Empower the Artist

I was at a friend’s house last night, hanging out with a bunch of people connected to the music industry and I heard this guy John, whose irish surname I don’t quite remember. He’s apparently a heavy ’cause he listed off some of his clients and they’re all top of the entertainment industry. Anyway, he said something that catalyzed something for me. He’s got a commitment to giving artists total freedom – as a producer, he knows that in that space, artists radiate. Anyway, what he said was that he’s about empowering the artist, and the words were exactly the phrase that’s been banging around in my head for the last several weeks. I’ve been composing a blog entry about empowering the artist, because I think that’s where the future of the music industry lies, not to mention a total transformation of the way music is created, shared and consumed. And that really turns ME on.

Artists have more access to audience than ever, and audiences have more choices for delightful sensory experiences than ever. The Music Industry Establishment (The Endustry) needs to control access to their content. But content is simply information, and as we well know Information wants to be free..

The winners of music 3.0 (which is about to emerge) are going to be the people who empower the artist. Intermediation is increasingly irrelevant – the network routes around inefficiencies and breakdowns. The internet is an inversive force – and by that I mean, it’s not just disruptive, but it completely alters the ratio of control from centralized, tightly controlled (and profit-driven) entities to the single thriving entity of the Network, the sum of all its parts, which now numbers in the billions. From content providers to content producers, which are anyone with a computer, camera and connection to the net.

Google sees the immensity of the opportunity. the tendency of information is to be networked and “free” (or I should say, “accessible”). How do you find things in an infinite information universe? Google.

The industry is trying to figure out how to mold it’s model of limiting supply and increasing demand into a world of decreased (relatively) demand and infinite supply. By decreased relative demand, I mean, the demand for Industry product (CD’s from major label acts) has fallen, as record sales numbers show. But people are still listening to more music than ever. They’re just not paying for it, currently, and because they don’t really have to – it’s pervasively available. Wrong or right, it’s a fact that if you can hear it in real life, you can hear it on the net. So the Music Endustry is trying to figure out how to stop something that is inevitable and unstoppable. Kinda like the war on drugs, or the war on terror. Except that record companies don’t have the bank the US government has, so this one will be relatively short-lived.

The Music Industry Establishment, a Music 1.0 legacy operating system, is about to be made obsolete in a networked world.

The Industry is right to be in panic – it’s not that the money is going to go away – it’s just going to be dispersed. That principle of inversion. The music 1.0 nightsky had a few thousand stars. the music 3.0 nightsky will have millions, selling directly to their fans.

The economic question isn’t how to capture the revenue by exploiting intellectual property. I believe the economic question is how to empower the artist to more effectively reach their audience. And the companies that develop models that empower artists to deliver directly to their audiences could, I believe, usher in the era of music 3.0.

We used to say that the winners of the 90’s dot com phenomenon were the people selling picks and shovels to the Gold Rushers. The principle still applies – empower the artist, recoup a reasonable commission on each sale. What if a record company had a million street team members who were REALLY motivated to poster, flyer, promote their record? There are something like 1.8 million band pages on myspace and every one of those 1.8 million accounts are connected to hundreds of millions of people. Add facebook, band websites, and all the other things bands do to promote themselves, and a few million musicians have access to the discretionary income of a hundreds of millions of people. That’s the music 3.0 marketplace in a nutshell.

Empower the artist.