Rough to Release - complete series

  Well, I've now completed my 'finish your damn song' blog series, complete with a full worked example at the end, and you can find the full series here:

https://roughtorelease.blogspot.com/2024/12/rough-to-release-index.html

I hope some of it is of use to some of you.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays all!

Flash Fiction - Blood Brothers

Because he was taller than us, broader than us, and stronger by far, they came with blades to cut him down.

Sometimes they came for all of us, sometimes for him alone.

But always he would rise, and we would rise with him, until they came again.

Once, they took him from us; plucked him from our midst and dragged him away. We were distraught, broken. We rose, but with heavy heart, leaderless, causeless and lost.

And then we heard he had returned. Of course we were sceptical at first. How could he do such a thing? But one sighting led to another, and then to many, and then, miraculously, he was among us, growing everyday, taller and stronger, until he towered over us again.

In time another rose. Not so broad, or so strong, but taller, sleeker, and more dynamic. The tiger to the bear some said, but I knew otherwise; they were brothers under the skin.

So when the blades came again, they stood apart but united, and we stood with them, and were cut down.

I tell you this now, looking through a haze of the fallen, I see him. He too is cut down, like the rest of us. I cannot see his brother, I have fallen the wrong way. But I know where he will lie: just over the crest, exactly where he took his stand.

We hear of a place where all grow tall and broad like these two. Stronger even, some say. Where they stand so thick and tight together that sometimes the blades are beaten back, and have to retreat and come again.

We don't have this strength, and we are not many, but we have our brothers, and they lead us still.

We are down, but we are not broken, and we will rise again.

The tale of two errant hairs on the otherwise balding scalp of a bearded man, as told by a baby-fine scalp hair.

Flash Fiction - Cake

"And then he gave me some cake."

"Sorry, what?"

"He gave me some cake. It was in a Tupperware in his bag. Said he'd been taking it in for his team at work but I might as well have it. To sort of say sorry I think. You know, for the inconvenience."

"I see. What happened then?"

"Well, he climbed over the fence and I stood there like a chump for a moment before getting back on and calling you lot."

"You didn't try and stop him?"

"What did you expect me to do? Wrestle him to the ground and throw him over my shoulder? He weren't a big guy but he's not much smaller than me.

"And he'd already made it pretty clear that he wasn't getting back on the train."

"How so?"

"Well, he said, "I'm not getting back on." But it was the way he said it. Like it wasn't up for debate. And he had a bit of a scary look in his eye."

"A scary look?"

"Yeah, sort of like he was on drugs but not really. Just that getting in his way wouldn't be a good idea. Look the guy who pulls the emergency stop on a train then just gets off and walks off into the countryside clearly has some issues, right? Besides which, he'd left track-side so I was hardly going to pull him back onto railway property was I?

"You'll have him on CCTV anyway right?"

"Probably, but you'd be surprised about how little help that is sometimes. Cameras are old, pictures are grainy and at the wrong angle, and we're looking for a normally-dressed, average-size, brown-haired Caucasian male carrying a laptop bag..."

"Yeah, sorry about that. I'd know him again if I saw him, but to describe him...? Well, he could be me or you or half the people who've walked past that window."

"Do you know where he got on?"

"Not a chance. With cancellations it was heaving on there, I never made it down the carriage."

"Okay, I understand. Thanks for your help. We'll be in touch if we get anything."

"Can I eat it?"

"What?"

"The cake; can I eat it? Well, share it with the team..."

"Yeah, go ahead, knock yourself out. What kind is it?"

"Banana and chocolate chip."

"Leave us a bit."

Flash Fiction - Walking

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I just didn't stop.

Standing here with my forehead pressed against the glass I wonder what would happen if the doors opened and I didn't get off, didn't go home, have my dinner, sink into the sofa, drag my lazy arse into bed, set the alarm to go through the whole rigmarole again tomorrow.

What if I stepped back, away from the doors, let the train pull my weary carcass the wrong way out of the station and north.

Not that you can go that far north. It's not that big an island. But that doesn't really matter. It's not about that. It's about what would happen if I got off where the train stopped and just kept walking.

I used to hand out catalogues in Amsterdam station; when you looked at the destinations scrolling up the board you couldn't escape the fact that you were at one edge of a continent. One train to Moscow, one more train to Vladivostok and you've crossed half the globe.

This train terminates in Middlesbrough. It's not quite the same. In fact it's a shithole. But you probably know that already.

We're not even moving. Waiting for a platform to become available apparently. Eleven bloody platforms at that station and I bet there's not ten other trains there when we get in.

What would happen if I got off in Middlesbrough and kept walking. Just kept going until I disappeared. Can you even disappear in this country? There's CCTV everywhere but it would take a while to find me on the cameras. They wouldn't be looking for me on Teeside. And in Leeds I'd be just another knackered, middle-aged office worker shuffling through the daily routine, one of thousands going through the grey commute. Tens of thousands maybe?

There must be some pretty empty areas of Northumbria where a man could disappear? Just walk out onto the moors, dig a hole, make a shelter, steal a sheep.

I've not even got a coat with me. I'd be dead in a week.

Maybe I should head south?

Pack a few different things in the rucksack tomorrow morning, head to the station as usual, then London, the south coast, a ferry, and then start walking?

Harder to find.

Warmer.

And it would mean I wasn't so tired I'm falling asleep standing up.

Empty the bank account.

Keep to the back roads and minor rail lines.

Head south, France, then Spain. I bet you can disappear there. No job. No rent. No jammed in like sardines for two hours a day in an overheated cigar tin. No fighting your way through the barriers because the machines don't work properly. No performance appraisals. No stretch targets. No desperate clinging on.

Just walk away.

Walk away.

Tomorrow.

And we're moving again.

Back into the station. Back into the routine. The rut. What did Nick say? "The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth."

Tomorrow.

Walk away.

Just walk away.

Just.

Walk.

Away.

Flash Fiction - The River

I've been dabbling in a bit of fiction writing over the last few years, very little has ever been worth even my re-reading but I've been working on a couple of things recently that might have slightly more to them. In the meantime I'm still putting words on the page just to get ideas out of my head so I can think about other stuff. 
For nothing more than curiousity's sake I've decided to start publishing these little bits of fiction (I think the term is "flash fiction") here. Feel free to comment or critique as you like.

The River

"Christ! Did you see that?"

"What?"

"Someone just fell in!"

"What? Where?"

"By the bridge." I jump to my feet, looking across the scattered groups of people, lounging and sunbathing in the early heat.

"Maybe they've gone for a swim?"

"Fully clothed?" No-one else seems to have noticed. I scan around for a life ring, I've seen one already, I'm sure. There! I start towards it.

"No! Steve, that one!" She gestures to one further down the bank, "The current's going that way."

I set off towards the farther ring. People have started shouting and I am properly sprinting across the grass, shouting "Excuse me!" as loud as I can as I cut round (and sometimes though) the groups of people.

Always polite though, very British.

Someone has already got the ring off the stand when I get there, an older chap I realise as he looks up; knows what he should be doing, but struggling to work up the nerve.

“I’ll go,” I say, pulling my shirt off, “tie it on.” I’m already barefoot, I dump my phone and wallet on my shirt (I feel guilty about that fraction of a second delay, but I promise you it’s really quick). Grabbing the ring, I take two running steps and jump in.

Is this what it feels like to be a hero?

I hit the water hard and nearly lose the bloody ring. The drop is further than it looks but I snag the thin blue rope and start to swim out.

Fuck. I’m already being carried downstream, fast. The current is way stronger than I thought and how the hell are you supposed to swim with one of these things anyway? I wrap the rope around my arm and surge into the river.

I can’t see shit.

I look over my shoulder and she’s moving down the bank pointing. I’m already fifty metres downstream from where I jumped in. She’s on the tow path now, shouting at the old guy to untie the ring. It’s a good thing that she’s got the brains.

Change of plan, no point fighting this current, just cut across and try and intercept.

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! The rope’s still tied on and now it’s hooked round my leg as well as my arm. A mouthful of water going down the wrong way. Coughing, spluttering, head going under again, rising sense of panic.

No. This is what it feels like to be a hero.

Released! The rope’s been untied. I roll onto my back and spew half-a-lungful of water out.

She’s still pointing where to go and I am unbelievably relieved to see the end of the rope in her hand.

Swim, check, swim, check, swim, check. I must be most of the way across? Why couldn’t the stupid bastard have fallen in on our side?

Suddenly her hands fly to her mouth and she’s not pointing any more. Must have gone under. I try to put on a spurt then check back. She’s pointing again, jumping up and down with frantic energy. Jabbing, not pointing now, I must be really close. I kick upwards as hard as I can to see further and catch a flash of something pale, something that might be an arm, as it disappears.

I’m tiring and desperate now and fling myself under the water, eyes wide, wide open.

There! Yellow t-shirt!

Grab. Slip. Grab. Slip. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Grab… got it.

Up, not far, gasping for breath. One arm through the ring, one under his armpits. He’s twitching thank fuck.

Suddenly I am surging through the water. Twisting, I can see that a bunch of people have taken the rope from her and there must be a dozen of them pulling me in. He’s slipping though, stupid bastards are pulling to fast and I’m struggling to hold him.

I kick and strain and heave and get my other arm down and under his arms; desperately I lock my fingers together, squeezing until my forearms are on fire.

There are people in the water now, taking the weight, untying the rope from my numb left arm.

She’s smiling at me and crying; I think I might be too.

A Manifesto for the Content Industry 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.*

Well here we are at the end and you’ll be relieved to know that this final entry will be very short.

The bottom line is that, as part of the content industry, your business exists to serve your customers.

If you choose to provide a service that is worse than the competition (be that legitimate or otherwise) then you can expect to lose customers.

If you choose to provide a service that excludes certain sections of your potential customer base then you can expect to lose customers.

If you choose to provide a product that is more restricted that that offered by the competition (legitimate or otherwise) you can expect to lose customers.

And finally, if you choose to treat your customers like criminals, and make them feel like criminals when they do support you, you can expect to lose customers.

But, as I’ve hopefully explained, you don’t have to choose to do any of these things…

* With reference to Red Dwarf: “Kryten: A superlative suggestion, sir, with just two minor flaws. One: we don't have any defensive shields. And two: we don't have any defensive shields. Now I realise that, technically speaking, that's only one flaw; but I thought it was such a big one, it was worth mentioning twice.”

A Manifesto for the Content Industry 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.

Let’s go back to the difference between middlemen and gatekeepers: What are you bringing to the table? If you’re adding something to the mix (distribution, promotion, technical expertise, access to fans / artists etc. etc.) then you’re a middleman. If all you’re doing is charging people to get to the table then you’re a gatekeeper and, let’s not beat around the bush, you’re doomed.

Before the advent of recorded media things were pretty simple. If you wanted to listen to some music you either played it yourself, went somewhere where someone would be playing it or (for the very rich) paid for someone to come to you and play it.

There were no movies of course, but the theatre was there and off you went.

The gatekeepers were just that, the men on the gate and, in some cases, the booking agents, but they were relatively few and far between. The middlemen were the tavern landlords, the ticket sellers and the folks who stuck up the bills.

With the advent of recorded media the game changed. Suddenly the option of bringing the entertainment to you existed for everyone, not just the very rich. But producing, distributing and advertising this content was expensive, very expensive. It also took a long time and required a lot of very specialist resource.

This meant there quickly became a clear divide between the amateurs and the industry-backed professionals, a divide that led to a massively successful set of industries for about 50-odd years and an ever expanding set of restrictions on what could be done with the output of these industries.

Towards the end of the last century, along with the rise of the personal electronics and the increasing availability of home computing, three things happened that started an inexorable change for these industries:

1) cheaper hardware and software brought media creation capability to the masses. Prices have continued to fall and quality has continued to rise to levels unimagined just twenty years previously. £1000 will buy you a brand new computer, the recording software, a solid-top acoustic guitar and a condenser microphone. With that you could record music that will surpass a lot of the stuff from some of the professional studios of the seventies and 80s.

2) The internet arrived and then, critically, morphed into web2.0, shifting from being yet-another-mass-media-distribution- channel to being a true many-to-many distribution mechanism for User Generated Content (UGC). In the music world sites like myspace (RIP), cdbaby, last FM, bandcamp, soundcloud, thesixtyone and many others sprang up to help artists distribute and advertise their work directly to fans. Amazon, Lulu and others are providing the same service for authors and crowd-funding tools like Kickstarter are offering aspiring film-makers and game designers (see 3) the chance to make this shift as well.

3) Computer games and consoles made the shift from the arcade and nerdiness to the front room and mainstream acceptance. In a world where digital content is effectively infinitely abundant, disposable income is still depressingly finite. The music, movie and publishing industries have been forced to adapt to a new competitor for these entertainment dollars and, in general, it’s a competitor that is born of the digital revolution and is reacting to the changing world more quickly and more profitably.

Content will always be produced, fans will always exist but the gates are going or, in some places, have gone entirely. There will always be a place for those who can add value to the connection between fan and creator, but if your business model exists solely to stand at the gate demanding admission then your ex-customer will just walk over the ruins of the walls around you.

Or, to go back to the original metaphor, the gravy train has stopped at the buffers, the passengers and artists have disembarked and are mingling on the platforms planning new journeys on new trains, cars, planes, bicycles and everything else under the sun. How long are you going to sit in the carriage waiting for them to come back?

A Manifesto for the content industry 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. 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.

This will be a short entry because it’s really just simple economics (even if it’s frequently missed by a great number of corporations who should know better).

Point 1: Once something is on the web it is effectively available everywhere. Sure you can try blocking things by regions and this will work for casual users and non-techy folks* but these things are easy to work around.
Point 2: Your unit cost is effectively zero**, everyone understands this, your unit price will have to be close to that for people to feel that they’re not being ripped off.
“Close to zero” is a variable though. In Western Europe or North America you can just about get away with 99c (or 99p) being “close to zero”. In the Far East, Eastern Europe, Russia, India and other areas of Asia, South America, anywhere in Africa, 99c gets ever further away from “close to zero” and ever closer to “a day’s wage”.
People will not pay a day’s wage for a digital entertainment file.

If you price your product that way then you can expect a high proportion of piracy in those countries. So you have two options: local pricing or acceptance that that market is not going to provide you with any income from digital downloads***.
However if you go for local pricing we get back to this “global market” thing. I have a friend who buys all his MP3s from a Russian site. It’s all completely legit (as far as he’s aware), but only a 10 th of the price. No laws broken, no copyright infringed, 1/10th the outlay.

But maybe 10 times the risk?
I’ve never used this site for two reasons:
1) I’m not comfortable giving my credit card details to a Russian website.
2) I’m not convinced that any of that money will ever make it back to the original artist.

And those two reasons mean a business opportunity still exists.
Let’s face it, a lot of the countries that have the lowest standards of living are also rife with corruption, if you run a trusted, 1st world web-company then that alone will be reason for some people to buy (see Amazon and iTunes for examples).
Secondly the success of things like Kickstarter, NoiseTrade and Bandcamp shows that there are a lot of customers out there who want to support the artist.
If you can facilitate that, show that you’re helping to get that content made, and provide a trustworthy service, then there’s a place for you.

* Warning, non-techy folks are a decreasing proportion of the population, building your business model on them is not a long-term strategy.
** I know that there are hosting and management costs for large businesses, but those large businesses are shifting lots of units.
*** It could still provide you with income from other channels though, don’t write it off.

Little help here please

I'm going to try and do a bit of an experiment in making my music available for wider use. You can already download the songs on a pay what you want basis, but that's not what I'm thinking about.
My plan is to make all the original multitracks for those songs available.
I have three challenges to this though:

1) the sheer amount of time it's going to take me to upload 55Gb of 88.2 24bit files.

2) Choosing where it should be uploaded to. I'm thinking a torrent site but with the pirate bay now being blocked in the UK (and not being particularly techy and not knowing how to get around that)  the obvious target has gone.

3) Getting word out that it's there. Back to the old obscurity problem.

Now obviously no-one can help me on the first one, but any advice or suggestions on the second two would be greatly welcomed.

Thanks

A Manifesto for the content Industry 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.

The entertainment industry is an aspirational business. I don’t know how many applicants you get for even the most minor role but I’ll bet the glamour of either the music of movie industries pull in a bunch more candidates than the equivalent roles in engineering or finance.

Journalism and writing are also aspirational jobs. Pretty much any industry where you’re paid to express yourself (or facilitate that expression) is going to be an attractive one to a lot of people.

Which is why seeing articles like this one is a bit depressing: Sky News clamps down on Twitter use

Basically, in implementing this ruling, each of their individual twitter feeds became less valuable. In fact, you might as well cancel the individual feeds and just link to the website.

If we go back to our old techdirt equation of Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy = $$$, this appears to be a clear case where the institutional instruction is reducing both of those factors; by restricting people to only tweeting about their field it makes it harder to make a connection with readers (fans) and by forcing everything through the central news desk it slows down the transmission of information and potentially reduces the value of their feed (reason to buy).

In a market where the legacy players are fighting to preserve both their reputations and their relevance the expertise of their staff remains one of their most powerful weapons. Restricting access to that expertise (or vice versa) undermines the business.

The entertainment industries in particular are suffering something of a crisis of perception as much as anything, contempt for the inherent imbalance in current copyright law, and the continued head-in-the-sand behaviour of the lobbying groups has meant that “the industry” is widely seen as “the bad guy”. Actually engaging with those disenfranchised fans (rather than suing them) is going to be necessary to rebuild the industries’ reputations* and the people on the ground are the ones to do this – not the CEOs or heads of the lobbying groups. Why? Because of Stephenson’s sixth law**:

I’ve recently discovered a blog run by a bunch of creators*** (mostly musicians) who appear to be trying to do something around that connecting with fans and, judging by some of the comments, they appear to be having some degree of success in terms of persuading people. Unfortunately they also appear to be trying to approach the whole debate from a moral standpoint (ignoring the underlying economics is rarely a good idea) and also by thinking of things in terms of a zero-sum game – they seem to be trying to attack pretty much every web-based service as not-paying-as-well-as-the-old-model rather than paying-better-than-nothing.

Additionally some of their writers have a tendency to embark on aggressive, expletive-fuelled rants about the people they’re trying to win over, which doesn’t seem a particularly good strategy.

But anyway, it’s a good example of trying to free up your people and helping them connect with their current & potential future fans – and they’re getting a lot of hits on their articles.

So whilst I may disagree with a lot of what they say, it’s a prime example of getting your message across without falling foul of the sixth law.

* Assuming that the industries update the rest of their business models as well. White-wash won’t work.

** This, of course, has absolutely no data to support it at all.

*** I’m told that there’s a rumour (could I be less specific?) that this site is in fact supported entirely by a major music label and is what is known as an “Astro-turfing” site, but I have seen no evidence on this and it’s largely irrelevant for the purposes of this instalment.

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 - 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.

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.

A Manifesto for the Content Industry – 5. Add Value.

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?

Now you’d think that this would be a pretty redundant article, after all, why would you be involved in a process if you weren’t adding value to it? Sadly large parts of the content industry have drifted a long way from this position.

At this stage it’s probably important to take a look at the content industry and the difference between middlemen and gatekeepers because, I think, you have fundamental difference in what they add to the artist-customer relationship. At least, this is the terminology I’m using so I’ll set out the distinction here:

A middleman is someone* who facilitates either the production of the work or the interaction between customers and creators.

A gatekeeper is someone* who restricts access to content until some kind of fee is paid.

Frequently a company can be both of these things. A record label may provide the upfront fees for a producer or session musicians, but then block the release of material via a non-traditional medium.

Frequently a company or organisation is supposed to be the former but ends up being the latter.

With the rapid improvement of consumer electronics and multitude of distribution options now available to anyone it might seem like the opportunities for a middleman to add value have disappeared. I’d argue that this is fundamentally untrue and there is still massive value that can be provided by the major players. A few obvious areas and examples are:

            Publishing: In a market that is still dominated by physical objects, distribution is key, and once your product is in the shop it needs to be visible on the shelf. You could try doing that as a self-published artist but good luck...

            Music: The difference that a good producer can make to a recording is probably analogous to the value that a good editor adds to an author, and it’s no real surprise that almost every novel you read will have the editor listed for thanks in the opening pages.

            Movies: unlike either writing or music, making movies is expensive. There’s no getting round the fact that even a budget production will probably cost you tens of thousands of dollars. And then you’ve got to find somewhere to show your film…

I could go on and talk about publicity and opinion makers and all kinds of other things, but however you look at it there is still a huge part that the established industries can play.

Unfortunately a lot of these companies seem to have decided that every interaction should also be a transaction and the only value that matters is shareholder value.

Hence they have become gatekeepers.

Where a middleman adds value to both the customer and the creator, a gatekeeper does the opposite by trying to drive a fee out of every interaction between the two. This might appear by way of a simple restriction of content (separating the customer from the creator) on you-tube “This video is not available to view in your country” – Sorry what? I’ve googled the official video for the new single and I can’t watch it for another 6 weeks because I don’t live in the US? Or by putting DRM on a video game (reducing the value) so that you can only play it if you’re connected to the web – Sorry what? I bought a single player game that I want to play on my laptop as I do my daily train commute, now I discover I can’t do that? Or a combination of the two, for example, by delaying the release of a series box-set on DVD so that advertising can be maximised via re-runs on a secondary channel – Sorry what? This was released in the US 6 months ago but I still can’t buy the box set and watch it at my convenience because you have a re-run on Sky-Atlantic.**

So to go back to our opening paragraph, one of the biggest challenges to any creator is getting their product seen/heard/read, and there’s so much good stuff out there it’s hard for the customer to find the great stuff. Connecting those two dots is value add.

Looking at the same situation from a different perspective, there’s a lot of good stuff out there that just needs a little bit of polish to really stand out. The aspiring film-maker in Spielberg’s Super 8 keeps going on about production values as a means to make his film standout in the upcoming competition and the principle holds in other fields as well***. Taking something from a “gifted-amateur” feel to a “professional-product” feel is value add.

Essentially it comes down to the title point; if you’re in the supply chain you should be adding value.

* Or a company

** Interestingly in almost all of these cases you'll be able to find an unauthorised copy for free with none of the restrictions. But try telling the respective industries that their behaviour is driving piracy...

*** Having recently listened to the first album by The National it sounds like a demo-tape for their later stuff; the talent and skill are there but the production values are in the “gifted-amateur” range compared to their more recent output.

Pay What You Think It’s Worth (or Free Market Economics).

Over on my Other Blog I’m and musician so, since I’ve been harping on for a while about alternative business models for musicians and how the biggest challenge for an amateur musician is not piracy but publicity, I’ve now decided to put my money where my mouth is and try one of these alternative models for myself.

For a long time the gatekeepers of content have tried to force the prices of digital content to match that of physical copies but it just doesn’t make sense. So what is the correct price for a download? Well, I guess it’s what the market decides is the right price. You’re the market, this is a chance to help decide.

So as of today all our music downloads are available on a Pay What You Think It’s Worth* basis (including “Free”) from our Bandcamp site**.

Personally I’d rather that more people heard and enjoyed our music than that we extract every penny from anyone who might like it. So please feel free to pass this on to anyone who you think might enjoy it (in fact, please please do that!) or anyone who writes / talks about music and the music business and might be interested in the experiment.

I put “Free” in inverted commas because if you go for Free then I’m going to ask you for an e-mail address and add you to my distribution list. You can opt out at any time and I don’t e-mail much stuff out anyway, I reckon that’s a fair trade.

N.B. the physical cds remain at fixed prices I’m afraid, because they cost a fixed amount to produce and I have costs to recover. If you download the stuff and then decide that you’d like one of the CDs (plenty of EPs left, a couple of handfuls of the Album) then I will happily knock off anything you decided to pay for the download.

Similarly if you’ve previously paid the full rate for the download and are now feeling ripped off (I really, really hope there aren’t many people in this category!) then drop me a line and we’ll see what we can sort out. I mean this, I’d hate for someone to be sitting there thinking that I’ve pulled a fast one on them.

* there is no good acronym for this.

** I’m working on setting up the same mechanism on other platforms.

 

A Manifesto for the content industry – 2. One shared file does not equal one sale lost

It appears that I have published chapters one and three but omitted chapter 2. My apologies, please accept this correction...

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.

Whenever you hear or see stats being bandied around by the content industry, this is the principle on which they base their calculations; that each unlawfully shared file* represents one lost sale.

This is the biggie for the music industry but it’s increasingly being misunderstood by the movie business as well so let’s look at various reasons why this might be the case.

Firstly you have your hard-core never-pay-a-penny file-sharers. These are the ones who think that the labels have been sticking it to them so long that they somehow owe someone something so try to stick it back by never buying anything that they can get for free. These are your lost sales. But arguably, since they wouldn’t buy your product anyway (so they claim), which sale has been lost?

Anyway, assuming that the die-hards above are all bluff and would really be out there buying records if that pesky internet would just go away, why else would one shared file not equal one lost sale?

Here’s a few reasons:

1.  I’ve heard the single but I like this band and I’m going to buy the album when it comes out anyway, why would I pay twice for the single?
2.  I already own the song on an earlier format, I could go through the hassle of rigging up my record deck and copying it across but that’s illegal too and more hassle than just downloading a copy.
3. I would happily buy a copy of this but because it's an old song / movie you no longer sell it. How can I buy something you're not selling?
4. I’m not sure if I like it. I’ve heard it on the radio but I need a couple more listens to determine if I want to buy it. Try before buy marketing
5. It’s not worth the cash. Now that cash might only 79p**, but when you’re talking about something with a unit cost of zero, that’s still a value judgement. I have a copy of William Shatner’s Rocket Man on cassette, I think it’s a pretty funny listen, but I’d never pay money for it, it’s just not worth it. Similarly I have old mix-tapes from the radio with various chart tunes on, if they turn up as a free download or magazine-cover cd then I’ll take a copy, but it’s not worth paying to replace them.
6. Because it’s not being offered in the format that the consumer wants. Some bands / labels are rejecting the MP3 format altogether and only releasing things on hard copy. An increasing number of people are ditching hard copies altogether and moving everything to a digital file. If you’re not selling what I want to buy it’s not a lost sale.

And that’s not even considering the fact that some of the Industry numbers are counting shared playlists on social media sites (like Spotify) as shared files.

But in summary yes, some of those shared files are lost sales, but it’s not even close to all of them. Using statistics based on this premise undermines the argument and the public’s trust in the content industry.

* Including Format Shifting.

** On a separate note, can anyone justify the increase in cost of downloads when the technology and storage costs are only coming down?

A Manifesto for the content industry – 3. Content will always be produced and consumed with or without you.

Continuing from my previous blogs on this subject.

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.

At this point it’s probably worth my iterating exactly who this manifesto is aimed at; content creators and major Intellectual Property (IP) rights holders are rarely one and the same. It varies greatly by media type but at one end you have the publishing industry (where a lot of authors maintain the copyright on their text) and at the other you have the music industry (where hardly any artists signed to major labels (or their subsidiaries) have any rights on their creation).

This manifesto is aimed at the rights holders; this entry in particular is aimed at those towards the music industry end of the continuum.

A common argument proposed by copyright supporters is that without our ever-increasing copyright terms (and ever-increasing lawsuits) there would be no incentive to create. Who, they argue, would go to all the trouble of taking an idea all the way through to a product if there was no return at the end of it? Surely no-one will go through all that effort and expense if there was no guarantee or a return?

It has been famously said that the business of the music business is business not music (by Billy Joel I believe) and the idea that people create something for a return on that is plainly a business-led idea not a creativity-led idea.

As has been pointed out previously, for hundreds of years artists have starved in obscurity, then, for a brief period in the last 50-years or so, some artists became very, very rich. The bit that tends to be forgotten is just how small a percentage of artists (particularly in the music business) actually become successful. On average, thanks to some interesting record label accounting*, fewer than 1 in 10 albums ever recoups (i.e. makes a profit for the recording artist). And bear in mind, that’s the figure for signed acts, it takes no account of all the people playing on the amateur scene.

So, extending the argument that people create for the return on copyright, in the period before the last fifty years and in the internet years there should have been very little content creation at all.

I have no idea of there was less content creation in the first half of the twentieth century or the second but it only takes a few minutes on Bandcamp, Facebook, Blogger, Youtube, Soundcloud, The Huffington Post (or any one of a myriad of other platforms out there) to see that there is a huge, huge amount of content being produced, the vast majority of which is never expected to make a financial return.

People will always create, frequently they will do so for nothing more than their own personal pleasure with no intent to share, sometimes they will want to share it with as many people as possible. What’s changed in the last decade is that this ability to share it widely has become available to everyone with a decent internet connection.

Couple that ability to share with ever decreasing costs for consumer electronics and what it means is that if you’re a content creator then your tools of the trade are getting cheaper and you’re closer than ever to the people who might want to consume your work.

If you’re a middleman, be it an aggregator, publisher, record label, movie studio, collection agency or any other part of the chain, then you are going to have to work ever harder to add value into the product lifecycle because creating has got easier and sharing has got easier.

Alternatively you could try lobbying, sadly that’s got easier too.

* See also Hollywood Accounting