Mountain Lion
It’s Apple’s new operating system.
Huh?
I’d bet most of you haven’t even bothered to install Lion. But rather than trying to convince you, the train is moving down the track, it’s not coming back to pick you up, you’ve got to run after it.
This is the way it should happen in the music business. Instead of trying to convince each and every person to buy your album, convince the core and move on. If you do good work, people will discover you and when they come aboard they’ll have so much great music to discover.
It’s a fight for the ecosystem. In case you’ve been out to lunch, read this article, it explains it:
In other words, instead of resting on its laurels before overnight it becomes extinct, like Palm and RIM and so many on the information highway, Apple is fighting for the future. And whatever your view of the Cupertino giant, you’ve got to admire the company’s business savvy.
This would be like Lucian Grainge competing not with Doug Morris, but Live Nation and Songkick and everybody else on the music landscape. You’ve got to go for scale, know that usually only one company survives. It’s not about short term profits, but investing in the future, a la Amazon. If you can’t see where the ball is going, you’re never going to catch it.
If you’re an act:
1. Keep releasing new music. It’s your greatest advertisement. Lead the audience, don’t follow it. And if someone’s not passionate about you, forget them. You can’t convince them and they don’t count.
2. Don’t make a deal with anybody who’ll prevent you from doing it your way, making changes on the fly. The music you make, the way you distribute it…you’ve got to own them. The scene changes so quickly you don’t want to be beholden to someone protecting his own pocketbook, however ignorantly.
3. Use the tools! YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. Don’t see them as marketing, see them as a relationship. Stay in touch with those infatuated with you. They want new songs, gossip, you’re keeping them alive, you’re the excitement in their boring life.
4. Take risks. If you come up to bat constantly, you don’t have to hit a home run every time. The old model is to try and get it perfect before the public gets a peek. The problem is the model moves on, styles change, and you’ve drained all the soul from your endeavor. In today’s world, people will accept failure, it’s the mantra of Silicon Valley, you learn from loss. Metallica’s flaw is not releasing that album with Lou Reed, but not following it up quickly with more innovative new music, collaborating with Aretha Franklin, Bruno Mars or Trey Anastasio. People would feel completely different about the Lou Reed failure then. They’d see it as part of a continuum, they’d stay interested.
If you’re a company:
1. If you own no music rights, don’t make them the building block of your endeavor. Negotiating with labels and publishers is a long drawn out process that you will not win. Forget it, give up. Focus on adding value to those who actually make the music. Become necessary to them.
2. Grow or die. If you do something little, you’ll be eaten up the same way Apple and Microsoft make the work of independent software publishers features in their next operating system. You want scale. Especially if you’re building a website. Every site is right next to each other online. You’ve got to be THE site!
3. Live Nation has to spend more. It should not be in bed with the labels, it should be killing them.
4. AEG should pursue the Live Nation dream or Phil Anschutz should have a target sale date. Live Nation’s got the acts, the venues and Ticketmaster, the stealth giant despite consumer opinion. But Live Nation is playing to Wall Street, it’s not playing to win.
5. Labels. They lost when they lost distribution control. They’ve got to be more artist-friendly, with more equitable deals, or they’ll die. The TV/radio paradigm? On a death march. Later rather than sooner, but it’s clear where we’re going, why aren’t the labels preparing?
Where are we going?
1. A place where music is ubiquitous. The Grammys will get a better rating than the Oscars. The movies are not as hot. The film business is ruled by old farts who don’t get it. The action is in pay cable, still, TV’s no match for music. And what is growing music is the Internet, allowing everybody to play and discover. Don’t listen to those lamenting the evaporation of the old model. The limited distribution benefited them, not us. Now everybody has everything at their fingertips and quality trumps hype.
P.S. The messaging in Mountain Lion is a game-changer. Suddenly, all devices are hooked together. You don’t have to pick up your phone to reach another person on a mobile. The winner? The public. The loser? Mobile providers. No one needs a texting plan. Savvy enterprises will utilize these new messaging abilities to establish and maintain relationships with fans. What killed the labels was a refusal to embrace new models. But the public does. Don’t let the public get ahead of you.
