A Manifesto for the Content Industry 9 - Be Genuine

We’re sick of spin, we’re sick of hype. If you churn out repetitive and unoriginal content whilst claiming it’s the best thing since last year’s clone, we’ll stop listening and go elsewhere (a lot of people already have).

“The best thing since sliced-bread” gives over 3 million hits on a google-search, I wonder how many of those things really are?

There is a theory that for any headline that ends with a question-mark*, the answer is “no”.

“You can tell when a politician is lying, his lips move.” Gets you over 500 hits on Google.

“Don’t believe the hype.” By Public Enemy reached number 18 in the UK chart

“So what?” I hear you ask. Well, we, as a populace, and hence as customers, are becoming more cynical. Advertising is pervasive but untrusted, techniques such as having the volume of the commercial breaks louder than the host programme and releasing ad campaigns that are designed to be offensive safe in the knowledge that any ASA activity will be retroactive further heighten the sense of intrusion.

Programmes such as The X-Factor are routinely referred to as “glorified karaoke” and the shelf-life of the winners is generally planned only to last until the next series (anything else is a bonus).

Media conglomerates have control of so many different channels that it is easy to find an advertisement for a TV programme masquerading as an article in a paper owned by the same company (or vice versa).

We, the customers, have known this for a while but, with the advent of a truly interactive web, people are finding out how to route round the hype, the misinformation and the adverts and are finding their own trusted sources.

Many legacy companies are seeing this as a threat. This loss of control means that their influence is reduced accordingly:

If people are TIVO’ing shows then they’re not watching your expensive adverts

If people aren’t listening to commercial radio they’re not hearing your carefully selected play-list

If people aren’t reading the newspapers then they’re not reading your trend-setter’s latest must-watch / -read / -listen to recommendations

But overall spend on entertainment is going up, especially for independents. So where are they getting their recommendations?

Well, the same way that they always did really, from friends, peers, colleagues, trusted reviewers, fanzines etc. It’s just that now, most of these are online and can have a far wider influence than they did previously.

And the reason that people are listening to these sources is that they respect the opinions and advice given. These new sources have established a track record on honest and reliable output that allows people to make a judgement based on that history.

This is an opportunity, and an easy one to open up. Most aspects of the content industry have their talent scouts (in one form or another) who could easily open up a credible dialogue with potential fans and customers, but very few are doing so.

More often than not this gap has been filled by amateur  / semi-pro bloggers and websites.

Sometimes industries will embrace these new sources, frequently they will do so in a confused, contradictory and ultimately litigious fashion.

This link [http://www.techdirt.com/search.php?cx=partner-pub-4050006937094082%3Acx0qff-dnm1&cof=FORID%3A9&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=dajaz1] shows the list of articles about popular hip-hop blog Dajaz1, a blog that was taken offline for hosting infringing content, a significant chunk of which was found to have been provided by the record labels for promotion.

There are plenty of other examples of fan-supported sites being closed down for copyright reasons that, ultimately, just drive people away from legitimate content.

From accounting practices to promotion techniques the legacy content industries (particularly music and movies) don’t have a good history of honesty. That’s a gap in the market, that’s an opportunity.

P.S. As well as my recurring concern about companies adapting before I’ve finished writing this I sometimes wonder if I’m going the wrong way with some of my analysis. Fortunately there is no shortage of regular reminders that reform is needed, generally in the form of one of the industries taking some ridiculous legal action. After writing this up last night my vindication came with this article from techdirt** about how skipping commercials might be considered illegal.

* e.g. Did radio-active, nazi gerbils kill Elvis in JFK cover-up?

** My go to source for all that is wrong in the Intellectual Property world.

A manifesto for the Content Industry 8 - Use your experience

There’s a lot of noise out there, but there’s also a huge amount of good stuff, your job is to find the great stuff. For example, if you’re a newspaper then do the investigative journalism, get into the detail and find the facts behind the story. I can get opinion and newsfeeds faster than you can go to print, get me the truth and I will buy your paper.

There are no longer any gatekeepers. You no longer control either the creation of, or access to, content. This doesn’t have to be a threat, this can be your next opportunity, You have spent the second half of the last century amassing experts in your field, be they A&R men, cinematographers, editors, investigative journalists or any other media professionals. If, in the last decade’s rush to bottom, you haven’t got rid of them all, these are the people who can differentiate your offering from the millions of bytes of user-generated content that is uploaded every second.

Note: this does not mean take your existing content, stick it on the web and hope.

Differentiation is an opportunity for monetisation.

Take the journalism example in the opening paragraph: “explosion wipes Doncaster off the map*” is a headline that screams across the web faster than any formal news channel can keep pace. But at that pace, and by the mechanisms of blogs, twitter and youtube, that’s almost all you’ll actually know half an hour after you first hear about it.

If you follow someone local to the incident you may pick up the name of the factory and a couple of nice photos (assuming it’s a daytime incident**). But the impacts of it, and the reasons behind it? That’s the opportunity; I’ve yet to see a spokesman giving a press-conference to “citizen journalists”.

This is even more important if there is anything unusual about the incident. At a time when it is easier than ever to disseminate misinformation and lies, the need for good investigative journalism and a trustworthy 4^th estate is greater than ever.***

This level of integrity is something that can be charged for, either by means of a paywall (see the Financial Times) or by actually selling pulped bits of felled trees (see Private Eye).

Expanding out from news reporting, we can see the same opportunities in other fields. There’s plenty of raw talent out there but very few people who, from scratch, can apply the necessary polish or have a wide enough network to achieve a critical mass for distribution.

Unsurprisingly this ties back into the Add Value and Be Brave sections, but it boils down to answering two questions:

why would a content creator want to work with you?

Why would a content consumer come to you (and pay you) for this content?

If your answers to those questions are about where and how you improve the quality, distribution and uptake of that content then you’re on the right lines.

If your answers to those questions are about how people have to come through you to distribute their content, how they are legally required to use your services to access the content or how only you can provide this content, then you’re a sitting duck.

* Some good news travels fast****

** Thinking of the 2011 London riots, it’s interesting how little user-generated video footage there is that is really watchable, mostly because camera-phones still don’t operate well in low-light. This is also an opportunity.

*** Don’t rest on your laurels though, taking the London riots example again, a number of twitter users started to independently validate and curate tweets about the riots and built up a stream of trustworthy sources for tracking the activity. These sources ranged from established journalists to a chap who just got on his bike and went to look at any alleged riot areas.

**** Sorry Doncaster, you know I don’t mean it.****

***** Actually I do.

Cycling, Music and Design (well, poking a bit of fun at fashion)

I think this video just about sums up all the key areas of this blog. And it has lots of swearing in it, which is always funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgCqz3l33kU
[EDIT - updated with embed]

A Manifesto for the content industry - 7. Be Brave

Be brave. If you’re focussing on sequels, glorified karaoke acts, this year’s answer to “X” or trying to build a brand then you are guaranteed to miss the next trend when it comes along.

First, as has become traditional, some numbers:

Rather than copy and paste a big picture please have a shufti at this Infographic from techdirt showing the numbers in an expanding industry http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120129/17272817580/sky-is-rising-entertainment-industry-is-large-growing-not-shrinking.shtml

What this shows us is that the overall entertainment sector is growing, both from a creation side and a sales side. So why do we hear so much about a dying industry being decimated by piracy?

Well, it’s partly because of that column on the left. The gaming industry of 20 years ago was niche and pretty negligible compared to the established movie and music industries. That’s all changed now and the customer’s entertainment dollar has a whole new market to play in.

So that’s part of it, and it’s partly because most people don’t know what decimated means, but we’ll step past that…

Having had a look at the top 20 singles, albums, tours, movies, paperbacks and video games (mostly courtesy of that other growth industry – Wikipedia) I notice the following things

The singles market is dominated by a few major artists.

The biggest movies of the year were mostly sequels, as were the video games.

The biggest tours were all by long-established by acts.

Novels alone still seem to have a good presence of debut works.

This tells me one of two things, either all the best stuff has been produced and there’s nothing good coming out of the ever increasing amount of new content, or the respective industries are scared of this new fangled internet thing* and are banking on their known, well, bankers.

Hence we’re seeing the sequels, cross-overs, franchises and the building of “brands” from the majors whilst most of the truly original content is coming from the independents and smaller subsidiary production houses.

This isn’t new, but the extent to which it is happening is, and it’s particularly galling in the music industry. Here we have an industry that has always defended its 90% take** on the grounds that it needs it to invest in new and developing artists. But speak to those within that industry who are tasked with that job and you’ll find there’s less and less money and time going that way. The general approach is now to let the scene develop organically and then cream 2 or 3 artists off the top when a lot of the hard work has been done by the artists and local enthusiasts.

If the content industry really wants to get back on the front foot they need to stop playing it safe and start hunting out the cutting edge; they have the skills and the resources to be shaping a new zeitgeist rather than perpetuating last year’s trends. But it means being brave, it means taking some of those profits and gambling with them, it means trying to reverse that process whereby companies go from creative start-ups to legislating dinosaurs.

It will pay off in two ways, firstly it increases your chance of finding the next being thing and being in at the start of a new scene and secondly it gives your customers a reason for some brand loyalty and, to go back to the techdirt equation***, a reason to buy (and then come back to buy again).

To refer to the previous chapter, it takes you away from content as a commodity and starts to return it to being culture.

The other way that the industry needs to be brave is in terms of how it connects its fans to its creators. We’ve talked about this before and we’ll come back to it again, but pretending the internet doesn’t exist is not going to work.

P.S. I love the wording from the US constitution at the bottom of the infographic, “to promote the progress of science and useful arts.” Does that mean that non-useful arts shouldn’t get copyright? Damien Hirst, I’m looking at you.

P.P.S. I know it doesn't mean this.

 

* An MPAA spokesman recently admitted that “the internet isn’t a platform we’re comfortable with”.

** On average, some of the older, more established bands do better, the manufactured ones don’t tend to get close to that.

*** Connect With Fans + Reason to Buy = $$$

A Manifesto for the content industry 6 – Focus on Quality

Focus on quality. A corollary to adding value; you cannot compete on quantity, it’s you vs the world, you have to be better than good.

So what do I mean by focusing quality? Well, simply put, it is finding and exploiting (in a positive sense) the great stuff.

First though, some numbers to explain why quality is the differentiator for any kind of business based on digital content:

•At least 35 hours of content is uploaded to Youtube every minute.

•The movie featured in this blog post was shot on an $800 SLR.

•Garage Band recording software is available from £13 and a fully specc’d copy of Cubase from £190

•e-books now outsell paper books on amazon and can be produced with free software and the cheapest pc you can find.

•Portable digital recorders with condenser mics now cost less than £100.

•You tube, Picasa, Bandcamp, and oodles of other sites allow creators to upload and share / sell their content for free.

•Over $100million was pledged to Kickstarter projects last year.

•There are over 200 million blogs and this number rises every year.

What all of this means is that it is easier than ever for creators to produce good content, easier than ever for them to share it directly with their fans, and easier than ever for people to find new content.

What’s not easy to do is find the best content. There’s so much good stuff out there that finding the great stuff, and getting in front of the right people, is a challenge for creators and consumers alike.

As with adding value, focusing on quality is where middlemen have a role.

We touched on this in the previous instalment (I used the example of the difference in production values on albums by The National) and these two aspects do sit together to a great extent, getting top quality content in front of the right audience is still a real challenge at all levels of the industry.

In the TV and music world there is currently a focus on the reality TV shows and their offspring, Big Brother, X-factor and their ilk. This is very much a lower-end-of-the-market play and, whilst it offers high returns for low overheads in the short term, the numbers indicate that this may have a short life span. Audiences for Big Brother and similar shows have fallen heavily since their early highs and whilst the X-factor continues to grow its TV viewing figures, the sales of singles are falling (even when downloads are taken into account). The limited longevity of the acts also means that there is very little “long tail” to be capitalised on.

By focusing on the lower end of the quality scale the output becomes a commodity rather than “art”, which, as well as removing any long-term re-sale value from the product, makes it open to competition from lower / zero cost producers, removes a lot of potential for any brand loyalty and makes the operation very vulnerable to a sudden shift in public opinion.

The competition for consumers attention is more open than ever, whilst the major content producers also own the major media and distribution channels a demand can be created, but as the net democratises the flow of information, and as peer-recommendation outgrows media hype, the money that people have to spend on entertainment will move towards quality output, even as they continue to watch and listen to the mass produced output.

* This may be my first ever blog post that has no asterisk'd footnotes. Oh wait.

It's not over (or A new world order)

The debate over SOPA and PIPA (and the eventual shelving of those bills) has been framed in various terms from its inception. According to the supporters of the bill it's about Freetards vs Creators. According to a lot of the pundits (mainly in the mainstream media) it's about The Internet Geeks vs Hollywood.
But both of these positions are false.
Sure there are people out there who will happily take content for free without a thought for the creators, but there are a great many more who will happily pay a reasonable price for unrestricted content; especially if they know that most of what they've paid is going to the creator. That's why so many artists, musicians, actors, and programmers have come out against the bill.
And sure the MPAA have been driving this bill and it has been internet-based agitators who have orchestrated the challenge to it. But it's not just the geeks who've been overloading the congressional switchboards and filling up the senate's inboxes. After all, everyone who reads this is an internet user, but would you describe yourself as an online activist or a geek?
To ascribe to one of these positions is to miss a wider affect that has the potential for much greater change.

What really happened over the last few days was Lobbying vs The People.

That it came about over a bill to regulate the internet is perhaps fitting as it's this same medium that has enabled everyday people to see exactly how the legislative process in the US works. When these bills first started being discovered and discussed there were many in the online world who thought that their protesting was ultimately going to be fruitless. The internet wasn't a big issue to a national audience and the millions of dollars at the lobbyist's disposal (in an election year) meant that most of those early protesters thought that this would be a forlorn hope.
I am so incredibly proud of everyone who took a moment to contact their senator and congressman to stop this happening and provide a rare victory for the people over the vested interests of a few companies.
Make no mistake, it is a rare victory and it is not over.
Those bills (and doubtless others like them) have been shelved not scrapped, they will be back, in one form or another and we'll be relying on the same group of activists to keep us aware.
The lobbyists haven't changed their tactics, they still think that they can buy new legislation and, if necessary, new legislators.
But they have failed to recognise that, in their hubris, they have woken a slumbering beast.
Now it may be that the american people will roll over and go back to sleep and, if so, a great opportunity will have been lost. But it may be that the american people will wake up and start looking at how their rights have been eroded by lobbyist dollars and vested interests and how far from their purpose that their elected representatives have strayed.
We can hope.

SOPA so bad

I feel I should be posting something about SOPA/PIPA here being as it's such a crock of shit and seriously fucks up this wonderful little thing I like to call the web.
But in truth, everything that needs to be said is being said and collated by those far more intelligent than me, so I'll just point you here: http://www.techdirt.com/
The other reason that I'm trying to avoid writing anything about is that the outright lies and bullshit that is being spouted by the likes of the MPAA and RIAA makes me so angry I'm almost unable to write a coherent sentence.
So all I'll say is, get out there and make a noise.

Maybe it's while we still can.