{"id":2860,"date":"2010-05-02T16:23:38","date_gmt":"2010-05-03T00:23:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=2860"},"modified":"2010-05-05T08:42:42","modified_gmt":"2010-05-05T16:42:42","slug":"corks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2010\/05\/02\/corks\/","title":{"rendered":"Corks"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a story in yesterday’s "Wall Street Journal" how the plastic cork has made inroads in the world of wine.\u00c2\u00a0 One quote rang so true, it reminded me of the music business: <\/p>\n

\n
\n"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."<\/p>\n

Show Stopper: How Plastic Popped the Cork Monopoly<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Bottom line, corks just didn’t work that well, wine ended up contaminated\/bad because of their deficiencies.\u00c2\u00a0 But no cork manufacturer believed there was a problem, never mind see an opening for an entrepreneur.<\/p>\n

Lessons for the music business?<\/p>\n

1. Never lose focus on your core mission.<\/span>\u00c2\u00a0 Which is to bring great music to the public.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Oldsters and hipsters hated boy bands.\u00c2\u00a0 Even more people hate hip-hop.\u00c2\u00a0 But these being the easy sell, labels purveyed them and wondered where their market went.<\/p>\n

2. Don’t be inured to old technology.<\/span>\u00c2\u00a0 If I hear one more person extolling the superiority of CDs to MP3s, I’m going to explode.\u00c2\u00a0 CDs are not portable, and whether it be the underlying technology or the EQ’ing for radio, they sound uniformly terrible.\u00c2\u00a0 Is it any wonder the public wanted a portable format, even if the sound was far from perfect?\u00c2\u00a0 The public can see the superiority in something new, like the plastic cork.\u00c2\u00a0 Traditionalists are doomed to the scrapheap.<\/p>\n

3. Efficiencies.<\/span>\u00c2\u00a0 You can only harvest cork from a tree every nine or ten years.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is like saying you’ve got to make a record in a major studio, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.\u00c2\u00a0 The Pro Tools era is here to stay.<\/p>\n

4. Success breeds complacency.<\/span>\u00c2\u00a0 All innovation in the music business is by indies, or acts themselves, doing it outside the major label system.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 But, the plastic cork providers go it alone.<\/p>\n

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.<\/span>\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe music is free. In any event, an overpriced album on a silver disc as the main driver of music revenues is history.<\/p>\n

6.\u00c2\u00a0 The public is more open to innovation than the supplier.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n

7. Price.<\/span>\u00c2\u00a0 The ancient acts and ancient concert promoters can’t see that shows are overpriced.\u00c2\u00a0 We’re not talking virtual here, corks are physical, whether real or plastic.\u00c2\u00a0 The future is lower-priced concerts.\u00c2\u00a0 Just like minor league baseball is a gold mine.\u00c2\u00a0 Then again, minors give a lot of bang for the buck, there’s more than the game.\u00c2\u00a0 Also, there are more major league teams than guaranteed sellout arena acts!<\/p>\n

8. Not every innovator triumphs.<\/span>\u00c2\u00a0 Another plastic cork supplier tanked.\u00c2\u00a0 Just because Napster was defeated that doesn’t mean a new technology won’t win.<\/p>\n

9. More than one answer to a problem can take hold.<\/span>\u00c2\u00a0 Screw caps are triumphant Down Under, in Australia and New Zealand.<\/p>\n

It’s hard for an old alkie to think that plastic corks can not only be better than the real thing, but triumph.\u00c2\u00a0 When I was a drinker, screw caps meant Gallo, they meant crap.\u00c2\u00a0 What’s next, quality wine in a box?<\/p>\n

Maybe.\u00c2\u00a0 The point is not to be married to your presuppositions.\u00c2\u00a0 Not to think that you’re operating in a world of immutable laws.\u00c2\u00a0 And to realize that trying to hold back the future is a losing proposition.\u00c2\u00a0 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?\u00c2\u00a0 And you wonder why people steal…\u00c2\u00a0 BECAUSE IT’S BETTER!\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 But you can’t hold back the future.\u00c2\u00a0 Especially when it’s better than the past.<\/p>\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a story in yesterday’s "Wall Street Journal" how the plastic cork has made inroads in the world of wine.\u00c2\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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-2860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s96vPs-corks","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2860","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=2860"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2876,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2860\/revisions\/2876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}