Media on the Move
Monetization is try to make money at something or trying to get something to make money. Twitter is going to do it (so I hear) by ‘Pro’ accounts. I read one of the latest Bob Lefsetz Letters and made some connections. Think about how we (or maybe it is just me) watch tv. Surprisingly TV viewership is UP! This is mainly because of DVRs and on demand viewing. You can watch more complex shows with more complex story lines and never have to worry about missing one. I think this is crazy because I hardly ever watch tv, I watch Hulu and the shows they don’t have I download. Advertising has to be failing on this stuff. Hulu has these little 30 second ads, fast forward through them on DVR and on demand. Soon TV will have a hard time monetizing. We as consumers shift so quickly from gratitude to them owing us what they give us. For example, I was on a flight recently that offered wifi. I flipped out my iPhone to try to hop on. Get this: they wanted $3.00 for that. CRAZY right? No. In the time it took me to pull out my phone I went from the thought “Man this airline really knows how to please its customers” to “WTF!?! Why would they want me to pay this crap charge?” They owed me that wifi.
Music is about to be the same way. No one buys albums. That used to be the smallest denominator of music you could buy, then came the little CD with just the single and a few B-sides. Now? Thanks to iTunes you can get just the songs that you want. Do I disagree with this? I would like to think, as a musician, that you would want the whole thought that the artist gave you with the album, but many albums today aren’t like they were when the Beatles made the album necessary. I think if I were to just grab Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” I have the gist of the album. On the other hand, I don’t want people thinking they bought a Trojan horse. “Oh, you liked the radio song? Check this out! Psyche they all suck and you paid $10 for that one song you like.” Now if you are ahead of the curve you just stream your whole album on your website. Why not? If you don’t someone on youtube will!
With the advent of constant internet connection and the coming of 4G wireless networks (which will be faster than your home broadband connections, get used to the word tethering because you are going to be hearing a lot of it) it will be exceedingly simple to listen to streaming, high quality music on the go. Hell, we won’t even have physical hard drives in our computers soon (Google’s Cloud service, OnLive). Streaming will be our new ethernet cables and bus cables. What will be the point of OWNING music when you could access it anytime at just as high of a quality with no ads? What will be the point of watching scheduled TV when you can watch it on your own time, where ever you want, in HD, and no ads? Why will we ever pay for entertainment ever again?
I think that the podcasting model that Revision 3 and TWiT have are going to be the ad models of the future. Old school style, actors coming out and talking to you about the product they are being paid to tell you about. We are programmed to dial out commercials and tune back in when those familiar faces come back on. Plus if Greg House is telling me in that way that he does that Herpex will control my outbreaks, I might get me some Herpex. Better than a disembodied voice and strangely happy couples talking nicely about a disease that has a chance of killing their children.
But music? How do you do that? People don’t want to hear musician’s talk. Dixie Chicks proved that. All musicians have is their product. If you want to make money at it you can’t do the old bait and switch of old with albums. You have to make music that is good enough to make people WANT to pull out their credit cards and pay for a digital copy. Beyond that you have to make connections and be the politician. I can’t tell you how many times people tell me they don’t like so-and-so because he is a dick. Yeah but his music is great! Most people can’t separate the two. Musician used to be the flake job, but these days I think the musicians you see that ‘came from nowhere’ will have been working their asses off. The Jonas Brothers won’t be selling out stadiums in 5 years (at least not in that iteration, remember n*sync=Justin). We can sit around and talk about the old days, but nostalgia is not a flattering thing. Makes me want to work harder, not whine. Look forward, follow the curve.
Podcasts are the new punk kid on the block. If you don’t subscribe to any podcasts, go out there and look for your interests. You will find them and behind them you will find people doing so much PR work it is insane. Gary Vaynerchuck still responds to twitters and emails personally. The time is ripe right now for podcasting. A mix of new and old. There isn’t some multimillion dollar budget behind them but they have the passion that their old-media counterparts don’t have.
Movies have a pretty solid model right now I think, no changes there for a while. Books are about to feel the hurt more than they already have once the Kindle gets a price drop and some more books on it, maybe backwards compatibility. Newspapers are screwed, Magazines are making the move to online.
Media is on the move.
Little lengthy and jumpy for my first post on here but I think I got all my sentiments out.
