The New Flatness

MySpace and Co. seem to have a vision as to where they want MySpace to be in the future.  Instead of just using the site as is, they are pushing the evolution of the social network.  Asking questions like what else can we do with this dense group of people besides just integrating paid search?  After only aquiring MySpace nine months ago it is good to see them making steps to continually evolve and change the service.

Thats what it is all about today.  Changing quickly and frequently.

Always look for the next space to push into.  FIM is doing just that with new ventures like Fox Atomic that I mentioned in my last post.
MySpace used music to create a user base and a social group that grows based initially on musical tastes.  That is what other purly music based services need to be concious of.  Music recomendation sites like Pandora, Mog and many others should think about something.

Why not use their users and join them to another service.

For instance; join GarageBand a music discovery service with a service like Dodgeball.

Push music discovery into an unlikely space.

Did you see Rupert?  Charlie always asks the right questions.  The interview was not ALL about MySpace but it was a big part of it.

Something that Rupert said resonated with me.  “Content is everything and…the focus must be on making it better than ever.”

With all the great and amazing things that are happening right now with the way you and I are aquiring our content; the content itself has to be better than ever.

No longer are the days where content is made for the majority.  It has to be built for everyone.  It has to have the ability to be customized for everyone’s world.

Rupert also developed Foxatomic.  Its a part of Fox that developes content just for 17-24 men.  The site so far has multiple partners including Jupcut which is a online video editing and publishing service.  This is the future…content provision has to be deep for customers to be loyal.

There has been a lot of talk about LisaNova…sure you’ve seen her around.

This is the state of things now. Its possible to have your material see and heard by everyone…everyone knows this. …although Mark thinks its boring.
I can’t help but think what it would have been like if these tools were available when Speilberg was making his war movies as a kid in his backyard.

What would that have been like? Were the internet availble then would it have made Speilberg, or someone that good, into something that he isn’t today?

Doubt it.

Even though there is the potential with the internet to break down walls of distribution and access, people still have to make the right decisions. The internet doesn’t help you make the right decisions.

When I say “right decisions” I’m talking about the question that Lisa must be asking of herself “now I have 75,000 views of my movie, now what do I do?” The best answer is to probably just keep on making the best content in the same manner. But the goal is to move forward and become a bit more than someone who posts funny movies on YouTube right!?
Here is the problem: How do you grow and continue to reach more and more people with progressively better quality content but do all of that without the help of old media concepts.

Brains always trumps technology.

I have yet to see a super star come from the likes of YouTube, MySpace etc. It’s possible and its going to happen. BUT, you gotta be smart, you gotta know how to do it, you gotta have a plan, you gotta know what you’re trying to do, you gotta know how to envision the end result, you gotta keep it goin’.

Thinking about the importance of being in a niche.

Reading this article by Chris Anderson got me thinking more about niches and the importance of catering to “a” or hopefully “your” niche.   When its broken down, a niche is where you have to start when trying to bootstrap any situation.  Think about your favorite band or your favorite entertainer, musician, artist and then research how they’ve gotten to where they are.  The level of “where they are” may be megastardom or it may be a smaller but one thing that I can bet is that they’ve found a niche for themselves and they have spent their careers working hard to cater to that niche.

The essence of what I’m getting at is that in the entertainment world; anyone that has the goal of longevity needs to start with a few people and a core audience.  For any sort of longevity it needs to start there.  Trying to appeal to the masses from the enception of an artist or band does not and will not evolve into longevity or timelessness.  If you are trying to reach big goals then pay attention to who you’re appealing to and who your audience is not to who YOU want to appeal to or what YOU want your audience to be.  Its not about you, its about everyone else.

A few examples come to my mind.  One is Utada Hikaru and she is a pop singer in Japan.  Now, Hikaru is not like anyone else in Japan.  Her music is original and unique but still concidered pop.  Some would say she invented what is called j pop today AND you can tell that she doesn’t pay much attention to musical trends in a way that most people do by copying them.  By doing this, and staying true to what she thinks and believes with regards to her musical vision, she created a niche for herself and fans gravitated towards her.  Seven or eight years later she is the biggest thing in Japan ever.  Trying to copy someone else’s niche doesn’t lead anywhere.  Do what your vision is and work hard at finding a niche for that vision to live. Don’t let anyone hold it back.

I’ll save “finding that niche” for another post.

I was talking to my brother the graphic designer many months ago about advertising and how powerful it would be if a “new” way of advertising was developed. One that didn’t work in the classic manner of shoving a pitch to as many random eyeballs as possible.

PayPerPost is here. This is what I’m talking about. A lot of people seem to be shunning the concept. One of the things that stands out on the surface to me is that it enables more people with more products and services to reach more people. How can anyone think that when there is so much positive stuff to had from it…like lots of money. I know why. Because no one likes the feeling that they are being duped which is what can happen when reading a blog post that may have been written just for money and not for the just out of belief of what they are writting. A lot of the time the best ideas feel strange at first.

This concept goes for all sorts of content as well…video and music. Fred Wilson has a good post on the issue of content providers making it difficult for the consumer to consume.

Creators of the products and content aren’t going to have a free-for-all though. They will still need the dough to pay the bloggers, and the more ya got the more people are going to read about your product/service. The important thing is that this is just a better, more effecient and more effective way of advertising.

Does this mean we’re going to see the rise of the rich blogger?

The importance of creating a web presence today is huge.

Parents, don’t let your kids grow up to be nobodies on the web.

Kids are living on the web in ways that are becoming more and more intricate and they are going to continue to live on the web more when they grow up.

It is important to have an identity on the web beyond a myspace profile. Although that is a start, it is only a start.  The future will bring much more conversation and collaboration over the internet.
So instead of parents being scared of sites like myspace where lots of specific information about an individual is revealed to the world, parents need to understand that this isn’t going away. It is only going to get richer and richer in the amount of deep content about people is available to the world. The best way to deal with this is to learn how to create a presence that is designed to last a lifetime…not block it.

What happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas anymore.

France is making some headway on the law to end DRM usage.

Their disagreement with DRM is a very valid point. In the physical world its the same as having proprietary CD players.

It is going to take time for creators and consumers to figure out how digital rights management is going to work best and most effeciently simply because it is totally different than the way things work in the physical world.
When the industry moved from tapes to CDs everyone had to reinvest in their collection and buy their music catalog again. This is what is still happening with DRM. Michael Roberts has good post that got me thinking. Material that is sold with a DRM is not what it seems.

Technology sped things up so much that formats can change so fast. So really what is happening is that the music player is changing again and again with every new DRM technology that comes out. What this is is the industry trying to incorporate old media practices into this new media environment. Even Apple, a unusually forward thinking company, is stuck in this old ideal. I think they are actually smarter than that…they are more concerned with selling the iPod music player than selling music. Selling music doesn’t make Apple any money but selling iPods sure does. So while Apple is being hailed as the saviour of the business it is only indirectly this.

The big picture issue is this…how to monetize, track, and retrieve digital files on the internet without being trapped in the old model where something physical, (CDs) is sold to be used on another physical something (CD player). We’ve become so accustomed to buying CDs and playing them in our CD players that that is how we expect it to work with digital files. The internet is open. Those proprietary walls don’t have to exist on the internet. By using DRM on music a wall is being put up between the creator and the consumer. These are the things that innovators need to be aware of.