- By tom
- In CEO, Social Media, conferences, marketing
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I had a great time today down in Austin, Texas. My panel on Digital Distruption, the first one of the day, included executives from Disney, Sports Illustrated, Electronic Arts and the Houston Rockets. The other three panels focused on ticketing, entrepreneurship and social media.
Red McCombs (a remarkable entrepreneur after whom the business school is named) shared a bunch of colorful stories culled from his long and successful experience as an entrepreneur. Larry Martin of the MBA talked about a couple of particularly interesting startups, including Groupon. Derek Palmer of Tickets.com, spoke about being agnostic about who sells the tickets.
Barry Khan of Qcue, a pioneer in dynamic pricing and Russ Stanley of the San Francisco Giants discussed their test of dynamic pricing with just 2,000 of the SF Giants’ seats. The test was so successful that the project will be expanded next year to include all 40,000 of the available seats.
On the entrepreneur panel, Randy Cohen of Ticket City; Bart Knaggs of Capital Sports & Entertainment; Greg Morrow of SportNet and Gary Hoover (Entrepreneur-in-Residence) shared stories and perspectives about what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Passion, passion and more passion. A tolerance for risk. A willingness to sell, sell, sell.
Throughout the conference, the impact of technology and social media was beginning to be apparent. Michael Feferman, from C3 Presents, led the social media panel, which included Jim Lutz of Pro Player Connect (in Nashville) who talked about Pro Player and also about Nimbit – direct artist-to-fan sales; Adam Miner of SportNet; Tommy Landry of RotoExperts; and Nicole Blum of Hashi Productions.
I heard a lot about the need for a deep understanding of analytics. It’s great that we’re able to collect the data, but if we don’t understand what that data means, it isn’t really very helpful. And even if we have the data and know what it means, if we don’t have a plan to execute – the desire and the capacity to take the appropriate actions based on what we have gleaned from the data – that really doesn’t help us much either.
- By tom
- In CEO, Social Media, blogs, technology
- Comments Comments
Back in 1993, when I was still a practicing lawyer, I went to lunch with a good friend of mine. He was the head of the Cable Television company, and my law firm represented his company. At the time everyone seemed to be preoccupied with the notion of 500 channels of TV, and he was troubled by this. During our lunch, he turned to me and said,
I had become heavily involved in computers, technology, online networks and the Internet. I thought I had an answer for him.
“Bob,” I said, “you don’t know where the content is going to come from because you’re too used to the model you’ve grown up with. You suppose that all that content has to be produced and polished.”
He looked at me, “Well, duh. What other model is there?
I thought I had a pretty good answer for him. “In the future,” I said, “much of that content will be created by the audience themselves. We’re going to create and consume our own content. Email is content. People will tell their own stories. Consumers themselves will generate the things that other people will want to read or watch.”
Now remember, this was before YouTube. It was before social networks. It was even before email and the web were in common use. Nobody was talking much about user generated content in those days. But the truth is, the elements were already there, the groundwork already in place, to precipitate a revolution.
When Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web and Marc Andreesen and his buddies at NCSA created Mozilla, the first really important graphical web browser, they laid the groundwork for an explosion, a big bang in the universe that is “content.” And ironically, from the moment that happened, content has ceased to be “king.” You remember the expression, of course. But “content is king” only when content is scarce, controlled and meted out. Today content is cheaper to create, cheaper to store, and cheaper to distribute than ever before. And there are many many more “producers” of content than there were in 1993. The world will never be the same.
All of this has an enormous impact on music and on the music business. There is more recorded music available today than ever before. Orders of magnitude more music. People listen to more music today than ever before in the history of the world. And increasingly, they’re distributing that music (sharing) and even creating it themselves.
Every copy of Apple’s OSX comes with a copy of Garage Band. Programs like Garage Band, Logic, Ableton Live, Cubase, Pro Tools, Reason, Sonar and others have made it possible for nearly anyone to record or compile “music” that may be completely original (and fall anywhere on the scale from sublime to unbearable) or utterly derivative. Artists have long been treating this vast collection of content as source material for the inspiration and support of their further creative efforts, including Grandmaster Flash, Dr. Dre, The Bastie Boys, Eminem, Moby, and a legion of artists with names that begin with “DJ” and end with pretty much any other word or expression you can imagine.
And the thing that amazes me most about all of this? That the transition from mere spectator to full participant hasn’t been more widely understood, embraced and appreciated. I’d like to introduce you to someone who does get it: Suzanne Lainson. Suzanne writes the blog “brands + music (bpm),” has some interesting things to say about this in the context of music. A week ago, some people from the music, tech and marketing/advertising space got together as part of the Jim Lewi inspired “First Thursday,” here in Boulder. Suzanne was among them, and during the course of our discussions, it became apparent that (a) she’s tired of hearing so many people in the industry say the same things over and over again, and (b) she has a different point of view about what needs to happen – a perspective I happen to share. Rather than steal her thunder, I invite you to read her most recent post, “Involving Music Fans at Many Levels” for yourself.
One of the things I particularly appreciate about Suzanne’s post: she wants to know what you think, and she asks you to respond. Instead of simply speaking her mind and leaving things at that, she has invited you to join in a conversation – precisely the thing she things needs to be happening in the music industry. And I can’t wait to read what you have to say.