A manifesto for the content industry

Following on from my previous blog about the gender discrepancy between the charts and the amateur scene I’ve been doing some further thinking about how the music industry, and the wider content industry / rights holders* might want to behave if they are to survive (and even prosper) in the post-digital economy.

So, the manner of the Cluetrain Manifesto, I have produced a Manifesto for the Content Industry.

Now, before we get onto the manifesto, I want to head something off at the pass. This is not about whether it is right or wrong to copy and distribute files via the internet. This is not a moral debate. File sharing happens and, in one form or another, will always happen. This is a suggestion for how companies can accept this economic reality and still remain a viable business.

Right, now we’ve got that out of the way, here are my founding principles for a modern content provider. They’re in no order apart from number 1 and I'll expand on them in turn in future blogs:

1              Do not sue your customers. Seriously, just don’t. It’s the economic equivalent of going to war. If, in the words of one CEO, you say “We’re going to sue the fuck out of generation Y”, exactly how many of generation Z do you expect to buy your products? If someone is taking content you have the rights to and selling it on commercially, sure, take ‘em to the cleaners**. But blocking up the legal system with 25,000 individual cases of people downloading The Hurt Locker is not only targeting a bunch of people who have no impact on your business model, it’s also an abuse of the legal process.

2              One shared file does not equal one sale lost. It really doesn’t. People will accept something for free that they won’t be prepared to pay for, don’t kid yourself otherwise. A shared file is equally likely to lead to more sales rather than fewer.

3              Content will always be produced and consumed with or without you. You are just a facilitator. If your entire industry disappeared overnight, people will still create and they will find other ways to share and appreciate it. Never lose sight of this.

4              You can compete with free. Seriously, there are plenty of working business models out there, study them. You are better placed than anyone to make this work, failure to do so is not about not being able to compete with free, it’s a failure of your business acumen.

5              Add value. What are you doing that your customers can’t do with 20 minutes and the internet? What are you doing that a creator can’t do for themselves? If you’re not adding value, why would someone pay you?

6              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.

7              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.

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.

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).

10            Free your people. If you’re doing the other stuff right your people should have some pretty interesting jobs. I bet they’ve got interesting stuff to say. Do they blog? We do. Do they comment in chatrooms? We do. Let them join the conversation, it should be part of their job.

11            This is a global market. If you charge western prices to the third world then people will find a way to get the content for free. 99c might not be a lot to readers of this blog but it’s a day’s wage to large amounts of the globe. But the bad news is that you can’t stop a European going to an African website and buying from there, your unit cost is zero, expect your prices to trend that way.

12            The gravy train has stopped, it’s time to get off. You are no longer the gatekeepers to content and you no longer have a monopoly. Lobby if you like (and we know you do) but you’d be better off coming to terms with it and adapting.

13            The customers are out there. A corollary to 8; the argument that people are unwilling to pay for content has been proven false by the success of I-tunes, Spotify, The Financial Times and numerous others. You have to figure out who you’re trying to serve and what their needs are (Hint, the answers aren’t “everybody” and “everything”)

14            Do not sue your customers. I know this is the same as 1 but it’s so important I thought I’d say it twice.***

So there you go, that’s my stab at a set of principles for a 21^st century content provider. What do you think?

* Please note, I am using the term “Content Industry” as a catch all to cover the major players in the Intellectual Property market (Studios, Record Labels, Publishers, Newspapers, Software houses) rather than the actual creators of that content (Artists, film-makers, authors etc) as the behaviours and ambitions are generally very different.

** Take legal action against your competitors if you must, but be aware of the Streisand affect. You can lose as much business being in the right as you can being in the wrong.

*** With reference to Red Dwarf

Interesting Stuff #2

Today we have a few brief snippets for you:

In interesting critique of the new justice bill, which could have been subtitle "and justice for some"

A new scientist article talking about advertising to monkeys. Please, leave them their innocence.

A few words on the words understood by the few in the rail industry.

More shite from the olympics organisers. Expect the letter O to be trademarked next.

It wouldn't be one of my lists if it didn't have something about copyright in there somewhere

And finally, a depressingly accurate cartoon from Ted Rall

Enjoy. Or not.

Interesting* Stuff** #1

A few people have given me some grief about my posting links on facebook and how it's overwhelming their newsfeeds. Apologies for that.
But quite a lot of people appear to like the links so I figured what I'd do is stick them in a blog post and then it's just the one update (or two if I subsequently find some other stuff).

So:
I do like these fun theory things

Why you should be able to see your source code Mr Jobs


If it looks like a Greek default, pays like a greek default...


Seems the TSA just can't see when to quit


This is just obscenely fun (Millard Viper)


Sink hole photos, number three is the best


Quis custodiat ipsos custodians, police monitoring app


The law doesn't matter if you can't afford to pay for it (fair use)


Free schools might not be the salvation or our education system but they might drive improvements, why is that something to be afraid of?


Funny thing credibility, Greenpeace caught out on a porky pie


Interesting analysis of the thought processes behind UK Uncut


Cool, slightly sinister and a very interesting piece of science: audible cloaking device


What do you reckon? Is this better than the facebook spam?

* Might not be interesting

** Might not even be stuff in some cases

Let's draw a graph

Or two graphs actually, everyone likes a good graph.
These ones were inspired by a Neil McCormick article in the Daily Telegraph discussing the domination of the pop charts by female acts. It's a fairly compelling piece.

"But," I thought, "if pop music is dominated by female acts at the moment, what about what Josh Ritter would call “the glorious bottom”?"

All the open mic nights and gigs I go to are, without fail, very heavily male dominated. Why the discrepancy?

I'll pause here and let you read the article.

Back? Good.

Well, applying my cynical hat I’d say that you have one over-riding reason for each phenomenon:

Looking at the amateur scene first (because it’s easier) I think there’s a very simple reason why there are more blokes in music – guys join bands to impress girls.

I did tell you it was simple, but think back to your days as a teenager / young adult, if you’re a bloke, be honest and tell me how much of your life was not driven by an urge from your loins?

Thought so.

Moving on to the charts, and still with my cynical hat on, it’s about marketing. Women’s magazines have women on the cover, men’s magazines have women on the cover; images of women sell. You know what the most common way for “youth” to listen to music is? YouTube. Guess what? Images also work well there.

But there are exceptions! I hear you cry. Not everyone is a goddess-like Beyonce or Nicole Scherzinger, what about Adele, for example?

Well, and this might not be particularly popular, this is where you have to ratchet up your cynicism another notch. Sure she can sing, sure she writes her own songs and sure, she’s caught the retro wave at just the right time. But loads of other people have as well, why didn’t they make it big, especially when a great many of them are equally tuneful and (there’s no nice way of saying this) easier on the eye?

Cynical hat firmly on? Brim tugged right down? Ok here goes:

Again it’s all about marketing. In the same way that you have the likes of Cosmopolitan and Marie-Claire at one end of the spectrum, with the beautiful models and the aspirational marketing, at the other end of the magazine marketing you have the TV guides and supermarket tabloids with the “real stories about real people”. The Jeremy Kyle / Jerry Springer market. It’s about marketing a figure that most people can relate to. Most of us can never really aspire to be a Rihanna, but Adele? She’s normal, honest, down to earth. That’s, we tell ourselves, who we could be if fate had blown its fickle winds a different way.

Ok, let’s take our cynical hats off for a moment before we sound like bitter and twisted old people.*

Neil McCormick presents a number of reasons why women are very much on the ascendancy in the charts, I’d like to add one more before we take another look at the bottom rung and what happens in the middle order.

The recorded music industry, by which I mean the 4 major labels and their subsidiaries, is struggling. Sure every now and then they’ll hit on something and sales will rally for a bit but any business that is actively suing its customers has got serious strategic issues.

And what happens when legacy companies get put under pressure by disruptive players? They retreat to type and known formula, so big promotional bucks go into the current best selling genre as they try and maximise their position. So what we’re seeing is an industry putting all its eggs in one basket and, stretching my metaphor, trying to get as many eggs out of the golden goose before it dies from exhaustion.

That’s my summary of the top of the market, what about the bottom?

Next time you go to a gig (and watch the supports) or an open mic night, count the number of women on stage over the evening to the number of men. I’m guessing you’ll be looking at a ratio of 1-4.

So, assuming that there is only a little truth in my testosterone fuelled theory at the top, and taking into account Mr McCormick’s comments regarding the inherent anger / violence in certain musical styles (hip hop and metal being the obvious examples) being a turn-off to women, why are there so few female acts at the bottom of the tree? And why are there so few female “bands” at any level (successful female acts mostly being “solo artists”).

Frankly I just don’t know.

It’s plainly not that women and girls aren’t interested in popular music, the sales demographics show that there’s plenty of desire to consume.

Is it that it’s easier for a bunch of young lads to get the kit and do the practice to emulate the rock / indie music that their idols play than for girls to produce the kind of output that the top female acts are putting out?

That doesn’t make sense to me. Sure you can get a guitar and amp nice and cheap but drumkits and bass amps are still expensive and practice rooms and time are difficult to arrange. Plus you have to actually find your band members. I’d say you had a bigger expense (time and money) there than you do producing an electronically-based RnB-type song.

Is it a side-effect of the whole women-aren't-into-technology thing? Although the kit and the software are more affordable than ever, you still have to be comfortable learning to set up and use your home studio (in whatever form it takes). Is this a barrier to adoption? My personal experience is that the women who I've worked with (musically) are just not interested in the technical side of things at all. They want to play/sing/drum and really couldn't give a monkeys about the kit beyond what's actually in their hands; but that's just my experience and, to quote Dr Goldacre, the plural of anecdote is not data.

So let's get some data.
Below are two graphs from the billboard top 100 singles and albums tracked (somewhat unscientifically) by the 5 categories shown in the legend. Apologies for the lack of a labelled x-axis, I am bolloxed if I can get this to work on the new version of excel.

Going from left to right takes you from the top 10 / 20 on the left to the bottom of the chart on the right. Sorry about that.

Singles:

Albums:

What this shows, I reckon, is that whilst female acts do have domination of the very top of the singles chart, as soon as you head further down the chart the male-domination that you see in the amateur scene comes back into play.

It's worth pointing out as well that a higher percentage of the female hits are by the same artist, Rihanna and Beyonce, for example, both having 4 singles in the top 100. There are very few male artists of groups with that kind of presence.

All of which reinforces my point that what we're seeing here is the effect of the industry backing a number of "bankers" in order to prop up their model without actually getting out and finding the new music that they purport to be supporting.

* For the record, yes, I am a bitter and twisted old person

What you don't have

Coincidence is a funny thing. I tend to read books and listen to music at the same time, and this frequently leads to some strange collaborations. Listening to REM's Life's Rich Pageant (particularly Begin the Begin) whilst reading Michael Scott Rohan's Winter of the World series leads to all kinds of re-inforced messages.
The most extreme example was several years ago, whilst listening to The Yearning by Things of Stone & Wood and reading a book by David Gemmell (I forget which), I read the words "the shadow of death" at exactly the same time as they came over the speakers. It took me a moment to work out exactly what had happened as my initial perception had been that these words had suddenly acquired more weight.
It'd be enough to make you nervous, if you were superstitious, easy led and very nearly dead.

Just this morning I was listening to the excellent Meursault album All Creatures Will Make Merry  whilst finishing off Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science.
I heartily recommend both of them.
But as I was reading the good doctor's final pages he produced a quote from The Economist along the lines of "the true cost of something is what you have to give up to get it".
At about the same time from the stereo came "It's not about what you don't have, it's how little you're given and how far you can run with it".

Coming, as they did, so close together they struck me as quite profound.

I'm not going anywhere with this blog by the way, it just occurred to me, that's all.

But I guess it does give you a bit of an idea why people are so precious about children, after all, what you've given up to get there is incredible.

On a completely unrelated note, I've fished the REM album out for a listen this afternoon and, in looking up the link above, have just lost about half an hour reading interesting stuff about the band.
The internet is still eating my life.

Dopamine rush (or How the web turned me from a creator into a consumer)

I've not been playing as much music over that last few months, nor have I been taking as much exercise.
Most of my sporting pleasures are outdoors and it's been cold and wet, I've been doing some long hours at work and some disappointing news on the music front has taken some of my initiative from there.
So I've told myself.
And it's horseshit.

Some people come home from work and put the TV on, it then stays on until they go to bed.
Not being a TV watcher for the most part* I've always been a little bit smug and superior about the stuff I did instead: read books, news websites, exercised, played music yadda yadda yadda.
Pride cometh before a fall.

The reason that my excuses for not creating more music or getting properly fit are horseshit is because I've been doing much the same as the TV couch potatoes but with my own personal drug of choice.
The web.

I was joking with a friend yesterday about not being able to go to bed because I hadn't finished reading the internet yet and it reminded me of a study a saw recently (can't remember where I'm afraid, you'll come to understand why) that said some people get a dopamine hit from learning new things or acquiring knowledge.
And this has been my drug of choice. I've not been sat in front of the TV because I've been sat in front of my PC.
For hours at at time.
You could argue (and I certainly did to myself) that it's not like I've been sat here watching prat-falls on youtube or vegging out playing farmville on facebook, I've been reading a fair number of web comics true, but mostly I've been reading news or current affairs comment sites. Getting my little hits of knowledge.
But am I really learning anything? Or am I just filtering articles and stories to provide data that supports my already-held views?

So today I did an experiment and chalked up a tally of websites I've visited this evening:
38 webcomics
68 news articles or fact-based blog entries
4 comment runs off those blogs
15 other sites (webmail, facebook, house-hunting stuff)
And am I any smarter than I was yesterday?
Nope.

So, it's time to cut down. It's tempting to cut off entirely (because I find it easier to stop doing something than to limit doing something) but I don't read a newspaper and I don't watch the TV and there's only so ignorant I'm willing to be.
So cutting down it is.
Maybe I'll get back to creating some content rather than just consuming it.**


* Ironically there's a tv series on at the moment called How TV Ruined Your Life which sounds really interesting.
** You'll note that the alternative title still puts me as a passive actor in this, I'm aware that the web has done nothing to me, it's how I've chosen to use the web, but I thought it read better as a title.

Russia Today, really? Apparently so.

I was surprised to find myself watching Russia Today this morning. The BBC was just looking at Conservative conference and we were scanning through the other news channels. Turns out Russia Today (presented in English by Americans) is available on freeview.
How odd.
I was even further surprised to find one of their interviewees talking about how stations like Al Jazeera and the like were climbing up the ratings channels compared to CBS / Fox etc.
His theory was that the previously established players had become so ingrained in the rest of the establishment that they were no longer producing news, they were dressing up opinion and marketing it. Increasingly people are trying to get away from this and find outlets that were focussed on the facts not the spin.
This is not a particularly new idea, I've been reading multiple news sources for a while now to try and get a balanced view, but today the media has helped me out by providing the perfect example, two headlines covering the same story:
From the Telegraph:

HSBC reveals plans to quit London for Hong Kong

From the BBC:

HSBC says talk of moving HQ to Hong Kong 'presumptuous'

The opening paragraphs of each article go even further in their disagreement.

It's getting increasingly difficult to find that balance.

Whether Russia Today and Al Jazeera are suitable examples of News-not-opinion media houses I will leave to your imagination but you can't help but wonder how many people would tune back into a news organisation that actually focussed on researched news and journalistic integrity rather than celebrities and ratings?