Saving Pirate Boyle
So let me get this straight. The Pirate Bay shuts down and suddenly all its users go legit, stop trading and start buying the wares of the entertainment companies. What did Roger Daltrey sing in the Who’s "Naked Eye"? IT DON’T REALLY HAPPEN THAT WAY AT ALL?
I sympathize with the rights holders. Their wares are being stolen. But didn’t they sue Napster ten years ago? Did that help record sales? We’ve learned how this works, you shut down one service and then a bunch of new ones crop up, and the RIAA is bad at playing Whack-A-Mole.
I get it, it’s the legal theory/precedent. But wasn’t that the rationale behind the Napster suits? Establishing the law? So now we’ve established the law in Sweden. Where next, Afghanistan? Cuba? North Korea? You can put a server anywhere. And the Pirate Bay is appealing and shows no willingness to shut down.
No, the only solution is new services that people want. But this requires a change in headspace. The rights holders must realize that the old business they used to love is kaput. There won’t be diamond selling superstars, but a bunch of niches. Kill the Pirate Bay and suddenly U2 doesn’t sell 10 million copies of their new album, Eminem doesn’t dominate like he did a decade ago. You probably don’t even grow any new revenue. So until you realize that you’re living in a changed landscape, you can’t strategize for the future.
The game of charging a high price of admission is working about as well as MySpace Music. iMeem is failing, burdened by payments to rights holders, and MySpace has got a user interface akin to Windows 3.0. If you can find what you’re looking for on MySpace Music, you’re a better surfer than me.
As a matter of fact, the Pirate Bay verdict isn’t even the biggest story this week.
Actually, there are three big stories this week. Amazon, Domino’s and Susan Boyle.
Amazon’s flaws, keeping gay books out of the search results, became a raging story on Twitter. As did the Domino’s employees mucking up the company’s food. And then Susan Boyle went on to become the biggest superstar in music today.
The lunatics are running the asylum. It’s no longer a top-down world. If you want to succeed, you have to realize you’re in PARTNERSHIP with your audience/consumers. It’s the only way out. There are a million cops, looking to bust you for the heinous policies you used to employ every day. And these same teeming masses decide who is a star, not radio or other traditional gatekeepers.
How long would it take for radio to go on Susan Boyle? You’d need SET-UP! The record would have to be tested! But none of this interference is run on the Web. You can get an instant spike on YouTube.
Sure, Susan Boyle sprang from the platform of "Britain’s Got Talent", but they don’t air that show in the U.S. and my inbox was burning up moments after she appeared on the show. That’s how fast you can make a star today.
Will she last?
Well, she’s got the requisite CV of a star. She’s an outsider, a virgin who’s never been kissed. She was dissed by her schoolmates. She’s not a Barbie. The same people suing the Pirate Bay are the ones who are foisting unreasonable "stars" on the public, less and less successfully. The public knows it’s cookie-cutter, that you’ve got to be beautiful and have true desire. Talent? The handlers will take care of that.
The public saw something in Susan Boyle. The same thing they see in James Hetfield. Somebody who’s not playing by the rules, who believes in himself.
For all the bullshit about the end of civilization, the death of record companies and newspapers, those of us not employed by these entities, sans the blinders, view this as the most exciting period of our lives. Suddenly, the Davids have power. Our lone voice now means something. Truth holds sway in a way it has not previously. It’s no longer who you know, but how good you are. Anybody can be a reporter, he just has to show up at the city council meeting and write down what happened. Meanwhile, the newspaper has cut that staffer and TV news doesn’t do any reporting anyway.
The public is hungry for music. That’s what all that trading on the Pirate Bay is about. The key is to figure out how to satiate this desire, not combat it.
The TV companies came up with Hulu. Spotify’s pretty damn good.
Bring Spotify to the U.S. License others with innovative distribution systems. Don’t try to get back to where you once belonged, but perceive that the past is truly history, and that if you want to survive, you’re going to have to morph your company and yourself.
Selling at Wal-Mart was a start. But CDs are dying. Trent Reznor is innovating outside the major label system. Same deal with Josh Freese. Metric may have sold bupkes, but the band made a lot of money. And isn’t that what the labels care about, money?
There’s a ton of money to be made. Not by driving people to the past, but living in their neighborhood and realizing, just like parallel computing, the collective consciousness is smarter than the individual. Universal Music can’t beat the Pirate Bay, can’t beat the public, it’s IMPOSSIBLE! Universal can only try to join the fray, reinventing itself along the way.
We’re not building stars, we’re building careers. That’s where the money has always been. Maybe right now the percentage of revenue is higher in tour grosses and merch, but don’t fight this, know that gas stations used to be full serve, you sent a letter, not an e-mail, you bought an album and played it to death because you couldn’t AFFORD more music! We’re not going back to the days of scarcity. Stop trying to jawbone the public into the past. Stop laying your album-length opuses on people who don’t care. Give us more Susan Boyles, who don’t have a fake bone in their body, who own their identity, who follow their path so independently, that we follow them.
