Brett Makes a Movie

This is my first video I’ve made through the site xtranormal. I hope you enjoy it:

It's Sloppy Out There

The coolest thing I find right now about the music industry is that I haven’t yet invested in it. I’m not going to sit back and play armchair general in this round, its complicated and I’m not really in any position to point fingers or call idiocy. However, at the moment it seems like the industry is composed of people primarily motivated to maintain a current profit-seeking model without regard to its  practicalities (or lack of) and have too heavily invested themselves in the current system to want to radicalize and change it.

There is a name for this apparently. It’s called the entrenched player’s dilemma, and a guy I read a lot has talked about this many times – although I’m the kind of person who needs things repeated a lot before I get them. Until I was actually flailing around today trying to think of a concise way to explain what I thought was going on in the industry, this concept and its meaning weren’t really clear. Now they are.

That being said, I can’t really blame the current group of “entrenched players” for behaving the way they do. Especially if they want to milk every last drop out of the current model. To radicalize, they would have to forgo obvious money-making opportunities.Sure they weren’t yielding as much money as before, but still, they’re there. What, not capitalize? Fuck you, go write on your blog.

And as wonderful and beautiful and brilliant as it sounds to suddenly drop everything you’re doing in favor of some insanely attractive and nebulous “no business model is the future!!!” rhetoric – for the existing companies out there that are dealing with this transition – the reality is far more unpleasant than what the rhetoric eludes to. There is a reason the record companies have taken so long to die.

However, I can blame this current group of “entrenched players” for being idiots if they honestly believe that not only  will the current model continue to sustain itself, but ought to, for the alleged sake of everyone involved, artist and all. In other words, its okay to be fucked, as long as you know you’re fucked, because only then can you begin to hope to unfuck yourself.

Rather than get involved in a constantly shifting industry whereby as an artist I become dependent on X group and Y group doing their thing and scurrying to capitalize on new trend after trend in an effort to squeeze every lessening pile of money from increasingly alienated and pissed off fans….I opt to…opt out.

In a way, it seems to make more sense to sit out and focus on making some really good fucking art, and finding small ways to connect with the very people that might love and appreciate it. A “marketing strategy” doesn’t necessarily have to be about inundating people with the message – they’ll get around to it if its good enough. But if you’re a) not patient enough to deal with this reality, and b) don’t make art that is good enough on its own merits, then you’re fucked.

Good. Its about time the prospect of one day making $30,000-40,000 a year working as an artist making possibly marginal art is actually a somewhat plausible scenario. Why not?? Cut out the bullshit and leave me be. I don’t need to be rich, just let me work.

http://www.mediafuturist.com/2008/12/2009-the-year-o.html

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/01/davos_discussing_a_depression.html

Being a Know-it-all is great, if all you want to do is know things

When you’ve committed yourself to researching a particular field, the most important thing to remember is that its not really about who did what. Being able to recall dates and people is helpful when trying find factual data to support your case or argument, but its not the same as being aware of and understanding the long-term principles that have either been transgressed or used competently.

Take music-marketing, something I’ve gotten interested in and knew next to nothing about about 6 months ago. I’ve subscribed to lots of blogs, and some of them, the blog posts themselves are literally “link dumps” with a brief, if any, extrapolation on the content of the links. And there are many links. Hypebot.com is a great example of this.

I read as much as I can of Hypebot.com – its like an hourly updated newspaper that appeals to the micro-universe of music and marketing. However, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t completely overwhelmed at times. A night or two ago, I was reading through his archive because I had missed about a week of his posts. Because of this, I had a shit load of posts to catch up on.

In scrolling through them all, clicking on the links and reading through them all, I felt really uneasy and insecure – no matter how much time I spend on this stuff, I’ll never be able to know and recall everything. I’ll never be able to keep up with all this information and still get all the work done I need to get done in my life. I stopped reading and sat back in my chair. Why was I working on this then? Why am I spending time doing or worrying about something that is impossible?

Because what I was doing and worrying about was ultimately impossible. And unnecessary. In order to do what I need to do successfully, its not required that I recite facts and what particular move company x did then or whenever. I was reading this blog and others under the false and stupidly held assumption that in order to be successful, it required knowing these things and also understanding all the larger concepts. So I wised up and came to this conclusion:

Success in this career is dependent on my ability to absorb as much raw information as possible, try to follow the logic and patterns behind decisions that companies, artists, labels etc., make, and then to gradually infer some conclusions and place them in the context of what ought to operate well in the particular economic environment that I’ll be working in.

And even then success is not assured. I still have to execute all these wonderful ideas. That takes balls. It also takes, I’m slowly learning, a mild insanity and occasionally irrational belief in the purpose behind undertaking the entire operation.

Conclusion: the point is not to know everything. Because you can’t. So stop trying. However, you can learn how to think and process information, and that is what you ought to do, because then you can actively apply it to what you really love to do. Leave the details for someone else, like a lawyer.
(Also, having music that doesn’t suck and that people actually want to listen to helps a lot too)

New Music Strategies

If you’re currently exploring the far reaches of the internet and have stumbled upon this strange little blog, and you like music, and you like marketing, and you like music marketing, then I want to point you to Andrew Dubber of New Music Strategies.

As a new student to understanding the disruptive effects of the internet and what this means for the future, I’ve been highly impressed by his ideas, most notably his e-Book, 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online. This is literally one of the most helpful and concise pieces on music marketing out there. He really strips down the general tenets of music consumption and examines their underlying principles and how they could potentially operate within the new available technology. Using historical examples of how disruptive technology has consistently changed society, he embodies the idea that “if you want to know the future, look to the past.”

Without some sort of basis or understanding of what came before, its very difficult to make any prospective analysis on whats to come.

He also writes on Music Think Tank.

Why Don't Some Bands Market Themselves Better?

If I started my own little music enterprise – in light of the power of the internet – I would do these things:

1) As I’m making a song, I would take photos and make videos or small documentaries of the process of making that particular song. Then post them.

2) Set up a damn blog. If only for the various band members to contribute their own insights on the collaborative process every once in awhile. But an active and often updated blog for a band I like is definitely going to keep me coming back. This is also an awesome way to set up a tour and keep fans intrigued. Tell stories about the things happening on tour. Relay some experiences. Invest the time and energy into bringing your solid fans even closer to your music – almost into your touring van.

3) Set up a messageboard and ACTUALLY POST ON IT. If your fans can actively participate in some sort of discourse with you – holy shit – that is a great way to get yourself out there and set yourself apart from most bands. The great thing about this is that the fans can get both the art and the thoughts, feelings, and mentalities that inspired the art. That intimidating barrier between the producer and audience becomes broken down.

All of these things (with the exception of maybe the video-making aspect) are low cost and don’t take too long to set up. I can understand why some bands might not want to do any of these things, because this actually requires talking to their fans. Some bands would prefer not to deal with that. I don’t really blame them, there are a lot of annoying assholes that many bands would be embarrassed to call fans. But I’m not interested in those fans. I’m interested in the few gold nuggets that appreciate both the art and the people behind it, that WANT some reasonable discussion with the creators (if only to banter), and WANT that connection that breaks down the traditional producer-audience barrier.

Unsprung Media

I just discovered Bruce Warila’s Unsprung Media.

If you’re a musician or somebody that wants to get involved with the industry at some level, read this.

He’s incredibly imaginative and has a ton of really clever and totally applicable ideas. You could call him a futurist or something like that, which sounds a bit hack-like, but I’m not so sure being a futurist these days as it relates to media and tech is such a bad thing.

Things are changing so quickly and we still have a few years to wait until things start to settle, so what we really need are people with huge fucking imaginations. The kind of people that come up with ideas that really strain the concept of plausibility. And lots of them. Because even if most of them turn out to be wrong (predicting the future is pretty much a crap-shoot) it means that that many more ideas have been given a chance to work and then fail, and then be efficiently filtered from the system.

The more ideas there are, the more quickly we can run through them, tinker with them, and see if they work. If they don’t, all the better for everyone involved – some variation or new idea that works will surface and everyone will be better off.

This is like sped-up, hyper-competitive capitalism.

I still have to read the rest of his archive , but the gist I’m getting from him and others keeping a watch on this subject is – if you’re an artist, produce a ton of content and focus on getting it exposed. Forget about the money-making mechanisms for now – in a few years most of them will be gone or totally changed anyway.

Some Things Take Time to Settle

Fortunately, in this day and age, things will probably settle a lot more quickly than the more massive technological movements in the past.

Over the course of a year with the internet, many things could happen that could easily comprise the multiple occurrences, failures and successes, of things that used to take place over decades.

The music industry has gotten completely fucked – the major labels have obviously chosen not to adapt the traditional marketing mechanisms to the realities of new media. Good. Fuck them. This is naive, but I say that if you want to be in a business solely for the money, please leave the entertainment business – you’ll probably just stick a dick in projects run by people with actual talent. The hippyness of this movement is funny, but here’s the problem – we’re not there yet.

What ’s missing, and is the void that needs to be filled in the next few years, is a method or range of solid methods to monetize people’s work. People are turning an angry eye towards ISP’s, and for good reason.

As it stands, ISP’s charge money to access to the internet. You pay every month for access to the internet, and all the content available (unless you’re China). If you’re a band and you want to market yourself better, you pay an ISP to access the internet, and to host a website. People that are interested in your band will pay their ISP to access your content. So far we have this:

You pay an ISP to host content.
Other people pay an ISP to access the content that you’ve paid to host.

Who seems to be winning out a lot here?

What it Could Mean to Have 1,000 True Fans

I read The Long Tail a couple months ago, and that among various other sources on the internet led me to this conclusion: in order to be a “successful” artist in this day and age, you really don’t need to have more than a few thousand heavy fans.

This would be high unlikely, if not impossible 10-15 years ago. Why? Without the internet to leverage a fan base and the methods of monetization that go along with it, as a band you were hopeless unless a label decides to pick you up and market you.

When I say the word “successful,” I don’t mean packing away millions of dollars. What I’m saying is that with a few thousand fans, any group with knowledge of, understanding of, and proper utilization of new media is in place to bring home a few hundred thousand dollars. Per year. This conclusion was based on the idea of niche markets, and the idea that a distribution mechanism (the internet) is what was needed to make these niche markets viable alternatives to popular markets.

I kind of came to this conclusion privately. Then I read this*:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php

and felt really really smart.

The fact that I came to the same conclusion is not really clever as it is indicative of a larger phenomenon – the world is changing, along with the old assumptions of old media. The groundwork is changing, and if you’re a smart artist, you’ll learn and adapt to these new changes. The cool part is that this is all so new, so the rules have a chance to be endlessly and creatively modified quickly before the dust settles, if it ever does.

*Kevin Kelly is brilliant. Read all of his Technium page