Ian’s Blog Entry
The truism of the web: people talking about you is far more effective than talking about yourself.
No, Ian Rogers of Yahoo didn’t write the above aphorism, Seth Godin did. Check out the entire post under the title "Blogs and self promotion" at:
Could it be that the days of self promotion are done? Is that what killed big time rap music? My inbox tells me rap is alive and well, just sans bluster and underground. Turns out if you’re telling everybody how great you are, no one takes you seriously. OTHER PEOPLE have to say how great you are.
This is anathema to mainstream corporations. They’re based on marketing. That’s what major labels became, marketing machines. There’s nothing organic about the procedure at all. What can be organic when you’ve got to move millions of pieces of product this quarter so your stock price doesn’t tank?
The music business has rarely been about thinking. It’s about bluster. And intimidation. If you don’t know this, you haven’t hung out with the old guard. Where if you don’t feel a bit scared, then you’re not hanging with winners. I had dinner with the deposed head of a major corporation recently and I was STILL frightened, even though he was sans power base. You see it’s baked into his personality. Where nerds were never frightening. And nerds are inheriting the earth.
I wouldn’t quite call Ian Rogers a nerd, he’s not a geeky Bill Gates, even an out of touch Mark Zuckerberg. Ian’s first and foremost a music fan. But he’s got the nerd knowledge base. And when he talks you’re not bored, rather you’re inspired by the pearls of wisdom.
Ian’s done with digital scarcity. Which is the major label paradigm. He references his manifesto re this on his Website. And that’s what I want to tell you about, his blog entry.
Sure, it covers the Aspen conference. You can read the screed and feel left out. But the reason I’m pointing you in this direction is so you explore the ideas of music distribution in the future, and not just argue whether this band or that is any good.
The new seers are different from the old ones. Sure, they care about their favorite acts, but that’s not their only concern. They ponder how the music is going to get to the listeners, and who those listeners are. In a way never contemplated by the powers-that-be, who have done such a good job of squandering the future of monetization of recorded music.
Doug Morris said he had no idea who to call? He should have called Ian Rogers, or a bunch of equally noteworthy young techies. But they didn’t have the right parents and they hadn’t worked in record retail, they hadn’t paid their dues, they didn’t approach the selling of music in the traditional way.
Ian tried to make nice with the majors. He’s done with that. So is the public. Whose side do you want to be on? Those with the keys to the castle, who don’t want to let the hoi polloi in, or the fans who actually support this music?
If you’re following the shenanigans of septuagenarian Clive Davis, never mind his inferiors, I feel sorry for you. That’s about massaging an act and hyping it via old wave marketing techniques. Word of mouth isn’t selling Alicia Keys, just raw promotion. That’s the old wave record business in action. Nothing inherently wrong with it, just that if it survives in the future, it will be a tiny sliver of the market. Snow doesn’t come down from the sky Charlie Brown, it comes up from the ground. You have to pull it up.
Lucy Van Pelt may not be right about precipitation, but she’s got the future of the record business nailed. You’ve got to pull, HARD! And you’ve got to pull for a very long time before even part of the landscape is covered. People like Ian Rogers understand this. They are inheriting the music business.
Talking To The Music Industry Again, The Aspen Live Conference
