{"id":9371,"date":"2014-12-11T15:07:07","date_gmt":"2014-12-11T23:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=9371"},"modified":"2014-12-11T15:07:07","modified_gmt":"2014-12-11T23:07:07","slug":"learned-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2014\/12\/11\/learned-year\/","title":{"rendered":"What We Learned This Year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Steve Barnett is a hero. He took Capitol from zero to the top of the heap. Shows what an individual can do.<\/p>\n<p>Sound may be lame on recordings, but it&#8217;s living large at the Forum, where a dedicated music space has touring acts and SoCal fans smiling. Talk about virality.<\/p>\n<p>Festivals are king. It&#8217;s still shaking out how many we need, but there will be more.<\/p>\n<p>Warner Music is an enigma.<\/p>\n<p>Publicity is everything. Taylor Swift proved it.<\/p>\n<p>Max Martin is the biggest star in music.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Voice&#8221; helps the career of the coaches, but does nothing for the acts competing.<\/p>\n<p>You can&#8217;t get a good ticket unless you know someone, have a credit card which is sponsoring the gig and has a presale or you pay a scalper. Income inequality lives large in the live space.<\/p>\n<p>Electronic music still did not break through. The Electric Daisy Carnival in Vegas was the biggest festival in the U.S. but it got a fraction of the press of Coachella and Lollapalooza. Then again, the Sahara Tent at Coachella dominates.<\/p>\n<p>All the money is in the ticketing.<\/p>\n<p>Streaming won, you can tell by the debate. Just like with Napster, when everybody starts talking about it, the new era is here.<\/p>\n<p>YouTube may not dominate. That&#8217;s the story of the month. How competitors are trying to lock up talent. Once again, it&#8217;s all about the acts, the acts have all the power. And he who pays most wins. Google&#8217;s deals suck. Just check their ad shares. No, that&#8217;s right, you&#8217;d rather bitch about Spotify, which pays so much more.<\/p>\n<p>Pop, country and everything else. That&#8217;s the landscape.<\/p>\n<p>A great record transcends genres. Sam Smith sounds nothing like anything else on the radio, yet it triumphed. The public is hungry for new and different, if it&#8217;s great.<\/p>\n<p>Samsung was a fad, in phones. Tim Cook knew it was all about profitability, he gets props for that. Furthermore, the iPhone 6 is a gargantuan surprise\/success.<\/p>\n<p>Mark Zuckerberg is more than Facebook. He&#8217;s a force to contend with. His purchase of WhatsApp and Instagram illustrate that he not busy born is busy dying.<\/p>\n<p>Jeff Bezos has revolutionized the &#8220;Washington Post,&#8221; it shows what money can do. It was the &#8220;Post&#8221; that broke the UVA\/&#8221;Rolling Stone&#8221;\/Jackie snafu. Proving once again that well-paid professionals with experience trump amateurs every day. You can have an opinion, but without facts you&#8217;re irrelevant. Which is why TV news is dying and all the online only news outlets have high valuations but don&#8217;t move the needle.<\/p>\n<p>Data is everything. Nate Silver ushered in the era. But never forget, in art data is irrelevant, it&#8217;s all about inspiration.<\/p>\n<p>In an era with no credibility, the one hit wonder is king.<\/p>\n<p>We live in an on demand culture. People want everything at their fingertips instantly. Which is why we&#8217;re going to day and date in movies and the concept of windowing in music is fallacious. If you won&#8217;t sell it to me right away, I&#8217;ll steal it, never forget that. Your business model is not sacred, just ask television outlets.<\/p>\n<p>We live in a mobile world. Everyone&#8217;s wired and connected. Sell to the handset.<\/p>\n<p>Price matters. Otherwise, everybody would not be leaving AT&amp;T and Verizon for the inferior T-Mobile. I love John Legere, but anybody with T-Mobile is just cheap. Because you want a high speed connection everywhere, and T-Mobile does not deliver this.<\/p>\n<p>Usability is everything. Instagram just trumped Twitter because it&#8217;s comprehensible. We want instant news, but we want it in a format we can understand.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s so hard to break through in music, that when you do you and your record last.<\/p>\n<p>Art is just a pawn in the game. As illustrated by the Amazon\/Hachette war. It&#8217;s the writers who suffered. However, this was a corporate battle fought in secret. We never learned what the deal points were, it&#8217;s hard to side with the old institutions that say they support the artist but really are out for themselves.<\/p>\n<p>Money. Either you have it or you&#8217;re envious of those who do.<\/p>\n<p>Lucian Grainge is God.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Steve Barnett is a hero. He took Capitol from zero to the top of the heap. Shows what an individual can do. Sound may be lame on recordings, but it&#8217;s living large at the Forum, where a dedicated music space has touring acts and SoCal fans smiling. Talk about virality. Festivals are king. It&#8217;s still [&hellip;]<\/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":[2,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business","category-technology","category-the-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-2r9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9371","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=9371"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9372,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9371\/revisions\/9372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}