I’m About To Get All Congruent On Your Ass
I just read a pretty useful article for bands and musicians by Bruce Warila: Are Your Ducks In Order?
Mine sure aren’t. But I’m getting there. Bruce’s post serves as a good little outline to help you get focused.
Side note in which I contradict myself for no good reason (and while talking about congruencey, no less):
I know the map is not the territory, but in his diagram (left), the incongruent tower looks a hell of a lot more interesting to me than the congruent one. Maybe that means something, maybe not. It’s just a diagram. As far as the reality of what he’s talking about in terms of business, I think he’s right, because if you think of these as actual structures, which one is going to hold up better, and longer? Life isn’t always about which concept diagram looks more interesting. Usually it is, but not always.
Music Strategy Guru of the Day :: Bruce Warila
I’ve been devouring the “unsprung wisdom” of newly discovered (by me) Bruce Warila this morning. I was impressed by his comments on the following post by Andrew Dubber, and happy was I to find that he has his own blog. He seems to know his shit and provides some good counter-insights to those of Andrew, who also seems to know his shit in these areas, so the plot has just thickened. The fact that they both make excellent arguments while disagreeing on several points is a great thing. I’m really thinking now. I’m reminded anew to stay on my toes and keep questioning when in comes to all these theories going around about the direction of music and the music industry.
It’s important that we as artists pay close attention to this stuff (that’s why I’m excited about this Bruce guy and passing it on to you), but also that, above all else, we trust our own instincts and rely on our own creativity. Nomatter how informed or expert someone may be in these areas, they don’t know it all, and there are other pieces to the puzzle.
But, that said, I’ve been “tumblr-quoting” the hell out of Bruce’s stuff, my non-bullshit detector (the oppposite of my bullshit detector) going off like crazy, and that’s a good sign that he’s onto some important things. He’s certainly sparking a lot of creative thought for me, even getting me re-excited about business strategies (a wave I need to ride when it’s high, so I’m going to wrap this up with some quotes now). Most significant to me is what he’s getting at in this post:
“A MySpace page dotted with fancy graphics, YouTube videos, slide shows and images, and a shitty music player was great in 2005, but this is 2007! A page of stuff is no longer compelling. We need something that really blows the socks off people.”
“Advice: Time to pick up the pace people. You need to learn how to be entertaining on the Internet. You may want to go out and buy the TV (yourband.tv) domain for your band. You need to start looking at your band like a television network. Have a filmmaker and a writer join your band, choose a theme, write a story, lash in your music, create episodes, write notes about your story on your blog, engage fans, develop characters, have a storyline, create a soundtrack, etc. Stop using your Internet presence to be INFORMATIVE, use it to be ENTERTAINING!”
“Nobody is going to make money selling $.99 cent downloads. Sell your music to some and give it away to everyone else that refuses to pay for music. Use your music as the bait that brings people into your shows and onto your new ENTERTAINING website/blog. If you make great music and you are entertaining, you will make money. By the time you learn how to incorporate story, basic film making, blogging, and how to be episodic - into your repertoire, the industry will have the tools you need to profit from all of your efforts - and your registered fans.”
New Music Strategies (Amazon Is Still Falling Short)
DRM-free is great and all, as is any healthy competition for iTunes. But you know how else you can get DRM-free music, plus not give iTunes or Amazon or any big record company any money at all, and just support artists on your own terms, as one human being to another according to how much you actually value their work? I do. Most people do, whether they choose to engage in it or not.
It’s actually two things in combination. The first is file-sharing, the second is donating. And plenty of people are choosing to engage in both — if more often the first of the two. But that’s the messy, realistic reality of things, like it or not, Elton. Why the hell fight it? I ask that not just in the sense of “why bother fighting the inevitable”, but in the sense that it’s not something that should be fought. It’s a positive r/evolutionary trend, both a cause and effect of old metaphors being outgrown and new, better, more expansive metaphors taking their place.
Radiohead is with it enough to see this and to actually live in the present (which in some sense requires also living in the future). Radiohead are clearly forward-thinking people who understand media and marketing (see TIME’s article “Radiohead Says: Pay What You Want” if you haven’t already). And they aren’t the only progressive thinkers willing — in fact, happy — to face and embrace the evolving reality of the music business (and all business, and life itself), to see the good in what’s going on and to find constructive ways to begin facilitating it, actively, now. Radiohead are just the most famous.
If you are a musician, artist, entrepreneur, whatever — person — you can’t afford to wait idly by for the ‘new music industry’ (or whatever industry) train to slow down and stop before you hop on board. It’s not gonna slow down or stop, so you better start moving, if you’re not already. Andrew Dubber is a smart person and here’s a smart thing he has to say about this (From his New Music Strategies Manifesto):
“…changes are still underway, and it is a process of navigation, not a process of conversion from an old model to a new one. By the time you have adapted you will be obsolete again. Develop a strategy for keeping up.”
Every second and every dollar you invest in the old business model is essentially a step backwards. Not a good move in a situation where you need to be not only keeping up, but preferably staying ahead of the curve, and better yet, actively participating in the direction of the ‘curve’ itself. As such, I have compiled for you a starter-kit of essential study materials to help you in this endeavor:
The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online (by Andrew Dubber)
New Music Strategies Manifesto (also by Andrew Dubber)
The Wu Tang Manual
And the following awesome conversations going on over at Tim’s place:
Pay What You Want
Rock Stars Need Not Apply
(no doubt these awesome conversations will be continuing in future posts and threads here, at Tim’s and at Andrew’s, so I would subscribe to / bookmark us all if I were me, and I am, and I have. You should too, mkay).