The Big Bang (of OTCC)
The demise of Top of The Pops (a staple of British TV since 1964) in July 2006 marked the beginning of the End - the tipping point in a huge upheaval in the music industry. Industrialisation is being reversed (in music, anyhow - will other forms of production, creative or otherwise, follow?). The warning lights flash with every RIAA lawsuit, every band that ditches their label, every gig that sells out before a band has even released a record, and of course, plummeting CD sales.
No point in mincing words. The industry’s being turned on it’s head. This is a revolution. Whereas the music industry used to operate on a push model, it looks as though it’s becoming a pull economy - where the user goes out and selects the music he is exposed to, and the music he eventually spends money on. Before I go any further, here’s a beautiful feature on Edge by a very clever guy explaining why filtering is a fundamental principle behind any system (including Life!). Ignore the rest of this jibber-jabber if you must, and go spend five precious minutes with it.
What we’re currently seeing is the birth of a truly fascinating ecosystem. Industry upheaval notwithstanding, I’m confident that musicians will keep on making music. This creates the "signal" of the system. Until now, music labels selected artists for their rosters and passed them onto you and I, via radio, the albums that your local record shop decides to stock, the ads that get placed in mags, etc.
Even independent music media (press and radio) couldn’t undo the label polarisation of the signal. With little exception, they can only play and review the records that the music industry have chosen to make. This industry was the filter that turns the signal (with all its white noise) into information - in the natural world, selection causes evolution, and recruitment filters (interviews, tests etc) will in turn affect your company’s culture and growth depending on who gets selected and who gets ignored. 
As the filter changes from music label to end user (or at least, user community), the information - i.e., the role and shape of music in our society - is bound to change. Like putting a different cardboard cutout shape in shadow theater changes the story, even if the signal - the lightbulb’s emission - is unchanged. In real terms, this means that (amongst other profound shifts) our attitude to music is likely to change.
One likely outcome is that we move away from long-term reverence of established stars or huge movements around new kids on the block - the only two classes of artist that music labels spend time promoting (i.e. the major output of the Old Music filter), towards established ‘relationships’ with a specific, finely tuned but evolving roster of artists that you have discovered independently.
The attention of the masses will be more diffuse, and everyone will have their own set of favourite artists. If the end user is the filter (a key characteristic of the ‘pull’ music economy) perhaps the value of music will rise beyond even what it had under the reign of the music label - which would mean that ‘music like water‘ initiatives are set to badly miss the point and are headed for disaster, medium term. Unless you’re in the not insignificant segment of the music industry that is currently aligning itself with a ‘music like water’ future, this scenario offers genuine cause for hope: if the value we attach to music bounces back, then with the right new music strategy and powerful marketing, the survivors of the new music revolution could undo the damage being done by the price erosion of music sales that we’re seeing at the moment.
So, the masses are gradually taking control of their media consumption, moving from passive consumers of broadcast media, via increased niche content diversity (two key enabling technologies here: the Internet (giving niche content producers the global reach needed to find audiences that make their output worthwhile) and news aggregators (so you can amass enough of your niche content, which is likely to be spread out, into one easily ‘consumed’ package), to user-generated content.
What if the trend continues, what’s the next milestone? I’ll hazard a guess that it might be content commissioning. I would love to hear ideas for business models where the user is commissioning the content (i.e. paying for it prior to it being created, much like major networks and studios do so at the moment). Could the Web 2.0 powershift really go that far?
Related:
- Virgin Media anti-piracy: who’s the crook now, eh?!
- Virgin Media is looking to emulate the 'French model' of anti-piracy, big-label protective measures, which sees persistent (three strikes) offenders warned and then kicked off the network. This is old hat stuff but a complex issue. In the post below I make the case that society needs to be wary/cynical towards this announcement - moreso than our castrate mainstream media. Here's why: Firstly, I take issue with the deliberately misleading, but unfortunately mainstream, assumption that music pirates are costing the music industry (as opposed to major music labels) serious amounts of cash. Many (not all!) music pirates spend vast amounts of money on music - you can see the results of my ad hoc study as they come in, here and here. These pirates just don't spend it on the big releases from major labels, mainly because having access to vast (shared) libraries of music means you can find the obscure records you REALLY like. They also spend a lot of money on concerts, merchandise, and within specialist distribution platforms that big labels have yet to get into bed with, like eMusic. An argument could be made that the iPod and the iTunes Music Store have destroyed just as much...
- Nine Inch Nails: distribution by pirate
- The music world is abuzz with chatter about the latest Nine Inch Nails LP being released (in part - Volume 1 of 4) on a Creative Commons license! Reznor and co. put it on filesharing sites and are encouraging people to email it to friends, post it on blogs, spread it around far and wide, in the hope that it inspires people to buy the full album. As an aside, I reckon few people are realising the significance and importance of the inclusion of a multi-page PDF with the nine DRM-free tracks. I was interested in what sort of response NIN would get out of music pirates that the music industry hates so much. I had a look at the forums attached to the album's download page on an unspecified music filesharing community. This is the download page for the full 4 volumes, so these people are explicitly going against Reznor's wishes and downloading/sharing all of his new work, illegally. Admittedly, there's a vast amount of bias to people's motivations to append messages to these filesharing pages (and just 43 comments for 1,300 downloads), so this isn't a scientific approach by any means - but the response is very, very...
- Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma
- In the video above, Matt Mason explains the value of piracy to a bunch of trad media suits. He credits pirate radio as a crucible for new music trends and as breaking grounds for new music DJs - an important counterpoint to commercial radio stations like Kiss 100 and Capital FM (in London). I don't disagree with Matt about the importance of pirate radio. Kiss was once a pirate radio station. But he misses the point - innovation isn't an inherent property of music piracy. Case in point - new bands aspire for airplay on (BBC) Radio 1, not your local pirate radio - because Radio 1 launches talent, not piracy. Matt gives piracy too much credit, missing the broader force that piracy is a part of - nonmarket production. Like pirate radio, BBC Radio 1 isn't market-motivated. THAT'S why it can take risks on underground talent, new music forms (future trends, or not - they don't care). Publicly-owned services, the pirate underground, nonprofits and transient crowd 'flashmob' initiatives are not driven by the same motivations as Kiss and Capital - and that's where the benefit to society lies. Matt's defence of piracy is flawed in that it speaks...
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