From 2011 but totally current stuff - must-read and think!!!
Entries categorized "Must Reads"
October 31, 2012
September 06, 2012
The Future of the Music Business - a new Ecosystem (the ultimate slideshow)
July 05, 2012
The decade to 2020 is set to be our Detox Decade :)
"The decade to 2020 is set to be our Detox Decade, in which we are forced to abandon unsustainable mindsets, behaviors, and valuation models"
Read this book! Amazon.com: The Zeronauts: Breaking the Sustainability Barrier eBook: John Elkington: Kindle StoreGreat book - must read!
via www.futureof.biz
May 31, 2012
My proposal to the Swiss government and the Swiss music industry: Die Musik Flatrate - das Schweizer Modell (in German!)
Update: Friday June 1 5pm EST: we now have the whole thing online (in German, for now), here, and the discussion is starting on this brand-new Facebook page.
I just finished this open letter to the Swiss government and the music industry, proposing a new, standardized digital music license, and a digital music flat rate of 1 Swiss Franc per week per user, paid by the retailers or telcos or the users.
Note: The PDF is in GERMAN until I get around to translating it: http://db.tt/IfIYAS3U
The blog post on my German site is here: http://www.gleonhard.com/2012/05/die-musik-flatrate-ein-schweizer-modell.html
More very soon!
Gerd
PS: This video says it all, really, and in English:))
May 22, 2012
May 04, 2012
Resetting the music business (good review of my keynote at SPOT festival)
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:
From Ego to Eco: the future of the music business (Futurist, Author and Keynote Speaker Gerd Leonhard)
View more presentations from Gerd Leonhard
My 2020 video on Music Like Water (via Ericsson)
Special Report with Stowe Boyd: Social TV and The Second Scree. Plus: Media Futures Collaboration with Stowe
I am happy to anounce the release of a special report that my colleague Stowe Boyd has recently written, Social TV and The Second Screen, developed cooperatively by his company 'Work Talk Research' and The Futures Agency, as part of an ongoing series on the future of media. You can download the whole thing (yes, for free) here, via Stowe's site.
I wrote the foreword (excerpt):
The overlap of social media and TV represents a huge opportunity for those that truly understand and internalize, embrace and partake in these changes, and that welcome this dawning networked, interdependent and many-to-many society.
via www.worktalk.ly
I will be working with Stowe Boyd to produce quite a few more reports and white papers in 2012. In addition, we will be doing a lot more work together offering Media Futures events, workshops and seminars.
Stay tuned!
March 20, 2012
Get this new report (free): the future of technology disruption in business (Ricoh / Economist)
Just found this via Ricoh Europe, in collaboration with The Economist (free PDF download, but requires email registration). This is a definitive MUST READ. Serious intel and stats here, and totally spot-on foresights.
January 12, 2012
The latest updates from my Tumblr blogs
Greetings! In addition to the blog posts on this site I also post on 2 other sites, see below.
The latest updates from my Future of Business Tumblr Blog
The latest updates from my Green Futurist Tumblr Blog
January 11, 2012
Get the free PDF of my Music 2.0 book - just pay with a tweet or Facebook post!
Attention is the new currency is one of my favorite memes. So: simply tweet about my 2009 book Music 2.0 (even if you already have it, in print or as PDF) and receive the link to the free download. Use this link to PAY WITH A TWEET and spread the word. If you really must get a dead-tree edition, the print version can be ordered via my bookstore at Lulu.com
About Music 2.0 (from the free mobile site): "This book was self-published in 2009 and is an edited collection of my best essays on the future of the music industry, and continues the work I presented in my first book, The Future of Music, co-written with Dave Kusek. It further describes what I think the next generation of music companies will actually look like – hence the term Music 2.0, a description derived from the now increasingly popular “Web 2.0.” I have been writing and blogging about digital music and the next generation of the music industry for almost four years now – in airplanes, taxis, trains, busses, hotel lobbies, conference halls, and at home. In Internet time (and it certainly feels that way to me), this is almost forever! In many ways my message and my opinions may have evolved a bit but the bottom lines and visions have not changed a whole lot.
Looking back at some 1,000 blog posts and over 20 essays it is evident that by far the most often covered subject is indeed what I (and many other people – I make no claim to having invented this moniker!) have come to call Music 2.0, the new principles that define the next iteration of the music business. All of this is also closely connected with a few other terms that I have co-coined and have come to be associated with: Music Like Water (MLW), the Flat Rate for Music, Feels Like Free (FLF), the Usator, Friction is Fiction, and the People Formerly Known As Consumers. In this book, I aim to just fine-tune the best of my writings from the past four years, while not altering the content too much, in order to preserve the timeliness and context of when it was actually written..."
You can also read the book on pretty much any mobile device just by going to MusicFutures.com.
Also, be sure to follow my music-business specific tweets via @music2dot0. To see all my blog posts on the Music 2.0 book (and the topics covered in the book) please go here. For the music-business specific videos, visit my Youtube channel. Slideshows are here.
October 24, 2011
Announcing my new Kindle book "The Future of Content"
Today is a very big day for me. My new Kindle book "The Future of Content" just went online at Amazon, and is already gaining a lot of traction. You can view a very short video greeting about the book on my GerdTube channel (Youtube:)
Of course I would be very happy if you would consider buying the book for yourself (only $3.90, Kindle-only) but beyond that it would be really great if you could help me spread the word via rating and / or 'liking' the book on the Amazon.com page, tweeting about it or just forwarding this mail to some friends that may be interested.
As you probably know, I have published my last 3 books as free pdfs (which are quite popular) but really wanted to try something new with this book; after all reading on the Kindle is a much better experience than reading a PDF, and thus is, to quote Kevin Kelly, one of those "New Generatives" :)
"The future of content" will also be available in dead-tree-versions aka print, via my Lulu store, soon - please stay tuned. Happy reading!
Gerd Leonhard
(Media Futurist and CEO of The Futures Agency),
Basel / Switzerland
http://twitter.com/#!/gleonhard
My public Amazon / Kindle profile
(sharing all my book highlights there)
Update October 25 2011: this nice review may be helpful:
Increases brain power for content creators, October 25, 2011This review is from: The Future of Content (Kindle Edition)
"I challenge you to expand your brain and read this book. What Gerd Leonhard is always doing is informing the global brain (or the collective brain) in ways that help us all get where we're trying to go. He builds the buildings in front of us.
This collection points toward several compelling answers for content creators. As a writer who is already swimming in the changing currents of "content," I found it intensely informative. Leonhard shores up my courage to continue embracing a digital world without DRM, and ebook prices "for the masses." He makes the all-important concept of curation crystal clear. If you are providing any kind of content in print or on the web, it's relevant. If you want to stay on the front edge of content creation and publishing, it's basic. I'm making this book mandatory reading for my epublishing circles"
Amazon Kindle German Store
Amazon Kindle French Store
Amazon Kindle UK Store
ABOUT "THE FUTURE OF CONTENT"
Futurist Gerd Leonhard has been writing about the future of content i.e. music, film, TV, books, newspapers, games etc, since 1998. He has published 4 books on this topic, 2 of them on music (The Future of Music, with David Kusek, and Music 2.0). For the past 10 years Leonhard has been deeply involved with many clients in various sectors of the content industry, in something like 17 countries, and it’s been a great experience, he says. “I have learned a lot, I have listened a lot, I have talked even more (most likely:) and I think I have grown to really understand the issues that face the content industries - and the creators, themselves - in the switch from physical to digital media.”
This Kindle book is a highly curated collection of the most important essays and blog posts Leonhard has written on this topic, and even though some of it was written as far back as 2007 - “I believe it still holds water years later. I have tried to only include the pieces that have real teeth. Please note that the original date of each piece is shown here in order to allow for contextual orientation.” Leonhard’s intent to publish this via the amazing Amazon Kindle platform, exclusively, and at a very low price, is to make these ideas and concepts as widely available as possible while still trying to be an example of what digital, paperless distribution can look like, going forward.
October 19, 2011
Social Media and HR (presentation by Ross Dawson)
Nice presentation by Futures Agency colleague Ross Dawson
July 28, 2011
Check out my Future of Business blog on Tumblr
I started using Tumblr a year ago, and because of its easy use of viral tools and instant-post options via Instapaper etc I have build a pretty good following there, already. I usually post interesting snippets I find via Twitter, Flipboard or my 1000+ RSS feeds (no, I don't actually read all of them), and only the most crucial ones are presented. In other words, this is not a river but a drip-feed:) Check it out at Futureof.biz , on any mobile devices try the new Conduit-powered mobile app.
May 03, 2011
Mobile Trends Africa 2020 slideshow
Seriously good stuff in here, via Futures Agency partner Rudy De Waele
Mobile Trends 2020 Africa
View more presentations from Rudy De Waele
April 08, 2011
Some of my best interviews and related media coverage of my work (PDFs)
Epoca Brazil, on Facebook (Portuguese) April 2011: Download Epoca Brazil Gerd
HSM Magazine, Brazil (Portuguese) June 2010: Download HSM gerd
eComm conference / blog interview on Telemedia (Sept 2009): EComm-Interview
DDB strategy blog guest post: Data is the new Oil (Nov 2010): The Future
Enjoy and feel free to spread or repost anywhere.
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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