The New Flatness

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.

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?

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.

YouTube made it simple for the a la carte video watcher.

Its interesting that the BEST clips from TV shows or movies can be found there. Forget all the other stuff no one cares about. The user is so in control that she is essentially telling the content creator what is favored and what is not when she puts choice clips on YouTube.

NBC is getting smart.

Doing business with something as powerful as YouTube is the best move.

It makes sense that TV networks are adopting this easier and quicker than the music business has because TV is an ad based business model. YouTube can easily facilitate that.

The revenue stream for the music business comes from CD sales…or at least they want it to.

How can music be part of an ad based model?

Advertising creates a huge platform to work from.

How can the music business wrap its content with advertising. Its a much better, and easier way to pay the content creators.

To shareholders of major labels it makes the most sense to turn to ad revenue as the primary source of income.

More revenue=happy shareholders=an environment to create

Music giants bid over each other in what looks to be even more consolidating of the industry.  Its gonna be down to three major music entities trying to decide what is worth marketing to you and I.

Analysts on the street say “the combined entity could generate $200 million to $300 million in additional cash flow by laying off employees and reducing the number of artists…”

Rupert Murdoch had the forsight.

He made the decision to aquire what is obviously a power player in this new media landscape.

If other industries haven’t been making moves to cement themselves in this wave of new media innovation then…well.

Why the music business needs to realize that traditional distribution doesn’t exist anymore.

There are many better ways to make decisions on what music to buy than by listening to what the industry tells you to buy.

A lot of the time you don’t even have to buy it. Musicians today are giving away their music. To build something in this new world you have to dive in head first. Its hard to build when too much time is spent worrying.