At least these guys get the clean thing. There's a raft of interesting content up there, and all you have to do is sign up on their page to get access to it all. “Inbound marketing” I believe the savvy would call it. Applause, please..
So RRE finally signed up on Twitter, right about the same time I succumbed to my curiosity on the same subject. In case you could tell by this blog, I'm completely fascinated by Web stuff like this. I mean, what a stupid concept, right? A micro-blog so that people can talk about what they're doing at that moment. As if I need to know what Scotty Baron had for lunch today! But wait...
The tech media is positively foaming at the mouth over this thing. Every marketing site I go to is praising it, every music business blog is blathering about how to use it, in 10 parts no less. So what is going on over here? I see this journalist over here mentioned that when the plane went down in the Hudson the first place he heard about it was on Twitter. He cruises around to some of the blogs he follows and none of them mentioned it until much later (in journalism time). Okay, so this could be a journalism tool. Outblog the bloggers. But wait...
Part of what I personally find so thrilling about technology like this is the potential that it has to become, at it's furthest extension, a tool for shining a light on the kind of evil that can only take place in the shadows. North Korean gulags, Egyptian or Saudi repression, Israeli actions against the Palistinians, Darfur, Kenya, Afghanistan, China, not to mention whatever the American gov't has been up to over the past hundred years in terms of shady foreign policy wherever.
I firmly believe that world harmony is at hand, and that once everyone has a cell phone and access to Twitter (or something like it), evil will have nowhere left to hide.
Now, this part won't be any news to anyone, but will mainly serve to help organize the thoughts in my brain. First, the old way:
The old way involved the “record industry”. The record industry used to exist because recording was very expensive. It was expensive to record a song, it was expensive to reproduce the recording of the song, and it was really expensive to warehouse, distribute, and sell the recording of that song. Thus a whole industry cropped up to take advantage of the fact that the barrier to entry for your average recording artist, say Ma Carter out of the hills around Bristol VA, was so astronomically high that nobody really thought about releasing their own music. Show up, play my tunes, get paid for them? Okay! This worked great for long enough for the basic oligarchic framework of the major label system to rise to power.
A moment now to reflect. It's extremely popular to bash record labels, and with good reason. Let us now take a moment, however, to reflect on the cultural purpose that they've served...
I take it for granted that America is, on balance, the coolest nation on the face of the earth, in the history of humanity. Citizens from other countries would doubtless dispute this claim, but I would submit to you that even those societies that profess to hate everything America stands for only hate so strongly because they don't enjoy the liberties and luxuries that Americans have long grown accustomed to. Now, imagine if the record business never existed, that there was no such thing as an LP or a CD, and the only way to enjoy music was to go listen to it live. There were no Beatles, except for those of you lucky enough to be in the Cavern Club, no Elvis, unless you went down to the BBQ shack to see him in Memphis, no Chuck Berry, no Led Zeppelin, no Pink Floyd, no Eagles, no Neil Young, no Bob Dylan, no Coldplay, no U2. I know, a lot of these bands are from the UK, but I consider the give and take of the UK and the USA to be part of the competitive exchange that has pushed the limits of musical creativity for the better. And we can safely lump all these bands into the category of Western Music. Now, imagine if Western Music never existed. How would we export our culture abroad? At gunpoint, probably. How would generations of kids be incited to stand up and make change happen? At gunpoint, probably. My point is that exactly at the moment in human events that the USA and the UK became 2 of the dominant political powers in the world (1946 or so), rock and roll made an appearance. It moved legions of Japanese kids just like it did American kids. The cultural service that the major label system provided these kids and us to come later is therefore immeasurable. And the world danced together...
Now, back to the point, to be covered in another blog, because really long blogs are fucking boring...
When in the course of your bands business, it becomes necessary to cast off your old, crappy website and the confusing, unnavigable interface which you present to the world as your first impression, and to assume the powers of PHP, CSS, XML, RoR, and other technologies not yet invented in the pursuit of a highly compelling online experience, a more meaningful dialogue with your fanbase, and the glorious rewards of possibly higher merch sales, a decent respect to the opinions of webmasters everywhere requires that I should declare the causes which impel me to dream of a better way....
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all websites are not created equal, yet they are endowed by their creators with the potential to be entertaining, informative, and even useful in a utilitarian sense. That to secure these ideals, most bands stumble blindly about with no technical idea of what's involved in actually building a modern website, that the layout and information contained in your average band website has been virtually untouched for several years in a field where technology is changing every day. That the potential for truly democratizing the music industry has never been more at hand than it is today. That nobody in the business of selling records is interested in seeing a better system devised. That the only way forward for the record industry is via the ubiquitous distribution system present in every one of your homes. That the only way to achieve such independence is to fight for change, to take up development tools, and to learn what bands and the music business are doing wrong, and to right these wrongs.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that those of us yearning for change learn as much as we can about the technologies available, so that we may make best use of them and not stumble where so many of our brethren have before. This blog shall henceforth detail my quest to overhaul the sorry state of affairs that is the music recording industry, so that it may brighten all of our lives forevermore...
When in the course of your bands business, it becomes necessary to cast off your old, crappy website and the confusing, unnavigable interface which you present to the world as your first impression, and to assume the powers of PHP, CSS, XML, RoR, and other technologies not yet invented in the pursuit of a highly compelling online experience, a more meaningful dialogue with your fanbase, and the glorious rewards of possibly higher merch sales, a decent respect to the opinions of webmasters everywhere requires that I should declare the causes which impel me to dream of a better way....
It's only going to get easier to build software. Brilliant.
This is a nice little explanation of how AIG got into the mess it's in, if you're interested in that kind of thing...
Ever heard of it? It stands for Software as a Service, and it's a little sector of the software/tech business that everyone is keeping an eye on right now. One of the leading vendors of this service right now is a company called SalesForce.com. My brother in law is actually their director of recruiting for the midwest region. What SaaS does is remove the need to buy software for your business. It moves the important stuff to the “cloud”, which is another name for the internet, and charges a monthly fee for the service. It's the same concept as Gmail, except that enterprise software is big, big business. Software companies don't just make a bundle when they sell it, they make a bigger bundle from selling the support contracts that every business inevitably needs to keep their company moving along.
So, SaaS removes the expense of buying, and instead rents you the software, along with the support, for however long you want it. I'm not in the market right now, so I don't know how long the contracts last, but the point is that companies probably won't continue to buy enterprise software if this model works out like SalesForce.com hopes it will. So far it's working like gangbusters. They're projecting about $1.3B in revenue for 2010.
The correlating service in the music business would be something like Napster, I guess. You pay a monthly fee and you get access to their whole database of music. Services like these haven't taken off for crap, mostly because iTunes already owns the market and it's still just too easy to rip music off for free. iTunes has proven such a success because they really do make it super easy to get what you want, the prices are reasonable, and they don't even insist on that DRM crap anymore (which was only there in the first place because the majors insisted on it).
What if a band with a pre-established fanbase wanted to try this out on their own? What if there were very regularly updated music, video, whatever on a site dedicated to the band, and the only place you could get that stuff was from that website? What if it were super simple for anyone to use, and super affordable for anyone to join? In other words, what if it were worth it?
Would people try it?
Would bands try it?
If the other option is to put out another CD that you can only buy at the merch table, or maybe online somewhere and even then only if you're already looking for it, I think this could be a way forward for a really motivated band.
This is a table I found that shows relative current interest in different computer programming languages. This was put together by measuring the book sales of books covering a specific language as compared to their sales from the year before. The size of the box tells their relative market share, and the color their relative market traction. You'll notice the really bright green one at the top, up 965%, is for Objective-C. Mac OS X applications, and iPhone applications are written in this language. I have personally contributed at least 2 purchases to that square over the last year...
So, if you're in a band and you don't have a website, you're not really a band, right? If you own a business and you don't have a website, your business doesn't really exist, right? If you ran a festival, could you see how you could get by without having a website?
The iPhone, and the mobile platform in general, is going to be the means by which info is spread, by which content is delivered, by which people are entertained and kept in the loop. The portable website, but better. Can we all agree on that much?