvious success stories shine through and inspire many more who follow. It doesn't mean that every musician is guaranteed success. In fact, Corey's story highlights the amount of hard work and dedication that was needed, combined with some great music and a bit of luck as well, to make all of this work...."
Interesting point by Martin, below. I would add that Twitter serves as firehose, knowledge flows more like a small creek, and 'wisdom' really comes in drops;)
I found this snippet on SocialMediaToday.com and it's clearly a trend we are going to see everywhere, in 2010: companies as well as individuals and organizations will put social media on the forefront of their 'marketing' efforts.
"The FT says that Economist publisher Ben Edwards hopes that Facebook will help his site acquire new readers and develop a "deeper level of engagement" with existing ones.
[…] "We have a mission online of being the foremost destination for global discussion and debate, which is a social proposition," Mr Edwards told the Financial Times. Making Economist.com more social is "the core of our strategy", he said.
[…] About 180,000 people have joined its official "fan page" on Facebook. A marketing budget of "tens of thousands of pounds" will be allocated to help boost those figures to meet its targets.
[…] The Economist will also be "a lot more active" on Twitter, which will be a "full-time job", Mr Edwards said. "That shows the importance we place on it as a source of traffic," he said.
Merry Christmas and a happy 2010 to everyone in the Music Industry! Below is a short video I made specifically for all you music industry people reading my blog (plus 2 other videos I believe you may enjoy, as well - if you need more, please go to my GerdTube channel on Blip.tv).
In addition, here are my top 9 ideas for what I think needs to happen in 2010, to move this industry forward. I am using mostly links here because, well, I have said it all already way too often in the past 5 years;)
Stop pushing for more and more and...more legal or technical protection measures and lighten up on the constant quest for control: think (and act) compensation not control!
Access to music is going to replace ownership, very soon, so start thinking 'Selling 2.0' - if copies are abundant and can no longer be monetized in the same way as before, what else can you sell? This is crucial. You need to groom and build the New Generatives not push harder to pass laws to try and get the old times to magically return.
Friction truly is Fiction i.e. utterly wishful thinking, now, so you have a choice: get out of the way... or lend a hand (you have heard that song before). Reinvent your relationship with the artists and the 'people formerly known as consumers'. Stop hiding behind technological tricks and artificial hurdles: protection is in the business model not in the technology (need more? Check out my new book "Friction is Fiction").
Stop hanging on to that good old, comfortable EGOsystem paradigm - start building the new ECOsystem. The future is not in Google paying for all music online, or the ISPs paying for all music on their networks - it's in constantly moving, interconnected, fluid and tri-brid (that is hybrid+1) systems of 'I pay, you Pay, 3rd party pays'.
The new money is in connecting the cloud (where the music is) with the crowd (where the money is) - access comes first now, ownership is second. And this is good news!
Question your assumptions: what do you still believe that is no longer really true...? (see the video below).
I just read this very interesting piece in PaidContent.org (one of my favorite sites): "Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division... at the MediaBistro eBook Summit... decried the emphasis on the $9.99 price point for e-books. “The $9.99 price point is not a money-maker,” he said. “Certain bestsellers are sold at that price for retail, competitive reasons. But you need to have a range. You could go from $10 to $20 even to $100 for an e-book. There’s no sweet spot and it’s certainly not $9.99. When you walk into a bookstore and there are a range of prices. It should be the same for an e-book store.” Haber went on to defend the use of DRM, which he doesn’t see going away for awhile. “You need an orderly process to sell books and DRM makes that possible, mainly because it allows content creators and distributors to make money from that content"
Ouch. Have you not learned anything from happened in digital music during the past 10 years - where have you been hiding?Let me summarize it for you:
DRM is a total - and much discussed - nuisance and significant deterrent to legal consumer behavior, and it does ZERO to prevent sharing of copyrighted content online. DRM just turns users that have legal, fair and honest intentions into guinea pigs for digital rights protection schemes thought up by people who still have their emails printed for them. Wake up: protection is in the business model - not in technology. I may even concede that DRM may work in some (but increasingly rare) cases, but for books and for music...? No chance. Imho, you have to be kidding if you think these kinds of remote-controlled-rights schemes will make you any money in the future. In my opinion, anyone that still talks about DRM being a chief part of their eBook strategy should consider taking a longer vacation, and do some serious reading and thinking (sure... you could start with my own new book "Friction is Fiction" -ask me for the free PDF if needed; )
Face it: the price point for digital books has to be lower - much lower - than the price point for a real i.e. dead-tree, printed, shipped, physical book. Just because you can't seem to figure out how to reduce your costs across the board, start to add significant value in new areas and still turn a profit, that does not mean consumers will massively adopt eBook-reading at those price points (Kindle etc) or even above (as seems to be suggested above).
This looks like a very lame rerun of the classic and most disturbing mistakes of the music industry: the incumbent market leaders really thought they could actually increase their margin as well as their ability to control the usage (!) when selling music online, i.e. have much lower distribution and marketing costs, keep the artists down to the same old, tiny percentage, and - yes ! - increase the prices on a per-track basis.
Ask yourself this simple question: what would have happened if a download had been priced at $0.20 or even 10 cents per track (or even, yes, a flat-rate), instead of $1 - would anyone still have bothered to try and download it for free, somewhere else? Could the value of those active, engaged and happy buyers be captured, and then be extended to other things you can sell them? Clearly, the answer is YES.
This is my message to the eBook industry and the publishers: do not head into the ill-fated direction of wanting to sell digital content for the same price as the physical content (or even above...ouch) - it is a pipe-dream!
Instead, make eBooks drastically cheaper, offer unique bundles and compilations, add new values all the time (cross-media anyone?), invent new packages (think mobile), and stop focusing on just selling UNITS. Flip the pricing logic before it flips you: lower prices, infinitely more engaged and legal users, and new Generatives on top!
Finally, here is something that wasn't touched on at Paid Content but that is crucial: If you think that the traditional deals with the authors will carry over into the eBook environment you are deeply mistaken. Witness what happened with Random House's eBook initiative, here.The authors (and their agents!) will need to be brought in as PARTNERS not minor players, as they have been in the past. Accept, adapt and move forward.
Demand Media (see this brilliant Wired piece), one of the biggest producers and distributors of online video (see the Mary Meeker / Morgan Stanley presentation here; page 42) produces 100s of 1000s of videos on topics that are solely determined by a proprietary algorithm that crunches data on popular search terms, keywords and their current rates on search engines, and information about how many web pages already cover the topic. If a topic is 'hot' and not yet covered, Demand Media commissions an army of freelance video makers, at $20 per video (!), to quickly produce short clips on the topic, e.g. on 'how to heel-flip on a skate board' etc.
Wired's Ryan Singel talks about AOL's similar new plan: "AOL’s new chief plans to combine algorithms, marketing partnerships and
cheap freelance writers in order to turn the stale web property into a
vibrant online content factory pumping out stories to fit the zeitgeist..." - all for the sole sake of taking advantage of the Google-page-ranking system i.e. to subsequently yield more advertising dollars.
With both examples, the idea is simple: to produce a huge a and hyper-distributed amount of fast, short - and above all - ultra-cheap content that is a perfect fit with the hottest and most expensive keywords on the web, today, so that the maximum advertising rates can be achieved at all times. In other words, this 'content' only exists as a way of garnering advertising revenues based on keyword popularity - hardly what I would consider 'adding value to the content ecosystem' ;)
In music, recommendations are already generated largely by software algorithms and data-crunching recommendation engines; some people even go as far as predicting whether a song will be a hit or not, using smart software engines (disclosure: I am on the advisory board of this company, uPlaya). Google's page-ranking system relies entirely on machine-intelligence, of course, and Twittercounter's top 1000 list is, of course, generated solely by data feeds - not by human editors (such as my own site, Futerati, which will, btw, be relaunched within the next 10 days).
Content that is produced only because of keyword popularity and because eager and / or desperate producers (no blame there, btw, just stating a fact) are willing to work for exceedingly cheap rates may bring in the immediate bacon but in my opinion will not last in terms of continuous popularity and therefore in long-term revenues. And if they do, great for them - but it does not mean that all content production will move in this direction. Every single person that likes to eat fast-food still knows the difference between Wendy's and a nice meal: yes, it's more expensive and it takes longer but it's a much better experience, and it makes you feel better. Fast food chains simply co-exist with 'real' restaurants of all kinds, everywhere - and that's what we will have in the content industries, too. If you want to make a quick buck by starting a fast-food franchise, go ahead. I, personally, don't like to eat fast food, nor would I enjoy running a McDonald's franchise so I will go a different route.
There will always be people who are willing to pay for better, deeper and more 'serious' content, and, in my opinion, increasingly so (mostly because of the trend towards mobile content consumption) - we just need to find new, web-native models of getting paid for content and translate the value of attention into tangible $. Yes, this is a real challenge, today, but new ways are emerging that will indeed provide plenty of resources for the continued creation of high-quality content. Let's have some imagination. Just because 100s of 1000s of aspiring teenagers want to see those free, ad-supported videos on pole-dancing does not mean we won't be selling video-on-demand, DVDs and books on more serious (or indeed, the same) subjects. Cheap, free and low-quality options have always co-existed with more expensive ones, and while the web has made this trend a lot more pronounced it will not spell the end of well-produced and high-quality content - the cheap stuff is simply first because so far we are lacking business models for the better stuff (for the most part).
Full-resolution PDF and slideshow is embedded below - feel free to share, embed, download, forward. Some bottom lines: Music 2.0 is about the inevitable shift to OPEN: Open licenses - Open innovation - Open distribution - Open competition - Open partnerships - Open technologies - Open data standards. In Music, first, we urgently need either a voluntary, collective license proposal by the rights-holders, and / or legislation that legalizes and monetizes the usage on the Internet.
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