{"id":1064,"date":"2008-01-07T09:14:48","date_gmt":"2008-01-07T17:14:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/archives\/2008\/01\/07\/ians-blog-entry\/"},"modified":"2008-01-07T09:14:48","modified_gmt":"2008-01-07T17:14:48","slug":"ians-blog-entry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2008\/01\/07\/ians-blog-entry\/","title":{"rendered":"Ian’s Blog Entry"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The truism of the web: people talking about you is far more effective than talking about yourself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

No, Ian Rogers of Yahoo didn’t write the above aphorism, Seth Godin did.\u00c2\u00a0 Check out the entire post under the title "Blogs and self promotion" at: <\/p>\n

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Seth Godin’s Blog<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Could it be that the days of self promotion are done?\u00c2\u00a0 Is that what killed big time rap music?\u00c2\u00a0 My inbox tells me rap is alive and well, just sans bluster and underground.\u00c2\u00a0 Turns out if you’re telling everybody how great you are, no one takes you seriously.\u00c2\u00a0 OTHER PEOPLE have to say how great you are.<\/p>\n

This is anathema to mainstream corporations.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re based on marketing.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what major labels became, marketing machines.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s nothing organic about the procedure at all.\u00c2\u00a0 What can be organic when you’ve got to move millions of pieces of product this quarter so your stock price doesn’t tank?<\/p>\n

The music business has rarely been about thinking.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s about bluster.\u00c2\u00a0 And intimidation.\u00c2\u00a0 If you don’t know this, you haven’t hung out with the old guard.\u00c2\u00a0 Where if you don’t feel a bit scared, then you’re not hanging with winners.\u00c2\u00a0 I had dinner with the deposed head of a major corporation recently and I was STILL frightened, even though he was sans power base.\u00c2\u00a0 You see it’s baked into his personality.\u00c2\u00a0 Where nerds were never frightening.\u00c2\u00a0 And nerds are inheriting the earth.<\/p>\n

I wouldn’t quite call Ian Rogers a nerd, he’s not a geeky Bill Gates, even an out of touch Mark Zuckerberg.\u00c2\u00a0 Ian’s first and foremost a music fan.\u00c2\u00a0 But he’s got the nerd knowledge base.\u00c2\u00a0 And when he talks you’re not bored, rather you’re inspired by the pearls of wisdom.<\/p>\n

Ian’s done with digital scarcity.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is the major label paradigm.\u00c2\u00a0 He references his manifesto re this on his Website.\u00c2\u00a0 And that’s what I want to tell you about, his blog entry.<\/p>\n

Sure, it covers the Aspen conference.\u00c2\u00a0 You can read the screed and feel left out.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

The new seers are different from the old ones.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, they care about their favorite acts, but that’s not their only concern.\u00c2\u00a0 They ponder how the music is going to get to the listeners, and who those listeners are.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Doug Morris said he had no idea who to call?\u00c2\u00a0 He should have called Ian Rogers, or a bunch of equally noteworthy young techies.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Ian tried to make nice with the majors.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s done with that.\u00c2\u00a0 So is the public.\u00c2\u00a0 Whose side do you want to be on?\u00c2\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n

If you’re following the shenanigans of septuagenarian Clive Davis, never mind his inferiors, I feel sorry for you.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s about massaging an act and hyping it via old wave marketing techniques.\u00c2\u00a0 Word of mouth isn’t selling Alicia Keys, just raw promotion.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s the old wave record business in action.\u00c2\u00a0 Nothing inherently wrong with it, just that if it survives in the future, it will be a tiny sliver of the market.\u00c2\u00a0 Snow doesn’t come down from the sky Charlie Brown, it comes up from the ground.\u00c2\u00a0 You have to pull it up.<\/p>\n

Lucy Van Pelt may not be right about precipitation, but she’s got the future of the record business nailed.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to pull, HARD!\u00c2\u00a0 And you’ve got to pull for a very long time before even part of the landscape is covered.\u00c2\u00a0 People like Ian Rogers understand this.\u00c2\u00a0 They are inheriting the music business.<\/p>\n

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Talking To The Music Industry Again, The Aspen Live Conference<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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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.\u00c2\u00a0 Check out the entire post under the title "Blogs and self promotion" at: Seth Godin’s Blog Could it be that the days of self promotion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-ha","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}