Welcome to the Futerati

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I'm liking Gerd Leonhard's Futerati initiative. Inspired by the value he feels he gets from shared wisdom; he's aggregated all his favourite twitter people and their posts (which you can then sort into types such as 'thought leader', 'author', 'activist', 'startups' and 'other').

Delighted to find myself under 'other'. That's about the most apt tag I've seen for me really... a kind of 'bits of all of the above'. As Dave Weinberger put it: "Everything is Miscellaneous"

Here's Gerd explaining why he's done it - and benefiting right away from the 'we are what we share, we are found via what we share' mantra.

Yep - totally agree. Our ever broader expression of metadata brings us together with ever more people we didn't know we needed to know.

Or as Stowe Bowd puts it "I am made greater than the sum of my connections, so are my connections".

The Music (insert Industry here) Manifesto

Manifestos rock!
The Cluetrain Manifesto, the social customer manifesto, the call centre customer manifesto.

Now we find the Music Industry Manifesto.

Music to my ears. I rarely repeat in full, but in this case...

The Manifesto

1. Music will always continue, but the parasitical 20th Century music industry is dead.

2. Music does not rely on technology or distribution. It simply requires people. It did not begin with vinyl, the CD, the electric guitar or the synthesizer.

3. If piracy is able to damage your ivory castles, you should seek to understand it and learn from it. Piracy is the most effective distribution.

4. You will never win the war on privacy, because the pirates have a belief, and you are protecting a business.

5. People will only pay for what they want to pay for. Get used to it.

6. Artists and fanatics run the show - if you are in neither camp you’re fucked.

7. DRM’s only function is to limit the spread of music and to irritate the very people you should be pleasing - your audience.

8. I’ve paid for the tape, the vinyl, the CD and the MP3 - if I ever pay again, I’ll pay for the rights to the content in whatever format is appropriate for the rest of my lifetime, not for something limited to one format.

9. Let’s face it..artists can make more money if middle-men are not involved

10. Look - we all know you’re pissed about you’re expense bill no longer being approved but please stop taking it out on the rest of us

11. The people of the world want to share what they love. If you stand in the way there is only one outcome. Rebellion

12. People embrace what they create. We all want to take part. It’s no longer your industry, its ours. Sure that hurts…

13. Just become a concert promoter. Live music will never end. Rip-off, insular and selfish business models already have. Sorry

14. People will pay for what they want to. If you create something of value to people, people will pay for it

15. People will not longer automatically pay for something that YOU think is valuable

16. Resistance is futile. However powerful your connections are, the people of the world will find a way around it

17. Every time you sue, you nail an even heavier nail in your OWN coffin. Think about it…

18. The people of the world love music as much as they always have - not less - its just they have seen behind the curtain now

19. Artists love fans and will get paid by them for products and services the fans adore. Get out the way and let it happen

20. Copyright is a byproduct of the business model for content creation and distribution. It’s not the reason for content creation

21. The case studies of artists making more money from not using your regime will never stop - only increase. Listen up

22. It makes no difference how connected you are to the government. Artists and fans out-number you and always will

23. All the time you spend wining about protecting music you could spend working out ways to help the new world mature

24. If you really wanna get rich, concentrate on facilitating fanatical advocacy. There is no ceiling of value to that

25. People can only truly be of financial benefit to you if they are free. Confined humans have no long-term monetary benefit

It is very cluetrain - and all the better for that.

I'm fond of saying that where-ever the network touches it disrupts (that's central to my book The Power of the Network). Music is just one of the places it has touched and is wreaking havoc.

Of course, you can remove the music industry references in The Music Industry Manifesto and insert Industry X, or any-form-of-centralised-organisation-from-education-to-government Y instead.

The same rules of disruption will apply. The same human-centric models will emerge to dominate.

Which remains the point of the Cluetrain 10 years on.

If you still haven't read it, get a clue.

Bonus question: Who is this masked manifesto writer? I have my suspicions, But there's no contacts or name attached. We think we should be told. If you're into hiding lights under bushels, by all means email me. But if I were you I'd be shouting it loud and proud.

17 lessons for the new marketing

There's a question I ask publishing teams planning on building websites or digital services:

What do you do if you don't have any content?

It's a question aimed at editorial peeps, generally. People who have a pile of 'content' they see as assets. As publishers, when we go digital our first response is to consider how we should re-use/re-deploy that asset.

To do without it takes your thinking to interesting places. It's the kind of thinking that results in Google, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, networked solutions playing to the power of networks and the nodes and connections (that's us folks) who create those networks.

Bill Drummond's 17 project (picture by grewlike via flickr) is, I think, asking the same question; about music.

To paraphrase Bill, now that you can access pretty much all of recorded music ever it's lost its magic for us.

Recording music (particulary the hits) was and is part of the mass production/mass media culture that the broadcast world nurtured and sustained. But the emerging networked world has less need for it and places less value on it (Why Hits Must Have Less Value in a Networked World).

His 17 project gathers choirs of 17 people. Their creations, their output, their performances are never recorded. They don't even have an audience. They are a unique, relevent experience for those who take part. And this delivers a far richer experience than listening to a long-since recorded (and therefore closed and finished) piece of music.

The networked world wants unfinished symphonies. Participatory culture is leading us to 'us' as the eighth mass media.

Think of this in the context of social networks and how messages are spread, in which we compare how communities of purpose gather to share in the co-creation of messages, to the old broadcast notions of audience and static, controlled messages.

What Bill is doing is taking us to a place where music exists but isn't recorded. Music without content. Music of course, before the broadcast/industrial age was made by the people listening to it, or at best, experienced in a unique (one off) form by small groups for whom it was relevant (carnival dancers, wedding banquets, village feasts).

The grand orchestral pieces for whom an audience was required to sit listening politely (the precurser of electronic mass broadcast) coincided with the arrival of the industrial age. The first stirrings coincided with the printing press and accelerated as the age of mass production began to pick up steam (literally).

In the networked world we are wise to ask:

• How do we publish if we don't have content?
• What is music without recordings?

So, if advertising is to marketing as content is to publishing then we should also ask:

• How do we market without advertising?
  

If you want to change behaviour but can't run a traditional ad campaign, can't come up with your 'on brand' message and broadcast and control it, what then?

Perhaps one clue to successful connection, successful relationships in the networked world is in offering/hosting/participating in unique, relevant experiences. Co-created experiences, shared with those we think will think its cool, too.

I don't suggest publishers shouldn't make use of the content they have. Nor should marketeers completely ditch their use of advertising. Advertising (even broadcast) has a place.

I do say publishers/marketers will make better use of content/advertising when they start from the premise that they should use neither. Use the idea as a tool to unleash your networked thinking.


The conversation on this one had already started, via twitter. But please join in by posting your comments below. When I floated an idea or two about this blogpost...

Richard Marshall asked: "Do you think it's important that the reader/consumer knows it's marketing or not? Advertorial versus content+ads?"

It's an interesting question because it reveals our distrust of marketing/advertising. We expect that the message from the centre is lieing to us (at the very least spinning the facts) and so we insist on warnings that we may be being played (eg we insist on transparency).

The new marketing should be less like traditional advertising in this way. If the message can be taken and adapted in order to be adopted it is being done so by people you trust - not by some distant third party (the brand?). If you can't trust your friends to be transparent with you - well that's perhaps down to your own choices - you can't blame the centre for that.

In the new marketing therefore the question of transparency, the need to know whether you are being marketed to or not is less relevant. Your friends (your social graph) are distributing their version of the message to you - and only if they think you will think it's cool, too.

David Bausola remarked: "Marketing is listening. Advertising is talking. Can't have one without the other. Did I just imply advertising will never die?"
Richard asked: "What do you call conversation between consumer and brand then?
And David came back with: Brands are deities not entities, so have to pray for help. Brands need to be nihilists so that people can prey on them
Seriously,people talk to each other. Brand has to inspire their conversation. How can Brand have dialogue when it's not an entity."

Looking forward to the discussion continuing... please add your thoughts below! Let's make this a shared, unique and relevant experience for those who wish to participate! Pass it on to anyone who you think will think it's cool, too!

Should bands sue record labels over threat to ban fans?

This is such typical centralised, broadcast thinking. Just exactly what do they think they can control?
The record industry has struck a deal with the six major UK ISPs and the Government to 'deal with' people who illegally share music*.

Deluded fools.

So the second mass media (recordings) is trying to exert control over the sixth (the internet) and the eighth (us)? (image by digitalbear)

How do they propose to do this? Well, they'll send us a stern letter (anyone else see the irony in choosing the post as a delivery mechanism rather than an IM or an email?). Er....and then they'll think about what to do next... Right.

There are a few problems here. I don't have enough life to detail them all, but let's describe the biggies.

1. Nobody owns the internet - least of all the six major UK ISPs. They have no control over what is done on it or by whom or how one node or person connects to another. Their only control is to charge admission. They aren't the only ones to supply access. Others will see a competitive advantage in refusing an invite to this Government-hosted record industry party. Beware the backlash big fellas!

2. Haven't the record companies heard of the because effect? Prince has, Radiohead have, NineInchNails have, and recently (free cd on the Mail on Sunday just before the release of a not free CD) David Bowie has. If you can't make money with content, you can because of it (eg google vs yahoo!). Is the Guardian about to send me a letter insisting I cease and desist from linking to its website because of the link I shared at the top of this post? No it expects the attention I have given it to create value (see also point 4!). Get it?

3. This is a slippery slope. If the Government is so keen to encourage complicity with national laws in respect of music downloads, why not on porn? What if it gets a taste for this control lark? Would anyone use the Government-approved internet?

4. *Thou shalt not promote/recommend to your friends (leveraging your own social graph as the perfect distribution method) or otherwise solicit the sales of our product... is not something I would expect the promoters of artists (that's you, record companies) to demand of my fans.

If I was in a band I'd seriously consider sueing!

The internet changes everything. You cannot expect to impose old ideas of business as usual.
As Clay explains (via Alan) below. Buy Clay's book. It's great. Mind you, so is Alan's.

Hey Apple - mind if I manage my own music please?

Is it just me, or is the fact that the Iphone requires hacking around in order to use selections from your own itunes library as ring tones (in the UK) just plain bizarre?

Which part of that doesn't suck, apple?

I'd have thought selecting my own music as a ringtone would be core functionality for a device which is, at its heart, for managing your music and making and receiving phone calls.

There are ways around it. Jemima Kiss was kind enough to share this tweet from @samhs:

• "there is a simple method for converting songs in your library to ringtones.
• "Save song as AAC,
• "then rename from .m4a to .m4r"

But my point remains; why should we need a work round? They don't in the US (via Chris Reed who suggests saving songs into garageband as another work round).

Another myth of everything apple working beautifully exploded?

Chris, new to an iphone himself, added:
"It's worth the wait, but for me, for the first time ever with a mac, it hasn't worked as I want straight out of the box..."

And now after initially being told new deliveries of iphones would be arriving yesterday, we're seeing +7 days being added on... at least.

And every day that passes, my current operator, 3, makes me a better offer...

MeM Cannes: Why Robbie Williams loves mobile

Robbie Williams manager Tim Clark, of ie music ltd was the keynote this morning at MeM in Cannes.

Some highlights for me: The £80m Robbie deal never was. They just leaked that amount to the Sun and the rest is legend. It was a good deal. Just not that good.

“digital technology has driven a panzer division through copyright."

And to make the point Tim says there are stories that itunes has 2 per cent of the download market, the rest is free. What the percentage actually is, is unknown. But the chances are his guestimate may be conservative.

"We have to find ways of valuing music because if artists aren't paid something there will be no music, I don't just mean the huge megastars, but also people like King Crimson, who I worked with years ago, and who are still touring and making a living. We all have artists like this who have played a part in our lives and they are the bedrock of music."

"The record companies world is changing. I don't care if they can get the digital revolution or not, I work for artists. I have to find the best way possible to get the music from the artist to the fan."

What Tim is driving at here is how record companies are being disintermediated. The role of the artist (the creator of the content) - as represented in this case by the artist's manager is becoming a more important relationship.

Now there are ways to distribute that content more easily, more cheaply and more effectively.

The mobile part in this mix? Well it interested me that Tim revealed Robbie Williams had made five times as much money from his deal with T-mobile Sony Ericsson in one year than he had from his record label. He made most of all from touring (the because effect in full effect!)

Interesting also that Sony Ericsson spent six times as much promoting Robbie's latest album in Australia than EMI did.

The change in who enables the flow of content is making huge economic differences across the globe right now.

Where once managers primary relationships were in connecting artists and record companies now it is in connecting artists with handset manufaturers and operators and social networks.

Qtrax: Free legal music downloads - but not for your Ipod

Qtrax launches this weekend apparently. It's free, legally downloadable, ad supported label-endorsed music. It comes with one of the biggest buts in history.
But you can't download to Itunes or your IPod. Or any other portable mp3 device.
Just another walled garden then.
Or the end of the IPod...

Lower the price and more people pay the piper

The TimesOnline is reporting that 3 out of 5 didn't pay a penny for the latest Radiohead album when offered the chance to download and pay what they wanted.

The average price paid was just £2.90, globally.

And there is much wringing of hands about this in the Times report. How terrible. The grand experiment has failed - is the general sentiment.

But the album has been downloaded 1.2m times in the first month. So the £2.90 a pop (as an average) is not a bad return - given that there are no production costs, and huge cut in marketing and distribution costs.

A bit of context, from everyhit.co.uk:

Lowest-Selling Number One
"The record for a non-limited edition single is "Wonderful" by Ja Rule featuring R Kelly & Ashanti. Entering the chart w/e 6th Nov 2004 it went on to sell a total of 65,000 copies. "

Another upside for Radiohead: Many of those sampling the album 'for free' may yet go on to buy a CD of it - following the same model as those who download free novels online and go on to purchase a hard copy to own on the bookshelf.

Lesson: Careful how you measure success.

Music Industry: Making money because of content rather than with it

Radiohead offer their new album for however much you are willing to pay. Madonna ditches her record label to connect more directly with her audience.(more) The Charlatans offer their next release free to download.

Previously we've seen how the music industry has demonstrated that the price of content is collapsing more vividly than any other sector (Selling Content Sucks If That's All You Do). But perhaps it also demonstrates the new ways in which value is created - and content has a part to play in this.

Radiohead fans will pay what they think the content is worth - and then pay more for the limited edition box set version.

Prince fans scoop up their free CD on the front of the Daily Mail - and then pay a fortune for his concert tickets.
Madonna's new deal is with a concert promoter - not a record label.

The Charlatans see the wood for the trees.

All of these examples are about using content (the thing that in and of itself has little value because it is so freely and widely available) to promote the demand for the thing which is scarce (Radiohead's box set, Madonna and Prince's concert performances).

It's that Because Effect all over again (more here)

This from 'Confused of Calcutta' (see recommended blogs, left)

"When something that was originally scarce starts becoming abundant, something strange happens. You find that you start making money because of that thing rather than with that thing. That’s the Because Effect." Click here to read it in its original context.

Licensed for life

As I wandered through my home I spied a stray cd copy of Julian Cope's Peggy Suicide - all alone on a kitchen shelf. I thought: "how many different formats must I own that body of work in?"
I bought it originally as a cassette because that best suited my car-borne life at that time. Later as a CD, later still as a download.
It's easy to assume that now I own it digitally I can do with it as I wish, that I could store it in some vast secure portal somewhere and repurpose as I wish ad infinitum.
Trouble is there are already higher spec digital versions available. And you just know that the quality will only improve - and rapidly.
So how many formats of a body of work are you meant to own in a lifetime? Perhaps this nagging concern - at least for anyone old enough to have a loft full of vinyl - holds us back from buying music and dvds like we once did.
Isn't it time we were able to buy a licence for access to whichever format we want, whenever it emerges, to do with as we wish? That, I might pay for.

Selling content sucks - if that's all you do...

The difficulties facing yet another vendor of content marks another milestone (gravestone?) along the road to the new media ecology.
There are lessons for all of us who sell content. There may be lessons for everyone who sells.
Fopp - one of the UK's biggest music store chains - is the latest to be hit by what is reported by the mainstream media as an issue that's all about competition from downloads and online supermarkets:
"All specialist retailers of CDs and DVDs have been hit by growing competition from online downloads and supermarkets. HMV today reported a 70 per cent fall in profits. Music Zone’s demise was blamed on the same factors..."
Supermarket competition impacts at the mass end of the business. Smaller retailers can respond to this. It is not to go head to head with the high volume - top 50 sellers. It is to serve the long tail and respond to local (community) needs. It is to provide a very different experience.
When I was a kid the local record shop (and even the small town where I grew up had one) was one-part youth club, one-part information exchange and one-part market place. I could sell old records I no longer wanted, order something obscure (they couldn't carry everything!), hang out, load up on some vicarious cool, share what I thought, form a band, etc etc
How far removed is this from the experience of buying in a supermarket?
Online vendors of downloads have (where they succeed) replicated this far better than bricks and mortar rivals.
They have understood that communities form around music - communities who want to share (is that the new marketplace of buying and selling secondhand records?) information, recommendations - and just spend time together discussing what they love and why they love it - and marketing their favourites to each other.
But that's not to say a music store couldn't capture much of the same. And by facilitating the physical meeting of communities they could take what online retailers have discovered and make it still more engaging.
Perhaps they have to accept two things:

1. Turn yourselves into a music marketplace - where people can come together to exchange information, buy (and sell/share?), and be entertained (God forbid, perhaps they could even put on the occasional gig?)
2. Offer downloads. Seriously - it is the disaggregation of digital content (the ability to choose which tracks you want, rather than buying whole CDs), that's driving download sales. Convenience is important, price is important. But serving of long-term diverse choice is the biggest factor. And it's the part of the market that is emphatically NOT served by supermarkets.

Fop, HMV, chains in general... seem to have forgotten that the marketplace was always about much more than buying your goods.