Corks
There’s a story in yesterday’s "Wall Street Journal" how the plastic cork has made inroads in the world of wine. One quote rang so true, it reminded me of the music business:
"By the 1990s, retailers and wineries were clamoring for a solution to wine taint but the cork industry didn’t respond. ‘No industry with 95% to 97% market share is going to see its propensity to listen increase – and that’s what happened to us, says Mr. de Jesus from Amorim."
Bottom line, corks just didn’t work that well, wine ended up contaminated/bad because of their deficiencies. But no cork manufacturer believed there was a problem, never mind see an opening for an entrepreneur.
Lessons for the music business?
1. Never lose focus on your core mission. Which is to bring great music to the public. The majors tumbled because it became more about marketing, finding a niche and filling it, oblivious to the point most of your market just doesn’t care. Oldsters and hipsters hated boy bands. Even more people hate hip-hop. But these being the easy sell, labels purveyed them and wondered where their market went.
2. Don’t be inured to old technology. If I hear one more person extolling the superiority of CDs to MP3s, I’m going to explode. CDs are not portable, and whether it be the underlying technology or the EQ’ing for radio, they sound uniformly terrible. Is it any wonder the public wanted a portable format, even if the sound was far from perfect? The public can see the superiority in something new, like the plastic cork. Traditionalists are doomed to the scrapheap.
3. Efficiencies. You can only harvest cork from a tree every nine or ten years. Which is like saying you’ve got to make a record in a major studio, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Pro Tools era is here to stay.
4. Success breeds complacency. All innovation in the music business is by indies, or acts themselves, doing it outside the major label system. To say you need a major label to triumph is to say plastic cork suppliers can’t win unless they align with real cork suppliers in Portugal, who, after all, are fluent in distribution and have preexisting relationships with wineries. But, the plastic cork providers go it alone.
5. Just because it’s been that way for hundreds of years, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be that way in the future. Maybe music is free. In any event, an overpriced album on a silver disc as the main driver of music revenues is history.
6. The public is more open to innovation than the supplier. People are not married to the old ways, they embraced not only Napster (and today’s execs STILL don’t know how to file trade, figuring if they never use Bit Torrent, it will go away) but MP3s and iPods and everything traditionalists said was crap.
7. Price. The ancient acts and ancient concert promoters can’t see that shows are overpriced. We’re not talking virtual here, corks are physical, whether real or plastic. The future is lower-priced concerts. Just like minor league baseball is a gold mine. Then again, minors give a lot of bang for the buck, there’s more than the game. Also, there are more major league teams than guaranteed sellout arena acts!
8. Not every innovator triumphs. Another plastic cork supplier tanked. Just because Napster was defeated that doesn’t mean a new technology won’t win.
9. More than one answer to a problem can take hold. Screw caps are triumphant Down Under, in Australia and New Zealand.
It’s hard for an old alkie to think that plastic corks can not only be better than the real thing, but triumph. When I was a drinker, screw caps meant Gallo, they meant crap. What’s next, quality wine in a box?
Maybe. The point is not to be married to your presuppositions. Not to think that you’re operating in a world of immutable laws. And to realize that trying to hold back the future is a losing proposition. The only way to maintain your share is to improve what you’ve got. How is the music industry improving what it’s got, making fewer records by acts most don’t care about and charging more at the iTunes Store? And you wonder why people steal… BECAUSE IT’S BETTER! It’s about more than free, it’s about sampling, it’s about access, it’s about all the things the old guard wants to prevent, to hold back. But you can’t hold back the future. Especially when it’s better than the past.
