The world is changing and if you work in the music industry, the business seems to be in troubling since you first got in 20 years ago. Every time you say "New Media" you feel guilty because you know it belonged in the 90s along with "Globalization" and Vanilla Ice. We have built an entire business out of extremely intricate system of copyrights that even we do not know what actually is what. You call it a Mechanical Fee, I'm trying to do Mechanical Free.
Why? It's simple. It's called a distributed ledger and NOT being an expert in technology , I translate it to "shut up dude, stop trippin, your shit is safe, focus on living". That sounds like a pretty good idea to anyone who is in the content business. No more waiting for an email reply if you can clear this right when you have no idea if the idea that you are being is the wrong choice of sale.
The word "blockchain" is the beginning of space age governance and it will do wonderful things for the future of everything. It definitely will accelerate the monetization of IOT products to come and it has the potential to solve legacy problems left from the Industrial Age. The idea of a distributed network is the birth of a new digital socialism that bear the hallmarks to a new order of uniformity. It does not hold emotions but provides a kind of trust that is shared among all.
After leaving the music business and joining....the music business, I had to hastily relook the way I viewed content. By any form of definition, content is infinite. It is created out of ideas, speech and interaction. From a movie to a live stream, a book to a blog, a song to a video, because they have been through some form of amalgamation from more than a decade of YouTubing, the amount of content can be presumed infinite. So no, your shit will not always be the hottest and just like a casino, the house always wins.
If you know how to make consumer content then starting thinking of every idea or piece of content you produce as a digital property. In other words, make an imaginary ledger of assets you are amassing. If you are a producer, you need to back all your music up and back those back up hard drives up because one day in the near future, you will be registering for title deeds on each one of them. Yeah, I know what you're thinking : Copyright. Right...and wrong. Copyright requires a large degree of manual administration to ensure the integrity of transactions. However, a blockchain solves that ineffectiveness with code, cryptography and more code. When governance is distributed across this network, it allows a new form of ethics and economy to emerge.
Let's imagine a scenario - a distributed network for musicians, creating a new financial system where people can choose to trade services for cash or share ownership knowing there is an agreed consensus and protocol underlying every transaction void of human bias and greed. These institutions of the past will have decreasingly less spending power because com
A music producer can work off his laptop by engaging with other producers and collaborating freely under agreed terms. Every transaction that occurs is safely honored. This means you can travel freely discover new inspirations, chase previously unavailable dreams and monetize all your work without intermediaries take percentage points off you that do not resemble transaction fees but profit sharing with you responsible for generating the profits.
Hold on to that content. Let generations mature and the next decade will bring about a content rush. The ridiculous inflated amount of money Chinese businesses are spending on content make me worry that content or IP (Intellectual Property) is a creating a bubble of over expectations.
Demand for content is not linear. A large population is more likely to resonate with a small proportion of content. One way of looking at content described by Derek Thompson in Hitmakers is The Bose Einstein Distribution. If you look at the chart below it basically says - people tend to gather around popular things. It's a safe bet. Low risk entertainment.
If
That is what we need to look out for - the birth of "low risk entertainment". Consumers and creators are all human and the main difference between the former and latter is simply sentimental value. When a piece of content allows for both parties to share that, you have a hit. This now rewrites the whole rules of the game. Yes, I enjoy a big budget Christopher Nolan movie about saving brave soldiers off a beach in France but I also equally enjoyed watching crusty old YouTube documentaries about this historical incident.
Here's something to think about:
- Stop thinking "Fee" think "Free"
- "Free" is your minimum viable product
- Scale the awareness and acceptance of your product
- Figure out how to monetize when 1, 2, 3 are achieved preferably in 1/10 the time