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Interesting facts from the future

26 May

Well, I say “the future”… that’s based purely on Gerd Leonhard‘s title of “Media Futurist”. I was recently lucky enough to spend a couple of days in the presence of him and Jeremy Silver at Future Music Labs, part of Creative Capital in Canary Wharf, London.

They both gave fascinating talks at the beginning of the first day, and I took lots of notes. I’ve just been looking back over them and thought there were a few snippits that are worth sharing. This will all appear in bullet-point form, as I can’t remember the exact context of each fact and wouldn’t want to misquote Jeremy or Gerd. Also, apologies if some of the facts don’t make that much sense out of context. They obviously don’t have the great slides that Gerd and Jeremy used to illustrate their points, too. You can see the slides for Jeremy’s presentation here, and Gerd’s here.

If they don’t make sense then let me know – I’ll improve my note taking technique!

Also, I’ll be adding news links to back up as much of this information as i can, when I can.

Jeremy Silver

  • The “value” in creative industries tends to be in digital media.
  • In 9 years the music industry has lost 40 percent of its value.
  • 20 – 25 percent of sales across the board are digital.
  • Games companies are making money!
  • Youtube‘s bandwidth costs $1m a day to maintain, and their daily loss exceeds $1m a day.
  • In the UK £357 is spent on advertising per head of population (from memory, this is annually). 19 percent of this is online, the highest percentage in the world.
  • The UK has the highest per capita spend on music. $82 a year.
  • Consumers are very sophisticated and want to interact with music – e.g. see Rockband & Singstar, Radiohead allowing fans to remix tunes etc.


Gerd Leonhard

  • 92 percent of Google’s revenue is from Adwords.
  • Total fragmentation of the market is certain. Very few models work for everyone anymore. We’ll never see anyone having hits on the scale of The Beatles again. In TV Dallas used to get 70 percent of US viewers. Today the top show, American Idol, gets just 7 percent.
  • Physical Media and productised content is the past.
  • 1.7 million new mobile users in India every week.
  • 6.8 billion minutes a day are spent on Facebook. It is a broadcaster, as are all social network.
  • We’re living in an age of “Attention Challenge”. Distribution is now a default setting.
  • Brand magnetism is everything. If you love them, you’ll buy them.
  • “Money is just a type of information” – www.kk.org

Passion, perseverance, and stuff

24 Feb


I saw the film Anvil a few nights ago. It’s a documentary about a rock band who, thirty years on from being on the verge of greatness, are living in near-obscurity and decide to give it one last push before giving up for good. It’s an absolutely brillant (and hilarious) film and I was incredibly touched by their perseverance, their passion and their lust for life. And it reminded me that perseverance is that rare quality that is usually the one factor that many people are missing out on when looking for success.

I often advise people on small business and creative industries, and tell them to look at the top DJs and producers in the world: Carl Cox, Pete Tong, Sasha, Roger Sanchez, Eric Morillo, The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, The Prodigy etc – I’m fairly certain that not one of them is under 40, and I know that some of them are over 50. (edit – I’m reliably informed by Ian -see comments below- that Liam from the Prodigy is a spritely 37). The average age of the freshest, hottest 3 DJs in the world (Tiesto, Armin van Buuren and Paul van Dyk) is 37.2.

Being a DJ is usually considered to be a youngster’s game. These guys are clear evidence that if you’re good enough you might make it, BUT if you’re good enough AND you’re willing to stick at it long enough then you’ll definitely improve your chances of making it. I suppose it’s a case of having the talent, and using the perseverance to maximise the likelihood of getting your break…

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer”. ~Albert Einstein

A few bits and pieces…
————————

We’ve recently announced details of Ignite Cardiff #2, and with that in mind I thought I’d link to this article explaining how to “Deliver a Presentation like Steve Jobs”.

14 Tools Of Highly Effective Twitter Users – I particularly like the first tool. I’d be more inclined to find out how annoying I am though, rather than vet others before following….

This looks quite interesting if you’re based near South Wales and are in the creative industries, innovation, enterprise etc. I’ll probably be there.

This link is either the greatest link ever for a procrastinator, or a fascinating archive of the things that amused us over the early years of “the internet age”.

Very interesting take on what’s “killing” the music industry. Not illegal downloads, according to the author. Surprised to see that the value of music being shipped is more today than it was in 1993.

My Dad’s been very ill recently, and I’ve been “hanging out” at an online forum where people exchange experiences and support about the illness that he’s suffering from. One post struck me as absolute gold: A woman has become very housebound and insular in the last year, not wishing to leave the house. But in the recent snow her husband and kids persuaded her to go out and make a snowman with them. The phrase that convinced her to get out there? “Let’s go make some memories“.

Life is short, and all we really have at the end of it is our memories, so go make some.

* The pic at the top is of my girlfriend and I, mid-jump, making some snowy memories a few weeks ago. That blurry shot is the best of about 15 attempts to get a shot of us mid air in the snow, using a self timer!

HMV buys into music venues

16 Jan


Not only is the traditional music retail industry in dire trouble, but there’s a huge global recession squeezing the life out of every high street store. It’s no surprise then that HMV are looking to diversify. It’s probably the only way they’ll survive the next five years and not “do a Zavvi”. They’ll spend almost 20 million quid investing in a string of venues (including the soon to be named HMV Apollo).

More details here.

HMV buys into music venues

16 Jan


Not only is the traditional music retail industry in dire trouble, but there’s a huge global recession squeezing the life out of every high street store. It’s no surprise then that HMV are looking to diversify. It’s probably the only way they’ll survive the next five years and not “do a Zavvi”. They’ll spend almost 20 million quid investing in a string of venues (including the soon to be named HMV Apollo).

More details here.

Why you should give it away

6 Jan

Andrew Dubber has just written the most concise, brilliant post about why you should give away your music online for free (or more correctly, why you shouldn’t be scared of giving away your music for free). Of course, this applies to almost any creative works, whether it’s music, writing, video etc etc.

Read it here. I’ll certainly be pointing people in its direction constantly for the forseeable future….

MP3 Sales: Another nail for the long tail?

23 Dec

Chris Anderson‘s 2006 Long Tail theory states that because the web provides unlimited availability of vast amounts of niche and specialist music/films/books/whatever that there will be perpetual sales for the relevant artists, authors and creators of this content. But in an update to their recent findings, the PRS-MCPS Alliance (the UK’s music royalty collection organisation) has announced that only 173,000 of the 1.23 million albums available online actually made a single sale last year. In other words 85 percent didn’t sell even one copy. This is in addition to their recent announcement that 10 million of the 13 million individual tracks available online didn’t find a single buyer. Anderson is stoutly defending his economic model of the new web-based landscape, but who knows what further data is out there to strengthen or weaken is argument?

Is the Long Tail a dead theory already? Is one year’s data in just one sector enough to kill it off? Or should we see the theory as along term economic model that will take time to develop? Or do we just accept that the web makes those producing niche content a little easier to find – a slightly healthier short tail…?

pic credit: novelr.com

MP3 Sales: Another nail for the long tail?

23 Dec

Chris Anderson‘s 2006 Long Tail theory states that because the web provides unlimited availability of vast amounts of niche and specialist music/films/books/whatever that there will be perpetual sales for the relevant artists, authors and creators of this content. But in an update to their recent findings, the PRS-MCPS Alliance (the UK’s music royalty collection organisation) has announced that only 173,000 of the 1.23 million albums available online actually made a single sale last year. In other words 85 percent didn’t sell even one copy. This is in addition to their recent announcement that 10 million of the 13 million individual tracks available online didn’t find a single buyer. Anderson is stoutly defending his economic model of the new web-based landscape, but who knows what further data is out there to strengthen or weaken is argument?

Is the Long Tail a dead theory already? Is one year’s data in just one sector enough to kill it off? Or should we see the theory as along term economic model that will take time to develop? Or do we just accept that the web makes those producing niche content a little easier to find – a slightly healthier short tail…?

pic credit: novelr.com

In the Mux

16 Dec

I remember Muxtape.com. It allowed you to make an online mixtape from a huge list of songs. It was a simple, brilliant idea, although I never used it. And I remember that it got shut down earlier this year, which is sad. But today I stumbled across the founder’s statement about what happened. It’s a very well written piece that has lots of insight for anyone in the music industry or anyone in the world of digital startups, or licensing, or working with other peoples’ intellectual property. Hell, it’s useful for anyone. Read it here.

Also, I came across OwnGig. Looks like an interesting take on the whole crowdsourcing thing, which is an increasingly popular trend. Anyone wanna pitch in with me to get Stevie Wonder to perform live in my kitchen?

Finally, I’ve just learned about the Project Triangle. Never heard of it before. Useful little tool for prioritising tasks and knowing where your product might sit in the market.

In the Mux

16 Dec

I remember Muxtape.com. It allowed you to make an online mixtape from a huge list of songs. It was a simple, brilliant idea, although I never used it. And I remember that it got shut down earlier this year, which is sad. But today I stumbled across the founder’s statement about what happened. It’s a very well written piece that has lots of insight for anyone in the music industry or anyone in the world of digital startups, or licensing, or working with other peoples’ intellectual property. Hell, it’s useful for anyone. Read it here.

Also, I came across OwnGig. Looks like an interesting take on the whole crowdsourcing thing, which is an increasingly popular trend. Anyone wanna pitch in with me to get Stevie Wonder to perform live in my kitchen?

Finally, I’ve just learned about the Project Triangle. Never heard of it before. Useful little tool for prioritising tasks and knowing where your product might sit in the market.

Convergence

8 Dec

I love taking photos, and I’ve got a very decent compact camera that I used to take with me everywhere. But it hardly ever leaves the house now. Why? Because my mobile phone takes photos like this over Sunday breakfast in a cafe:

Don’t get me wrong. The camera on my phone is very limited, and can’t compete with the sort of pics I take with my “proper” camera:

But in 99 percent of cases it’s more than good enough to record a moment in time. It got me wondering about technological convergence, and how portable items such as cameras and phones are slowly and steadily merging into one thing. My first digital camera (circa 2000) wouldn’t have been able to take a picture as good as that one at the top. But my phone now has GPS, web and email facilities too. All of which I use on a regular basis. I even subscribe to podcasts on it too, which I download via my home network using the phone’s wifi capabilities. So, where will it end?

I pondered this as I ran across the clifftops of Penarth before dawn this morning (not a regular occurrence – I couldn’t sleep). I watched the sleepy, blinking lights of England across the channel and wondered about the tankers in the shipping lanes. How would they benefit from convergence? Nothing sprung to mind, but then I know absolutely nothing about shipping. I realised that convergence is driven by portability. It’s about making stuff smaller, and reducing the amount of items to save our overwhelmed pockets and bags. Tankers, by their very nature, have plenty of space aboard. I suppose it’s not such an issue….

My phone is smaller than a pack of cards, but in most cases it means I don’t have to carry a laptop, camera, satnav, gaming console, radio etc.

As I mentioned recently we live in incredible times. And we’re seeing the world change right in front of our eyes. My good friend John Rostron pointed this out yesterday, as he wrote about the slow, inevitable decline of CD sales. Technology is moving very, very quickly. We are literally watching the world change day by day. It’s a fascinating time to be alive!

Oh, and big thanks to Mr Rostron (who’s also co-organiser of the Swn festival) for my brilliant Swn t-shirt. It’s a doozie, and a Howies one, too. I really must remember to pay him!

p.s. Play a musical instrument?

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