>On Jul 8, 2010, at 3:05 PM, Matt wrote:
>
> > I guess I am missing the point...entirely. Unless the context is only
> > U2/Prince/Ke$ha/Lady Gaga/Justin Bieber/Whatever gazillion dollar
> > tours, and not every band who paid for tours and living expenses by
> > selling tickets, t-shirts, and CDs in the back of the bar they were
> > playing in.
>
>I just interviewed the guy, Sean Keenan, for this evening's radio show.
>One difference between then and now: in the old days, record companies
>(whose general suckiness I won't for a second deny) gave advances to
>promising acts. Now, bupkes. And as Keenan points out, the artists that
>succeed today have to be good with spreadsheets and marketing, which take
>precedence over music.
>
>Look, this is part of my ongoing interest in how the hell we're going to
>pay for journalism and popular art in a world where everyone wants stuff
>on the Internet for free. His isn't the last word, but it's all worth
>thinking about.
>
>Doug
My first reaction was: strike! If they just stop creating music, art, journalism, literature, and so forth, people will realize how much they want it and are willing to pay for it.
But there is the rub. As Shane said, the dealio is, with anyone who is a creator, the drive to create (and I suspect, not necessarily to have an audience at all) is so strong that they can't fathom doing this. Which is not to say that this drive is natural or anything like that. The situation is one where creators get taken advantage of because of this idea that people do it for the sheer joy of creating and, therefore, they don't need to get paid. Anyone who has ever freelanced or tried to run a small business knows just how many friends and family - and perfect strangers -- will ask you to work on spec, for free particularly if, in their mind, all you are giving up is your time. after all, you must love designing web sites so much, you'd do anything to create and, therefore, since there's no "cost" involved, why wouldn't you make this one little web site for a friend?
(same thing goes on, as you know, WRT authors and speaking engagements. Of course, you will do it for the good cause, right? It's just a weekend, 2 hours of your time. And of course you'll do it on the cheap - the cause! - since, as we all know, peole aren't goign to pay for tickets to see a lefty speak! yadda. A few months ago, I was in a conversation about that and had to defend the lefty speakers who were asking the big bucks to speak. Dudes, they have to eat. And everyone nodded. And I thought we were all on the same page; no inviting speakers unless we are paying them a reasonable buck. Well, no one wanted to slow down for two minutes to raise the money, so they plowed ahead and I've since backed off, embarrassed that they have the nerve to ask people to speak for practically nothing.)
Meanwhile, as my reading of Ken Auletta's Googled revealed, advertising revenue on the Web is a tenth (or less) of what advertising revenue was for print. That was the "free" model before - the 50cent cost of a newspaper didn't cover production and distribution costs of that newspaper so it was, nearly, free. The rest was made up in advertising revenue.
The deal with the Web is that the advertising costs don't sustain the operation. Everyone thought it was going to be cheaper to produce web-based versions of print. Well, surprise, it's not a tenth or less of the cost of producing print. And in spite of the wealth of information today's advertising can learn about what works and doesn't work on the Web, the problem is that tracking, collating, deciphering, analyzing that data costs money and requires skills -- the latter is actually, I'd guess, in short supply. Why? Because in the old advertising world, as Adland's James Othmer points out, no one knew why advertising worked or didn't work. They had lots of research and inchoate theories, but nothing solid. So it was all magic - which is what Adland is, largely, about: they way an entire advertising industry was built on smoke and mirrors, convincing people to pay big bucks for advertising that no one could explain how and why it worked (or didn't). WEll, now they have detailed data on who's watching and who's not, what goes viral and what doesn't, they have bloggers who willing write about what they liked and didn't like about it - hell with the focus groups! But all that information - who can figure it all out? It's still a big black box. (Auletta says that Google is in the process of creating the artificial intelligence to decipher all those signals and then sell that information to marketers, business owners, etc.)
The point? It's a different business model - well, the same really. It's the old advertising based one, but with less money coming down the pike from advertisers. Google is placing it's money on the emergence of a mediating advertising analysis infrastructure. They are creating the tools so that a business can place it's ads on line, get immediate feedback about how the ad is working or not, allow them to tweak it themselves OR google sells them the consulting staff to do it for them. (again, see Auletta's _Googled_. I've boiled that part of his work down into a concentrated form since his book is about a lot more than just this stuff. And, as Auletta's quick to point out, Google's often so fucked up that makes beaucoup bux off very little they've actually created themselves, but they end up making it off of the startups they've purchased. So, this may be their plan, but it will be one of the very few times Google makes money of something they *intended* to do. :)
So what I'm saying is, the big money, if Google's correct, is going to be where Google is, where the analysis is, and they are going to be the deep pockets that eventually makes sure the content is produced. As I wrote in my review of chris Anderson's _Free_: the word of the day is circuitous. The path to $ is going to be far more circuitous than it ever was with the old advertising model. And it will require bizarre iron constitutions for anyone to ever run a business on this model and for them to even understand what the fuck is going on. (On the other hand, I can tell you from first hand experience that plenty of medium-sized businesses have no idea what the fuck is going on. One company I worked for called their print business, "The Daily Miracle," because they had no idea what worked and what didn't work. And now, with the Web, they are screwed.
so, it's a different business model with music, too. Circuitous is the word of the day. and the big money isn't going to be where it's conventionally been. The music will, eventually, be paid for; it just won't be paid for by the consumer purchasing a music product directly. They will view ads. They will give their information to facebook in order to listen to pandora and show their friends what kind of music they like. And pandora will collect all the information about what people listen to and don't, what they like and don't, and they will sell that information to - whomever. And then facebook will sell related information. And third party companies like Rapleaf will sell information about the email addresses associated with myspace, facebook, linkedin, yadda. You are giving them all these marvelous information, and they will feed that information into their information factory and spit it back out in the form of music produced based on all that collation of data from social media, from iTunes store, from Amazon's store.
Bake your own fucking bread and circuses man. Give it to them for FREE and then they will sell that to whomever and they will take it, with their half-baked, clueless theories about what works and doesnt'w ork in order to figure out what music you want made next.
today's artificially-intelligentized cool-hunters do it with "intelligence agents" instead of hustling the streets of NY looking for the latest new fad, the authentically hip so they can turn it into a mass merchandized experience, and the authentic can sneer and get pissed because their cool, authentic whatever has been taken over by the faker poseurs. and the beat goes on and on and on...
So Keenan thinks it's "whoring" to place products in a music video. That's really funny. It's like the classic bourgeois distinction about selling your skills at baking apple pies and selling your skills at giving hummers. The distinction rests on mystification of one as mundane, the other as sacred. Apparently, selling the music directly through tickets to concerts and CD purchases, or even getting paid royalties for each video played on MTV (supported by commercials!) is not selling your Art in a bad way, but making a music video with a pepsi can in it is.
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)