Quote Of The Day
"Technical proficiency is a dead-end. There will always be someone better. Instead focus on diversifying your skill set."Martin Atkins at SXSW
That’s what I love about technology, you don’t have to go to an event to experience it, to reap the nuggets, you just wait for people to point you in the right direction, to separate the wheat from the chaff.
In other words, I didn’t have to fly to Austin, jostle with the people and spend any money to get what little benefit there is to going.
I’m not saying if you went and had a good time I have a problem with that. But the fantasy that the music conference means anything is a fallacy.
Or as Jay Frank said on his futurehitdna blog in reference to the success of Rebecca Black vis a vis SXSW bands:
"LOSER: EVERY SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST BAND?At my SxSW panel on Saturday, I did the math. If you combined every view of ‘Friday’ and its parody videos, approximately 62 Million minutes were spent on this song. That’s presuming that, on average, the viewers only watched half the video. In the meantime, if the approximately 15,000 SxSW attendees watched 12 hours of music a day for all 5 days, that would only add up to 54 Million minutes spent watching music. All hopes of fame from Austin got upstaged by a 13 year old."
In other words, you’re better off staying at home testing the limits on YouTube than spending all that money to journey to a distant burg where no one really cares about your music. Sorry, but it’s true. It makes you feel good to spend all that money, to play, to give tastemakers your CD, but there’s almost no benefit. It’s all part of an evil plan for the conference to make money.
And everybody knows the real action is at the Interactive portion of the festival anyway.
And hardly anybody goes to the panels, they’re too hung over, they’re too busy "networking". But this guy Martin Atkins has some great stuff to say, like:
"It’s not a problem if 20,000 people ‘illegally’ download your music. It’s a problem if they don’t.""A contract is not protection — ever! Leverage is. … Sell tickets and you can get anything you want."
Read Greg Kot’s summary of the presentation here:
