What I’ve Learned About The Media Business, Part 1
Over the last six years I’ve spent 95% of my time alternately being a musician, media entrepreneur, music educator, and recording engineer.
For what it’s worth, here’s a few of the things I think I’ve figured out along the way (interspersed with some prognostications). Of course, your results may vary ;-)
- The math has to work.
- If you want to create value in a particular industry, be a user or producer of the product/service…and not just superficially. If you want to be in artist management, learn how to play an instrument well enough to be in a band. If you want to make music your career, learn how to write a good press kit or book a gig. If you want to create a web service that filters and organizes music, learn how to critique art. Does Honda hire engineers who don’t have a driver’s license?
- Media is made possible by technology and technological change is increasing at an exponential rate. Technologies determine the economics of media businesses, 100%. So, business models will probably start changing at an increased rate as well.
- Creating and iterating software (and to an extent hardware) is the only scalable business model. It’s not about “having a website”; it’s about creating and continually improving a service that lives online and makes money 24/7 by coordinating all that value-creation that’s happening outside of your company. This is the simplest explanation of “edge competency” I can muster ;-)
- Everyone (except surly teenagers) likes music from every single genre, given the right circumstance. That is, taste is circumstantial.
- The price of a single recorded song will fall near zero pretty soon for a variety of economic reasons, but most viscerally because the vast majority of artists need to use recordings as promotion. Open pricing models (Radiohead, Amie Street) and subscription are probably the best medium/long term answers.
- Wireless music services in “the cloud” are going to be huge and will eventually erase the whole “but people want to own their music” argument. (Actually, I’m not so sure about this…more research is needed…but it seems likely.)
- Even though it’s a unique experience treasured by the majority of the human race, it’s extremely challenging to persuade a given individual to leave their house and see live music. The tools connecting artists and audiences are weak, although services like SongKick are moving in the right direction.
- Teaching children music is an incredible way to develop their creativity, discipline, analytic skills, social skills, and overall intellectuality.
- Sustainable talent is extremely rare, extremely valuable, and hard to find (unless you really, really know how to look for it).
- The deflationary nature of technology prices is making the tools of production more accessible and easier to use. The quantity of music being produced is going to continue exploding. Whether or not this will make talent more or less rare remains to be seen. Will more musical geniuses find music this way? Will they get buried in a flood of Guitar Hero-inspired noodling? If the robots can figure out a filtering mechanism, real talent has a chance ;-)
- People really want to have good, fresh music around them all the time, but most don’t have the time to look for it. And they definitely “know what they like,” even though half the stuff they like objectively sucks. (This was the hardest lesson for me to learn; I may be too optimistic and in love with music to see the truth here).
- Aggregated humans are better than algorithms at finding good music…for now. I hate to admit it, but this could change soon (5-15 years?). If that comes to pass, it will have a REALLY big effect on creativity.
- The music of India (North and South) is amazing and more Western musicians should check out it’s methodology.
- Talented musicians are the coolest people on the planet. They have it all: discipline, leadership, raw creativity, emotion, sociability, extroversion, introversion.
- Artists are going to need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps for even longer before a third party (agent, label, manager) is going to help them. This is made easier by an emerging suite of automated artist tools:
Sonicbids (booking agent/presskit)
Tunecore (recording distributer/syndicator)
PumpAudio, HankMusic.tv, Ricall (licensing)
ArtistData (managing fan networks across SNS like MySpace, facebook, et al)
??? (manage relationships with music bloggers and online DJ’s; HypeMachine, are you listening?)
CCmixter, JamGlue (remix communities)
CafePress, Zazzle (merchandise)
Colortone Media (sponsorship…this is one of my ventures ;-)
- The band I’m playing in, Alex & Sam, is amazing.
- The following resources are indispensible:
The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler
Free Culture by Larry Lessig
The Future of the Music Business by Steve Gordon
Last Night A DJ Saved My Life by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton
This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin
