MediaFuturist

The Printing Press brought us Copyright, the Internet brings... Usage Right!

I think creators now need to get paid for the USE of their work, not (just) for a copy. On the web, everything is a copy, every listen / watch / read / use is in fact a copy; computers are simply copy machines by default. If creators and rights-holders stick to the old definition of 'copy' and the corresponding, unit-based mode of how they used to get paid (e.g. the mechanical license for each download of a song), then we will continue to have a total mismatch between what 1.4 Billion Internet and the converging ~ 4 Billion mobile phone users are willing and / or able to pay, resulting in a drastic loss of revenues that could be harvested via revenue sharing, bundling and other collaborative, usage-based models. Check out the slideshow below. More on what I call "21st Century Content Economics" later today - I will publish a PDF with my Authors@Google presentation I am doing in San Francisco, today.

Copyright 2.0 and the Future of Music Gerd Leonhard Norway Think Tank June 2008

View more presentations from Gerd Leonhard. (tags: copyright immf)

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Itay Talgam at PICNIC08: Conducting Creativity (great video)

Itay talks about his Maestro Program and explains how business has changed, using the example of how conductors interact with their orchestras. From Itay's site:  The “Maestro programs” were founded on the belief that, in the orchestra as in the work place, music has the power to create community and reinforce shared values. Music embodies knowledge and innovation, individual effort and collective achievement, and offers a work-environment that is full of opportunities for excellence and self-actualization – same as any successful business. These programs offer a unique learning experience that explores the magical relationship between conductor, musician and audience to achieve inspiring new insights into leadership, management, and teamwork".  Great stuff.

I saw his presentation at PICNIC 08, and it was the high-light of this entire event, imho. Well worth watching.

Itay Talgam at PICNIC08: Conducting Creativity from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.

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Thoughts on 21st Century Content Economics (flash movie)

Just a quick brain-dump, this time in swf / flash format (just open in any browser, hit space bar for next animation).
Enjoy. Share. And so on. And on.  Download Gerd Leonhard Thoughts on 21st Century Content Economy

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Jeff Jarvis: what would Google do (book and video)

Image via Wikipedia Jeff Jarvis is a leading thinker as far as the future of media is concerned; I have been reading his blog and his books for a few years already, and I can guarantee you: he's inspiration pure!  So, I just ordered his new book "What would Google do" and really look forward to reading it - the topic is a perfect theme for anyone looking at future trends, obviously. Here is a short video with Jeff where he talks about the lessons we can learn from Google ("make mistakes and make them well")- check it out.

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Video from LeWeb'08: Sharing Love - Joichi Ito ***

Joi is a great speaker and this presentation from this year's LeWeb conference in Paris is well worth watching (27 mins), particularly his comments on Copyright 

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2009: The year of Re-Designing the Content Business

I am planning to dedicate a good chunk of my 2009 time and energy to this crucial topic: what are those new, web-native, social & inter-connected business models that will power the future of content creators and their industries?

In 2008, the disruptive force of the Internet has finally hit home, and - as is usually the case - it all came much later than we had estimated but the disruption is also much bigger than expected. A quick look at some trends in this context:

• Newspaper revenues are seriously down (25% in some cases); and magazines and other print media are severely challenged, as well
• Digital music revenues are still going up, overall, but very very very far from enough to stop the free-fall of the recorded music industry, in general (approx 20%, globally, would be my estimate for 2008) *pennies for $$, see below
• DVD sales are declining, worldwide, prices are falling, too - and this will only accelerate next year
• Online video views and audiences are up a lot - but so far pretty much everybody has trouble making any real money with online video

My hunch is that the Internet may well - and soon - bring us an utterly scary reduction of traditional content models that is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1:5, i.e. if you keep relying on the old 'disconnected' content revenues models you may eventually see only 1/5th of the financial returns that you had before. This could vary by industry, location and context, of course, but I would dare say that if you stick to your old models the future will be bleak, either way - and this goes for the actual creators but even much more so for the businesses that are build around them.

To me, the bottom line is that most of what used to work just fine in a disconnected world of 'totally segregated consumers and producers' will simply not work in the future.

This is why I think 2009 will be year of:

• Totally exploding consumer / user / fan / listener / viewer empowerment (yes, you ain't seen nothing yet - wait until 2 Billion + people are wirelessly connected via increasingly smart and easy-to-use mobile devices)
• Re-inventing content commerce (such as: charge for access... not just units, bundle content into access, freemium etc)
• Re-evaluating copyright as that sacrosanct, sole, principal, or even main driver of revenue - the solution for what I like to call 'digital payment-refusal' aka piracy is not a technological issue but a business problem
• Re-inventing advertising (since new kinds of advertising will no doubt be one of the future drivers of content commerce, as well)
• Getting the telecoms and network operators aboard - for they can't make it work without content, either!

I do have a hunch that this old Chinese proverb holds a part of the solution: “Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.”  Stay tuned for 2009 - this will be fun.

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More ways of following me (should you care to) - ambient awareness vs ADD;)

Image by gleonhard via Flickr

RSS and APIs have brought us some pretty amazing new ways of following people we like, and thereby help generate what some people have called 'ambient awareness' of what our network 'friends' are doing. If this should be chalked up under 'yet another Attention-Deficit-Disorder-Generator' or not... you decide; but here are some cool ways of following me:

• My friendfeed RSS feed (Friendfeed aggregates most of my social network outout in one place) - you can read this feed even if you are not signed up for Friendfeed, I think
• RSS feed from the Twitter search "Gerd Leonhard"
• My Twitter timeline feed

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An easy way to subscribe to my life/thought/idea - stream

Friendfeed is a great place to aggregate all social media services that I use or subscribe to. Now they offer an RSS feed straight from my Friendfeed page, and you can subscribe to it here.  This way you can get all of my bookmarks, tweets (twitterpost), Facebook updates, blogposts etc etc, all in one go!  You can also see my latest entries on my lifestream page on this blog (see icons above) but the RSS feed may make it easier. 

Update: here is my Friendfeed realtime 'river'

For those of you that are still hooked on email you can also get an email update via Feedburner

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

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Stream of the entire Futuretalks DVD with Glen Hiemstra *220 minutes

Drop.io rocks! More details on Futuretalks are here. The IT / Media Conversations pages and podcasts are here.

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

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Video of Kevin Kelly at Web 2.0: inspiration pure

This is a must-watch

Finding the Twitter elite in any city (via keithhopper.com)

Now this is a cool and very useful tool: Finding Twitterstars | keithhopper.com. So says Keith:

"Finding and connecting with local social media 'superstars' can be a valuable short-cut for anyone trying to ramp up quickly in online social environments. These enthusiasts are knowledgeable about social media tools, are highly-connected, and understand well how to succeed in the online social environment. But how do you find the local social media superstars? Today, many of these individuals use  Twitter. The "Local Twitterstars" mini-application below takes any US geographic search area that you provide and returns a feed of the top five most followed individuals on Twitter who have been recently active in the region..."

I tried it and it works great for non-U.S. too! Latest update from Keith is here  Original Yahoo Pipe here (thanks @bentrem)

Artists and Audiences in a connected World: my presentation at the Scottish Audience Development Forum in Edinburgh ("Getting Attention 2.0")

This was a really invigorating event, with lots of nice, smart and open people that were really interested in what the future holds for the Arts, i.e. the creators, the creative industries and the organizations that want to serve them. My task was to address how the broadband-enabled, always-on world of digital natives equipped with 4.5 billion mobile devices impacts on emerging cultural practice.

It is always a great pleasure to speak to a crowd of people as diverse and well-prepared as was the case here! As it says on the event site, Partnerships 2.0 set out to explore how to develop audiences for the arts, film and the wider creative industries by maximising (Web 2.0) technology and new partnerships - and this goal was pretty well accomplished I would say. Hopefully they will have some videos available, soon, as well - be sure to check their site for details (and this blog). For now, here is the PDF:  4.5 MB PDF (low res) * get the high-res PDF via Slideshare, below. artists_and_audiences_in_a_connected_world_gerd_leonhard_futurist_low_res.pdf

Artists And Audiences In A Connected World Gerd Leonhard Futurist

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: scottish arts council scotland)

Sequoia Capital Slideshow on the Economic Downturn - and what startups should do, right now

This is a remarkable slideshow - thanks to Eidon, via Slideshare for putting this online. There is a lot of good stuff in here - great financial analysis, and very tough conclusions. Found via Joi Ito's feed. Below is my favorite image from the show - it's brutal but spot-on I guess - what do you think?

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: depression recession)

The Widgetization of Media: PDF with my presentation at MIPCOM, Cannes / France Oct 16 2008

I was invited by MIPCOM to present my thoughts on the use of widgets in the content industries and the so-called "Widgetization of Media" and to put together and moderate a panel discussion with 3 great speakers (Oliver Creiche of Six Apart, Tom Smith of Universal-McCann, and Neil Perkin of IPC Media - 3 very smart and clued-in people, indeed - be sure to read Tom's UMWW reports, for sure, here), in sunny+windy+chi-chi Cannes, today. More information on this event is here on the MIP blog (and I think there will be videos here, soon, as well).

In a nutshell:  If you are already into widgets on your computer & mobile devices (such as the iPhone Apps, or Nokia's Widsets) very soon you will be able to chose from 1000s of widgets that will be available on your super-sized TV screen in your living room. Imagine: stock tickers, twitter tweets, RSS feeds, music widgets, social network messages, video streams, contvertising ;) Now what will that do to the TV industry? Talking about competing for attention. And ad $$.

We are indeed heading into the Attention, Conversation and Participation Economy at mindboggling speed. Anyway, I promised to put up the PDF with the presentation so... here it is

Widgetization_of_media_gerd_leonhard_at_mipcom_2008.pdf (low-res 1 MB)

Widgetization_of_media_gerd_leonhard_at_mipcom_2008_high_res.pdf (23 MB)

The Widgetization Of Media by Futurist Gerd Leonhard (MIPCOM 2008)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: syndication media futurist)

eMail is for old people (and that includes me I guess) - the end of eMail as a social tool?

I am 47 and I just realized something (probably belatedly so) that I think is important to share with you: the Digital Natives [Wikipedia explains] the Net Generation, the 10-27 year-olds, don't use email like we do. For them, emailing means business, parents, government and other unfortunately unavoidable stuff. If they want to communicate (and that means 2-way now), they will twitter each other, leave messages on Facebook or Myspace, Orkut, Cyworld, StudiVZ, Mixi, or subscribe to each other's blog feeds or follow each other on Friendfeed (well.. yes, mostly the geeky ones), or chat on IM, via QQ or talk / video-talk on Skype, or SMS each other (worth $100 Billion in 2007). Even more importantly, they share stuff in order to im- and explicitly communicate to each other by aligning with personalized content that shows who they are, such as posting and commenting on youtube, sharing pictures on Flickr, bookmarking stuff they find on delicious, sharing slideshows and presentations on Slideshare, music recommendations on Last.fm and iLike... and so on.

eMail is way too formal, too direct, too organized, too PUSH for them, and is usually used more in the same way that we 'older' people used the fax or even good old snail mail. And the age range that deserts email as a social tool is increasing every week - this is one of the reasons why I recently junked my monthly email newsletter: it had become pretty much like flogging a dead horse, there was no conversation, no 2-way process.

This trend makes a huge difference for marketing and selling stuff online (or... rather, period): you don't get to push to these people anymore, you must PULL. You must get them to befriend you on the social networks, sign up for your RSS feed, follow you on Twitter - in other words, you must offer value and merit, and build trust. You don't own them, somewhere deep inside your databases - they own YOU in their minds, or Not. Ouch. Good. Yes?  Talk back --- comment below! 

Update: Alex at ReadWriteWeb has previously written about this - just discovered his column here