Now there is a movement afoot to change humanity’s co-ordinates. In 2000 Paul Crutzen, an eminent atmospheric chemist, realised he no longer believed he was living in the Holocene. He was living in some other age, one shaped primarily by people. From their trawlers scraping the floors of the seas to their dams impounding sediment by the gigatonne, from their stripping of forests to their irrigation of farms, from their mile-deep mines to their melting of glaciers, humans were bringing about an age of planetary change. With a colleague, Eugene Stoermer, Dr Crutzen suggested this age be called the Anthropocene—“the recent age of man”.
Be sure to watch the video !
You may have noticed that I caught the Tumblr bug about 18 months ago and that I have been busy curating my findings - as opposed to actually writing longer stories, myself, as I used to do on this blog - on 3 new blogs. Most of the posts on this blogs are a direct by-product on what I actually read and digest via the fabulous Instapaper and Read-It-Later apps, published directly to Tumblr via some nifty APIs:)
Some of these blogs are quite popular already; please take a look and follow me there as well if you like:
Please take a look and let me know how you like them; all 3 are mobile-optimized via Tumblr, as well, btw.
Roger Tagholm at Publishing Perspectives just published a nice review of the World eReading Congress in London, on Tuesday, where I had the pleasure of doing the opening keynote. The 6MB low-res PDF can be downloaded via this link: Download Ereading congress london gerd Leonhard (note: this is quick version, better resolution soon on Slideshare).
Here are the best snippets from Roger's review (and the rest of it is a good overview, as well!)
By Roger Tagholm
"Access not ownership, relationships not transactions and concerns over who owns the channel to market – these were some of the themes of the second World E-Reading Congress which began in London on Monday. Once again, organizers Terrapin had assembled a powerful line-up of speakers who provided a one-stop take on what is happening in the digital space. From “haptic technology” (from the Greek Haptikos, “pertaining to the sense of touch”) to “lean back” readers, this was also the place to get a jargon update and phrase fix.
Media Futurist Gerd Leonhard kicked things off. He believes the debate will soon be about access, not ownership and said that “for those over 30 it’s very hard to understand this switch. There will be some ownership, but it won’t grow. With music, iTunes sales are flat, but streaming is growing. It will happen with books. A Spotify for books will come. If a student wants 300 books, he’ll buy a three-year subscription”. Small examples of that already exist, but Leonhard means on a mass scale, such as that being contemplated in Brazil “where the government is looking to buy 100 million devices for students so they don’t have to buy the physical books”.
He believes there is more to the future than walled gardens and that “humans need meaning, not just cool technology. In the end, meaning is money. Apple has meaning, even though it is a totally walled garden — an oligopoly, a cult.” During the next three to five years he thinks we will see telemedia convergence. “The telecoms industry will realize that it will have to make deals with ISP operators to sell content — so that if you buy this SIM card, for example, you can get ten books.
“For the consumer, access to content will become much cheaper. We cannot force the consumer to pay the same for digital as physical. Technology owners reads more, so why penalize them? We need to innovate now to keep them.”
Sharing, he maintained, should be “non-negotiable. Sharing does not create economic damage.” Publishers must engage with their customers; attitudes to piracy must be rethought (“piracy happens when motivation meets opportunity”); and publishers must build value around content “because payment works if the context is right — if there is a reason, people will pay.”
Added note: "Duncan Edwards, President and CEO of Hearst Magazines International, took an entirely different view on pricing. “We have discovered that, because of the ease of use, people are prepared to pay as much — or even more — for the digital versions of our magazines.”
Really? Not sure that maybe that have just discovered their own desire to get as much as before, and found some willing fans - rest assured, this won't last. Look at iTunes and the music industry:) People will not continue to buy songs for €1 every time they are interested. Unsustainable, imho:=)
Wired UK's Duncan Geere has just published a really astute summary of my keynote at the annual SPOT music conference in Arhus, Denmark, see below. It's not that I haven't been saying this for the past 10 years but I think I may have phrased it all a bit bitter:) See the slides below; and feel free to download my Music 2.0 book, here.
"At the Spot music conference in Århus, Denmark, musician and futurist Gerd Leonard discussed a series of possible futures for the music business. Leonhard isn't a fan of how the record industry has been run over the last decade or so. "The whole economy of music is based on big companies owning the rights. It's unsustainable," he said, comparing the major record labels to big oil companies.
"Do big oil companies represent nature?" he asked. "Of course not. Do the big record labels represent music? Probably not." Leonhard sketched out the reasons why people pirate music, blaming high costs and a lack of legal alternatives, and he also argued that cracking down on filesharing doesn't benefit artists. "We had 52,000 people sued in Europe over copyright infringement," he said. "That earned nothing for the artists. Only the lawyers."
But Leonhard is optimistic, arguing that music is simply migrating into something larger. "The business model of merely selling 'copies' of music is over," he said. "Let's redefine the meaning of selling. No-one knows what it means." Leonhard is a firm believer in the power of access models over ownership ones. Models where you pay a small recurring subscription fee to gain access to an enormous jukebox in the sky, just like Spotify (which he says he's a big fan of).
Leonhard claims that it would only require each person in Europe to pay two euros each month to generate revenues larger than the global music industry. That's not necessarily a practical thing to demand individuals to do, but companies have begun to roll subscriptions of this nature into other products, making this music tax more palatable. Telecoms providers have begun to bundle music subscriptions into their contracts, which is a way of making music "feel like free" to the consumer.
But that's not quite enough, he said, projecting a list of hundreds of legal music services from across the world onto a screen, compiled by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). He claimed that most of them are dead or dying: "90 percent of the legal music services are bankrupt, or there but sorta not doing anything," he said.
To fix this, compulsory licenses, like radio licenses, are needed. "The free markets won't fix this problem. They won't work. We need must-license provisions, public oversight, regulation for the common good," Leonhard said."In 2017, we'll have five billion connected devices," says Leonhard. "75 percent of that will be mobile, accessing 50 or so platforms of content, sharing a €250 billion ad market."
To capitalise on that potential, Leonhard says, music companies are already diversifying beyond simply selling records. Labels have begun taking a chunk of all sorts of revenues -- merchandise, touring, premium content, sync licensing (getting music on television, and in adverts and movies) and other sources. "We're going to make money in 50 different ways. The first music business was a grand illusion."
Ok... so far so good. There are 2 things you may want to look at in this context:
My slideshow from today:
My 2020 video on Music Like Water (via Ericsson)
Check it out. Thanks to Ericsson for the nice production work.
See more videos at http://www.ericsson.com/campaign/20about2020/.
"Music used to be a product that we bought piece by piece. Now it is becoming a public utility, says media futurist Gerd Leonhard, who argues that we will soon be constantly connected to an infinite library of songs. And when music is like water or electricity, our friends become the new music critics..."
From a new eMarketer post (and related report), here are some interesting snippets:
"In a sign of how important online streaming and subscription music services have become to the recording industry, trade publication Billboard recently updated its weekly Hot 100 song chart to include data from Spotify, Slacker, Rhapsody, Cricket/Muve, Rdio and MOG. The revamped methodology went live in March 2012, after several months of testing that showed a rising curve for audio streams, from 320.5 million in the first week of 2012 to 494 million during the week of March 4, 2012. By comparison, digital track sales during that period decreased from 46.4 million to 27.1 million, according to Nielsen..."
This is, of course, totally obvious: as good as it is, iTunes is essentially an inadvertent punishment for being interested in more music, since every desire to listen to aka 'consume' new music results in having to spend another dollar on downloading the track. Cloud-based services don't have that problem - and clearly I won't pay $ 20.000 to fill up my iPod with Apple's music, while I have no problem saving 2000 Spotify tracks on my iPhone anytime I want to (and for $10 / month). I have been talking about this for the past 10 years, but here it is again: access is replacing ownership, like it or not (and I don't see a reason not to like it, as user or as creator). We can wish for this to be different, but it's not. End of story. Participate or become insignificant.
"Another indicator of the popularity of cloud-based streaming was a 50.5% increase in online music listening hours in 2011. According to a February 2012 report from AccuStream Research, US consumers spent 1.3 billion hours listening to music through internet radio and other streaming services in 2011, up from 865 million hours in 2010. The media spend associated with US internet radio and on-demand streaming services amounted to $293.7 million in 2011, according to AccuStream Research. This compares with $171.7 million spent on subscriptions to those services. AccuStream forecast that the total market would grow by 78% in 2012... Ad monetization is expected to grow at a healthy clip on the mobile side as well. eMarketer expects US mobile music advertising revenues to hit $591.5 million in 2015, more than doubling 2012’s total of $264.5 million. According to eMarketer estimates, the advertising component of mobile revenue is much higher with music than with gaming or video, largely because of the popularity of Pandora and Spotify on mobile devices..."
Yes, of course, streaming music currently makes much less money for the content owners and rights holders than downloading does - but the key to making this work is to get EVERYONE involved in streaming legally via one of the existing or future services and platforms, just like radio, i.e. starting with a more or less free / feels-like-free or freemium offering. The math is simple: if 200 Million people use Spotify or Simfy or Rdio - whether they pay 'with attention' aka advertising, via telco bundles, or with their own cash - then the rightsholders will see some serious money coming their way. If they can't allow this market to grow, then it won't be created (at least not in a legal way)
The bottom line is: the music industry has to monetize AROUND the music, not just WITH the music. Think advertising, bundling, added values... new generatives. There is no sense whatsoever in fighting the obvious trend of access replacing ownership.
FT's Rob Grimshaw says (defending the FT's paywall): "Many news publishers are now facing up to the reality that online advertising isn’t replacing revenues lost from print. Newspaper Association of America figures show annual print ad revenues for the industry have dropped from $47 billion at their last peak in 2006 to $21 billion today, a loss of $26 billion. During the same period, news publishers’ digital ad revenues have risen by $1 billion from $2.2 billion to $3.2 billion. The prospects for winning back those lost ad dollars look dim. Nearly half of all online spend now goes to search advertising (49 percent – IAB US / PwC H1 2011) and in the display market there is intense competition from portals, networks and social media. Facebook’s pageviews are now 1,000 times greater than the biggest news publisher sites and its display ad revenues are likely to exceed those of all U.S. newspapers combined in 2013. Google’s will too, and that’s excluding their search revenues..."
Comment: I think this is just because those ad spends were always '50% wasted' - the advertisers just didn't know which was which. In other words, these revenues were always artificially inflated by lack of competition or alternative ways to gather enough eyeballs.
The web has just made the obvious more visible; brutal but inevitable. Also, in my view, the FT may have a good case for charging people, but in general the added values is what it comes down to - and many publishers and their publications don't really have enough to offer in that respect - same problem that is facing the record labels.
via www.wired.com
Just found this really interesting and thoughtful piece via DataMotive (high-lights, and some links added by me)
"Adam Smith makes a strong and eloquent argument why these silo’s are erroneously seen as a profitable system (by those in control) yet limit the growth of the wealth for all. A more liberal economy would open the door for more specialization and therefore a way higher productivity, for more competition and therefore the push to innovate. More specialization requires a larger “ecosystem” to sell to and to source from in order to get what you need to thrive, aka a large geography/economy to trade with without hindrance. ( The key enabler is trust: without trust the edifice collapses, something we painfully are reminded of these days). The enormous benefit is a much larger wealth for everyone, lifting the boat to unforeseen heights: the title is “The Wealth of Nations”, not “The Wealth of Individuals” and for a very good reason.
This “liberal” (relatively to what was practice in the 1700′s) view is nowadays something like the 11th Commandment, yet in his day and age it must have been revolutionary. Scary for the powers that be: how can anyone believe that relinquishing power and embracing uncertainty will turn out to be a good thing? More precisely, turn out to be a good thing for you yourself? The more amazing it is that this book has been so influential, that it marks a turning point where this more open economic structure became accepted as a generator of wealth for everyone.
We need a new Adam Smith nowadays, one that explains these old maxims again but now framed for the information economy. In my opinion we are still in the 1700′s of the information economy : copyright laws, intellectual property laws and patent laws take us where no law has gone before, only to carve out copyright guilds, create absolute IP monopolies and sustain patent oligarchies that wage ridiculous battles. A mistaken belief that information has monetizeable value and therefore needs to be locked up. The historic lesson seems forgotten that oligarchies and monopolies stifle growth, that we only can grow by building upon each others efforts. Sharing and trading of (in this case) information will lead to an explosion of productivity and wealth for everyone..."
This is as good of a summary as I anything I could provide: in order to prosper in the future, the 'wealth' of nations- and the 'wealth' i.e. scope of the commons - must matter more than the wealth of individuals (or indeed, individual companies or organizations) - we must move from Ego to Eco (as in... networked, not (just) as in 'green) - see this video of my latest talk on this topic.
I recently was invited to chime in on this snappy collection of 2020-predictions done by Amy-Mae Elliott at Mashable, along with some of my peers and esteemed futurist colleagues such as Ian Pearson, Jim Carroll and Dave Evans. Take a look. Here is my piece:
Connecting the Cloud With the Crowd
"By 2020 everything will have moved into the cloud: content, media, health records, education. Connecting the cloud with the crowd will become a huge business. Related to this, access will replace ownership in almost all forms of media. Future media 'consumers' will simply have music, films, TV shows, games, etc. in the cloud, paid 'with attention,' i.e., advertising and data mining (Facebook cloud), subscription (Apple new iTV), and bundles (i.e., with mobile operators). Most importantly, many consumers will not pay for 'content' per se, but for all the added values around the content, such as curation, packaging, design, social connections, interfaces, apps, etc. Finally, all media that is not social and mobile will shrink; all that combines with their current models will prosper."
Thanks to Amy at Mashable - well done!
Read more on my content-cloud ideas. Check out my Future of Content book, via Amazon Kindle.
Absolutely agreed. This is a huge powershift. Get ready to be disrupted. Read more here.
"London, 16 February 2012 - New figures from a study sponsored by Ricoh show that by 2020 the impact of new technology in the workplace will force businesses into a new era of decentralisation. The research , conducted by the Economist Intelligence unit, shows that 63 per cent of business leaders predict a shift towards a more decentralised business model and that responsibility for business decision making will move from centralised management boards towards individual employees. “We believe that businesses will be more process orientated, ensuring that critical information is more centralised and data can be received, stored and retrieved by employees. This will mean decision making can be less hierarchical and allow employees, who are collaborating directly with customers, to make important business decisions, without delay,” says David Mills, Executive Vice President, Operations, Ricoh Europe.
Supporting closer customer collaboration is essential as by 2020, business leaders believe that customers will be the main source of new product or service ideas. Furthermore, 86 per cent of business leaders agree that customers will become an integral part of internal decision-making and that project teams will typically include people from outside the organisation such as customers and business partners... In the future, there will also be a need to consider how experts outside the organisation can input and retrieve information to act on behalf of the business. 85.7 per cent of business leaders agree that project teams will typically include members from outside the organisation (for example, customers, partners, communities)... Mills says, “In the new era of decentralisation it will be essential for businesses to do more to adapt to the digital world, especially as critical information will need to be accessed by employees, many of whom will be working virtually or outside the business..."
This nice video just went up on my Youtube channel: my entire keynote speech (67 minutes) from the Future with High Speed Broadband Conference in Auckland, New Zealand on February 23, 2012. Topics: Transformational Technologies and Creating new demand for ICT services - The Future of Broadband and ICT -, in detail: the coming telemedia convergence, the future of content in a hyper-connected society, social networks are cable TV without the cable, why open standards are crucial, why and how data is the new oil, how Control is being replaced by engagement and involvement, why sustainability becomes even more important, the shift from egosystems versus ecosystems, the new drivers of Innovation. The slides are embedded below, as well.
This video just went live on the MIDEM Youtube channel, see the panel description here
"We now live in a digital society, networked, mobile, social and always-on. In this super-noisy, decentralised world of constant self-broadcasting, liking, sharing and networking, how will an artist, a manager, a label or publisher, or any other business get attention, and reach their audiences? If interaction comes before transaction, what does marketing look like in the next few years? How does one build a strong brand in this world..."
Keynote Speaker, Think-Tank Leader, Futurist, Author & Strategist, Idea Curator, some say Iconoclast | Heretic, CEO TheFuturesAgency, Visiting Prof FDC Brazil, Green Futurist
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