Here is a short clip from the Future of Music event in Dublin (June 2010) - best soundbite, imho: "It's about the creator and the user - period". Enjoy and RT. More videos (incl. download feed for iTunes) are at GerdTube.
Entries categorized "Disruption"
November 06, 2010
November 04, 2010
The Future of Classifieds, Advertising and Online Selling (ICMA 2010 presentation)
Here is the high-resolution, slideshare version - enjoy! You can download the PDF via Slideshare.
The Future of Classifieds & Selling (ICMA 2010, Vienna)
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October 28, 2010
My presentation at Schwab Impact 2010: Be Bold - The Social Media (R)Evolution
Update: here is a video of my speech.
Here is a first, quick PDF of my presentation at the Schwab Impact event in Boston, 3 hours ago: files.me.com/gleonhard/qfjsq8 Updated: here is a slighty changed, higher-resolution version via Slideshare
Social Media (R)Evolution (Schwab Impact 2010)
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September 22, 2010
The Future of Advertising: Interaction before Transaction (AdTech London)
Here is the high-resolution PDF of my talk at AdTech London yesterday. Some of the key points:
- Data is the new Oil
- Interaction before Transaction
- Social Networks are Broadcasters (and the biggest, actually)
- Targeted and personalized advertising will support a lot of 'feels like free' content
- Get ready for the Tribalization of Business
The Future of Advertising: Gerd Leonhard at Adtech London 2010
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September 19, 2010
Egosystems become Ecosystems: the future of media, marketing and business (my presentation at DoLectures 2010)
Blogging this aboard a train from Wales to London; on my way back from one of the most amazing events I have attended in a long time: DoLectures in Cardigan, Wales (UK); see more details at their blog, here. I was invited to speak on one of my key topics: the switch from EGOsystems to ECOsystems - here is the PDF, below. Video to follow shortly.
Egosystem to Ecosystem: Gerd Leonhard at DoLectures 2010
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August 16, 2010
MusicNetwork Interview on the Music Business "The Future of the Future"
The Future of the Future: Gerd Leonhard looks ahead (published today in TheMusicNetwork)
16 August 2010
16 August 2010
The main shift is going to be away from the downloading of content and owning of CDs and more towards music in the cloud. That is going to happen with most media, starting first with music and then going into films and books. This is not just a music business issue. We are moving away from the copy to access. This is a very good model for the artist. In the past, most of the money was spent on the physical product – so the reproduction, packaging, shipping and retail store.
The artist basically got nothing in most cases. Skipping that whole process now means that the brand of the musician becomes the most important thing. This is very good news for the artist, the producer and the creator but less so for the industry as it’s much easier to sell a copy than it is to sell access. The idea that the artist just gets, say, 10% of the sold product is now out the window. Now the artist will give his agent or service agency some kind of fee – say 25% just as Nettwerk Records and other companies are already doing.
The issue is to get attention and clicks from consumers. If that attention is converted into a revenue share based on advertising, a subscription fee or an upselling process, then as soon as you have attention, you participate. We are still in the old system of counting on revenue per use. That won’t work in the future. The bigger your brand, the bigger the attention you will get and the more clicks you get, the more money you’ll make. I believe that consumers will ask for the access models to be free initially but then after they use it for a while they’ll be quite happy to pay so they can remove the ads or increase the quality of the stream for example. Music online will feel like free. There is plenty of money to be made from ads, but it’s just not there yet. It’s coming, though. We have seen that advertising just doesn’t work on the Internet.
It’s so easy to click away the ads or avoid them altogether. Advertising was essentially useless until now as today we are starting to see social advertising, such as on Facebook. Plus we have mobile advertising. Finally advertising is becoming more useful. The brands are no longer looking to spend 1% of their budget on social or mobile; they’ll be spending 10% or more. There is a total disconnect between the way a new business can be grown and how a lot of rightsholders perceive how the business will be paid for by Google or ISPs, for example.
That’s a very bad approach because it makes it impossible to legally grow a new model. You will be much more successful – like YouTube and Last.fm – if you don’t have the right licence and you just do it. That’s a real irony. I don’t think we’ll be able to support new services without a compulsory licence.
We need a compulsory licence for music use on the Internet so that companies like Spotify, MOG and we7 can use a licence rather than just bang their heads against a wall like they have in Germany and the US. A cloud-based model has to win out in the end, as the costs are so much lower, the sharing is so much easier. You can put all sorts of ads into cloudbased systems because you always know what the user is doing. There are lots of great benefits there. But the industry hates the cloud-based model as they lose control over distribution.
June 16, 2010
The Future of Marketing in a Broadband Culture (presentation at FoDM London)
Here is the PDF from today's presentation at EConsultancy's Digital Marketing event in London: low resolution / quick download version (use slideshare to get the high resolution download, 25MB):
Download Future of Marketing in a Broadband Culture FoDM LowRes Gerd Leonhard
The Future of Marketing in a Broadband Culture (FoDM Conference London)
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May 23, 2010
Complete video and audio from my appearance on Roda Viva / TV Cultura (Brazil), April 2010
This is the complete, 75-minute video of my appearance on Brazil's most popular talk show on Public TV, called Roda Viva (on the TV Cultura channel). I was delighted to be invited to the show, and really enjoyed being 'grilled' by the super-smart journalists and Brazilian media experts in the studio. We could have talked forever! The show was originally broadcast on April 26 (on Brazilian TV as well as online, see the Twitter buzz here) but unfortunately the webcast did not work very well so this is the first time I have seen the video, myself, and thanks to Roda Viva / TV Cultura I am delighted to be able to share this recording with you, as well.
More information about the show is here. Duda Groisman made some great photos during the recording of this show, embedded below. Related activities on this trip include: my presentation for NBS Brazil "The Future of Communications and Business", and my presentation at Fundacao Dom Cabral (one of Brazil's best business schools) on "The Open Network Economy". Please note: the video is half Portuguese (the questions) and half English (my replies)
April 21, 2010
March 12, 2010
TelecomTV: the Foolishness of Hadopi 2, the French Internet Law
Martyn Warwick from TelecomTV news has some very nice and succinct comments, as well as some recent stats, on the bizarreness of the French HADOPI law. The juiciest stuff is excerpted and commented below. Enjoy.
- A new study carried out by the University of Rennes and focused on the illegal downloading of online music and video in France reveals that it grew by three per cent between September and December 2009 - despite the noisy and bad-tempered passing of a contentious law designed to outlaw the practice.
- The report shows that 30.3 per cent of all Web users in France illegally downloaded content over the quarter. Over the period 1 July to 30 September it was 29.5 per cent.
- What the Rennes University work throws into stark relief is the feebleness and structural shortcomings of an ill-conceived piece of legislation that was foisted on the government by intense lobbying by vested interests within the content industry. It was conceived in a panic and rushed through without any real analysis or understanding on the part of the legislators of the way the Internet actually works. That's because Hadopi 2 only targets P2P file sharing networks and completely ignores streaming sites. (My comment on access versus copy is here)
- However, the numbers of people who watch and/or download video, film and music via streaming is growing rapidly, while the numbers who do so via P2P networks is in equally rapid decline.
- The Rennes Report shows that the percentage of French Internet users who favor streaming sites rose from 12.4 to 15.8 between September and December last year. At the same time the percentage of those using P2P networks declined from 17.1 to 14.6 over the same period.
- Even more interestingly, the study also shows that those who routinely
and freque
ntly buy and download content legally also use illegal platforms. It also comes to the conclusion that the suspension or permanent removal of an individual's Internet connection will be counterproductive as many who do pirate content also pay for stuff as well. Thus legal video and music sales would fall. My comment: I think this is the most important point: disconnecting those that are looking for content, those that are fans and interested in music, is a ludicrous idea if you actually want to sell to them! Protection is in the business model not in technology or the law. Regulatory capitalism will fail (quoting James Boyle here).
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February 25, 2010
Shifting to the Open Network Economy: my presentation at the Fundacao Dom Cabral CEO event in Sao Paulo
It was a great pleasure to be invited to contribute to the Sao Paulo / Brazil-based Fundacao Dom Cabral's innovative CEO leadership program, led by my colleague and Swiss-Brazilian collaborator and leadership guru Didier Marlier, as a visiting professor. Below is a fairly large and long (95 pages - do not print!!) slideshow with most of the important stuff I presented; needless to say this was not the usual 45-60 minute session but took pretty much the entire afternoon. I was extremely impressed with the organization and their hosts (FDC / Dalton Sandenberg) as well as with the fast and agile minds of the CEOs that attended - we had some very inspiring conversations. And Caipirinias, too;). Update: Low-res download of PDF here: PDF 11.5 MB Open Network Economy Gerd Leonhard FDC SP Low-res
Enjoy. Share. Retweet. And get my free iPhone app before it turns 'freemium'.
Shifting to the Open Network Economy (FDC CEO Event in Sao Paolo)
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February 11, 2010
Warner Music Group 2.0: my unsolicited advise on how WMG could embrace the Future
Image via Wikipedia
Yesterday, the Net was buzzing with news from Warner Music Group's earnings call, with Edgar Bronfman announcing his intention to not license 'free' streaming services any longer. Rather than rant about this (as tempting as that may be), I thought I would just share some ideas with you, and with Edgar, on what else WMG could do to become.....well, WMG 2.0. Some of these ideas were initially presented to another major music company about 9 months ago, btw. I don't know where this ended up, though - stay tuned.
Download the PDF: Thoughts on WMG 2.0 Gerd Leonhard Futurist
Related posts:
- "Book publishers: please learn from the mistakes of the music industry"
- "Content 2.0: protection is in the business model - not the technology"
- "The price of free: reinventing the online economy"
Gerd Leonhard’s unsolicited thoughts: Creating Warner Music Group 2.0
Dear Edgar, based on what I have learned of my 16 years in digital music, and distilled from the 2 music-specific books I (co)-wrote (“The Future of Music”, and “Music 2.0”) here are a few ideas on how I think WMG could reposition itself and achieve future growth:
1) Create and offer a complete, cutting-edge online platform for your artists, writers, labels etc. Let’s call this the ArtistOS. It should pretty much mirror what Google already does for Internet users, in general, i.e. provide free access to very powerful and inter-connected Web2.0 tools that used to cost 100s of 1000s of $ to build but are now provided free of charge. These tools could include things such as music widgets and embeddable flash players for audio and video, twitter-API based marketing and communication tools, connecting tools based on Facebook- & Google-Buzz/Connect, multi-site upload and updating tools (similar to TubeMogul for videos), text/video/audio RSS feeds and syndication tools, ad-insertion tools and production technologies (for widgets and web pages), mobile phone applications for quick-launching artist and label apps (see MobileRoadie!), general content syndication and CMS tools, Google Buzz, Tumblr- and Friendfeed-like services for artists, Google-analytics-like tools for tracking and analyzing web traffic, and much more. Building (or licensing!) these tools would require some dedicated resources but this would not be a huge undertaking in terms of budget since most of these solutions are based on existing APIs, feeds and various open source offerings. Having the ArtistOS available to anyone that works with WMG would be huge strategic advantage, and would greatly simplify marketing and promotion tasks, as well.
2) Define, publish and promote a Collective, Global and Open Licensing Platform. The biggest obstacle for strong growth in the Music 2.0 era is the utter lack of global licensing standards for the legal use of music on the Net, and apart from the admirable Jim Griffin - led Choruss initiative WMG seems to still be following the old-school path of ‘ignore & deny’, here. Not good. The current licensing procedures are causing severe friction in the digital content ecosystem, and represent a significant hurdle to innovation - and thus to creating and nurturing new revenue streams. WMG 2.0 could solve this problem by pioneering a standardized and collective licensing platform that is open to everyone, transparent, flexible, and revenue-share based rather than fixed-fee based, therefore allowing for liquidity in the new digital market place. Providing a public, standardized yet flexible and open license to all streaming-on-demand services would be a very good way to start this process - and the time to do this is now. Yes, I know, advertising revenue splits are not bringing in much money, now - but they are dead-certain to do so within 18-24 months, when up to 25% of all advertising budgets will be shifting to digital, interactive, mobile and social platforms. Have some imagination. Build the Future (don't keep asking for it to be delivered to you).
3) Vigorously pursue flat-rate and bundling scenarios for the licensing of your entire catalog in return for flat fee payments, RAND-based revenue shares and fair splits of advertising and other revenue streams (similar to what Google has done in China, TDC in Denmark etc). Licensing access to music, rather than (just) copies, is the only way forward in a connected, always-on world that already equals listening with owning. Switch from relying on scarcity to monetizing ubiquity and abundance, and invent new models that fit this. Generate new revenues by engaging with ISPs, telecoms, ICT companies. mobile operators and search engines. Drastically reduce friction. Embrace ‘free’ models as long as somebody will pay somewhere.
4) Develop (or license) and deploy your own mobile music applications, on all platforms (iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows etc); make mobile applications the center piece of all marketing and selling efforts, worldwide - the future of music is mobile, period. Think of mobile applications as the new CD; and therefore of music as....software. Roll out applications for all new releases, and for all your labels and brand. Make the basic apps free, but offer very attractive ways to upgrade, in all territories. It’s all about the packaging!
5) In terms of future sales, think Freemium, and think access not (just) copy. Offer things that used to cost money (such as listening to a song, on demand), for what I like to call feels-like-free (i.e. in return for the users’ attention); just be sure to find ways to convert 20-50% of those users (aka the friends, fans and followers) to all kinds of new premium services, such as high-definition versions, concert recordings and web-casts, special products, digital compilations etc. In addition, dramatically lower the price for physical products while providing all kinds of premium products - again, focus on selling access to music not just products.
6) Investigate the concept of crowd-sourcing new talent. Use the web’s increasingly useful collaborative powers to discover new artists, and draw bloggers and pro-sumers into the A&R process, worldwide. Bloggers, in particular, are the new Radio DJs! Combine some of the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ with your own professional A&R people. Do what P&G has done with Innocentive and their own ‘Connect and Develop’, and what DELL has done with Ideastorm, and what Kodak is doing in Social Media. The benefits seriously outweigh the risks!
7) Drop most if not all of the on-going law-suits, and switch your legal strategy to a 100% solution-oriented process. Compensation not Control is where the money is; all else is just posturing. The IFPI and RIAA-led efforts of enforcing control in an exponentially consumer-empowering media ecosystem have all failed miserably, and will not produce any monetary results in the future (except for enriching the lawyers). Here is a tough one for you: do you still need these lobbyists? Rather than spending most of the time preventing what the ‘people formerly known as consumers’ really want to do, all available energy should be put into exploring, building and co-developing those ‘new generatives’ for digital content, i.e. next generation advertising and branded content, packaging, bundling, flat rates etc.
8) Pursue drastic and large-scale innovation within - and on the fringes of - WMG. Bring the smartest possible people into the company; apart from content and talent (of course), focus on technology, mobile and next generation advertising and marketing. Invest in start-ups that can invigorate WMG 2.0 and provide significant strategic advantages.
9) Start to really talk to the music users, and have actual conversations with your customers. Engage on public conversation platforms, switch your PR and corporate communications from push to pull. Launch a WMG executive blog, start using Twitter; turn push into pull across the board. Do a Kodak - and go beyond! Create more transparency which creates trust which creates new business opportunities. Win back the trust of the consumer (better: the users) and the artists.
10) Offer profit-sharing arrangements with your artists: from a fixed pool of profit shares, each artist that is affiliated with WMG could receive a bonus payment that is proportional to their significance, every year. Do something similar with your staff.
11) Decentralize your distribution efforts, syndicate the music as wide as possible. Youtube gets 60% of its traffic from people embedding video players into their own websites - do something similar for your catalog. Instead of (or at least, along with) building or supporting central destinations, allow the users & fans to do the marketing for you, and syndicate your assets around the web. Think RSS, feeds, XML, API, not MTV.
12) Data is the new Gold - mine it! Making money around the music (not just from or with the music) is where the future is going. Investigate new business models that are based on data-mining, next-generation advertising and branded content, and behavioral targeting.
Note: once you’re ready.... there are a few good companies already working in most of these areas, and you could team up with them: just ask me.
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January 13, 2010
My presentation on "TeleMedia Futures" at BLPLaw in London
Here is the PDF from today's session in London. High-res and Slideshare version below - and stay tuned! 3.5 MB PDF: Telemedia Futures BLPLaw London Gerd Leonhard
TeleMedia Futures: the next 5 years in Media, Content and Telecom
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December 17, 2009
Some eBook industry 'leaders' are starting to sound exactly like the music industry 5 years ago
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!
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December 05, 2009
Announcing my new book on Lulu: "Friction is Fiction" - write a review and get the free PDF!
I have been very busy compiling my best essays, blog posts and other writings from the past 3 years, and have finally uploaded the most recent version to Lulu (my favorite print-on-demand book store). The new book is now called 'Friction is Fiction' and is available in 3 versions: 1) 158 pages, 6x9 inches / U.S. trade format, full-color, for $60.40, here (yes, it's quite pricey because of the cost of printing 4-color, on-demand) 2) the same dead-tree version, but in black & white only, for $19.98, here (much cheaper but a lot less cool;) 3) as a PDF, for a token price of $7.50, here.
I would be delighted if you would consider buying whatever works best for you - what better Christmas present could you possibly think of! Please note that this book will be updated every 3 months, to include my latest writings. If you want to share the book page please just send people to www.frictionisfiction.com - thanks.
As to giving away the free PDF, here is the deal: you can contact me anytime (via email, Facebook or Twitter) to request a free copy of the PDF if you just don't want to (or can't) spend the $7.50, and I will send you the download link. In return, what I ask from you is to pay me with attention, i.e. to write a review on Lulu, a blog-post, or a tweet about my book, with a link (all 3 is best;). Deal?
As to the title: I used to simply call this compilation 'The Best of Media Futurist' but while looking through all those posts - and spending a lot more time revising them - I found an important thread that goes through almost all of it and which therefore has become the new title: Friction is Fiction. So what does that mean? It means that if you are currently basing your success on maintaining or even constructing hurdles, difficulties or other bottlenecks somewhere in the system - i.e. if there is something that impedes the flow of information, or a transaction or purchase so that a higher price point or some other form of control over the can be obtained - then you are very likely to face diminishing revenues in the next few years. Building obstacles for users (fka consumers) used to work just fine but... no longer. Building walls is the fastest road to suicide in the digital economy.
The web has been utterly ruthless about finding these glaring points of friction, such as paying for eMail (remember that?), paying a ton of money for long-distance phone calls (remember those pre-skype days?), or consumers not having any access to travel booking systems, flight information or seating. These hurdles are being removed, one-by-one, and those 'people formerly known as consumers' are getting more powerful every single day. Banking on friction to increase your revenues has become like throwing matches into the river and asking it to stop - it's useless.
Friction was, of course, the main money-maker in the media, entertainment and content business, for a long time: certain CDs were only available in certain stores at certain times in certain countries, DVDs with those movies you really wanted were only available in certain countries and within certain 'windows', books had to be printed and shipped, and ring-tones could only be purchased from your operator. Basically, at every turn the consumer encountered have-to's and must's which essentially allowed a substantial level of control by the media and content companies - and thus, higher prices. In many cases, the more friction the higher the price you could ask for.
No longer. Read the book!
Related: my blog-book "The End of Control": download the first 6 chapters here. Also: My Music 2.0 book is available via Lulu, here
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Gerd Leonhard
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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