If you’re an owner of content, you are faced with the rock-and-a-hard-place discussed below: content is plentiful and plenty of it is free, so how are you going to make money?
Yes, you can make your content the absolute best in class, and you will find a fraction of your audience that will pay because your content is just so damn good, but on a grand scale you can’t really add value to content. You need to come at the problem from the other side and add value to the consumer.
Social media, the tools we have now to learn about people, and the new way we build relationships between people and brands- these are the ways you’ll make each and every consumer more valuable. Display ads are nowhere - they’re a megaphone to an undifferentiated and indifferent world. But if you tell me you can reach Northwest dads in their 50s who rock climb and recently quit smoking (which you easily can, by mining plentifully available data) - and if you are a modern brand that’s built direct and personal relationships with those consumers- suddenly you’ve added value to those consumers, who, in turn, add value to you.

Great piece by Felix Salmon in his Reuters blog, which jumps off from News Corp and its proposed paywall and includes a quote from Group M characterizing non-paying readers of online news as “useless tourists”. Salmon says (I couldn’t possibly phrase it better):

Millions of people are willing to pay for a physical object — a newspaper — but are not willing to pay to read that same newspaper online. It doesn’t make sense that those millions of people are hugely desirable readers when they’re reading a physical newspaper, and hugely desirable readers if they pay to read content online, but are just “useless tourists” if they don’t pay to read content online.

Here we go again with the challenge we’ve faced since “content wants to be free” and “content is king” both came into being: how do you make the consumer of free content valuable?
Seems to me you’d better find a different means of valuation. If you can’t value the consumer by ad dollars because they’re not worth enough to advertisers, and you can’t value the consumer by the subscription dollars you so dearly WISH they’d pay…guess what?

It is up to you to make your consumer - your customer- your audience -more valuable.
More on that next post.

The major record label groups all operate on an assumption. That assumption is that a label is “about” its current roster and existing (mostly pop) acts and it’s an assumption that has been held for a very long time.
Is this the tail wagging the dog? Why wouldn’t a modern record label flip its priorities and become a catalog of recorded music first and a promoter of new acts second if at all?
The pay-per-download model isn’t financially satisfactory or sustainable to the majors. If the dream of a major label is a successful subscription service or monetization of radio services like Pandora - these experiences won’t be like pay-per-download. They won’t be hit-driven - not current hits, anyway. If you have all-you-can eat music streaming, a percentage of people are going to use that primarily to check out new music. Most people will listen to a lot of what they love. Which will mean catalog.
Pay-per-download isn’t and never has been good for catalog because, unlike the introduction into market of the CD, there is no “replacement” period during which consumers need to re-buy their favorites in the new format. CDs are a digital format and most people capable of buying an iPod are capable of ripping a CD.
I’d love to see a “label” take its history as or more seriously than its present and try letting the dog wag its tail.

The word “conversation” is used a lot to reflect the fact that, yes, it’s required of a brand or company to enter into the conversation its customers are having - otherwise the conversation goes on without you, which is a bad bad thing.
Now I see plenty of companies chattering away on Twitter, posting cool content on Ustream or Facebook, creating compelling blogs around their customers’ general area of interest- all in the name of engaging the customer and proving via a sort of “soft sell” that, really, we’re in it for the sheer love of what we do and not merely to sell you stuff.

This is all great, and necessary. But are you merely conversing? Or are you listening to your consumers - taking their input and responding, reacting to immediate customer complaints and the like- but not hearing them?

By hearing I mean…Are you practicing transparency, but not actually creating change? Are you ready and willing to make long-term, major changes in your company or product based on real and substantive interaction with your customer?

Great article by Martin Lindstrom in Fast Company yesterday on the most “addictive sounds” in the world - measured using neurological studies. Here’s his list of the top 10 branded sounds (i.e., sonic brands of one kind or another) in terms of their effect on the brain:

Top 10 Branded sounds:
1. Intel
2. National Geographic
3. MTV
4. T-Mobile
5. McDonald’s
7. State Farm
8. AT&T Ringtone
9. Home Depot
10 Palm Treo Ringtone

It’s amazing to me that there are so few contemporary examples of a “sonic brand”, “sonic identity”, or “audio signature”. Look at (or listen to!) the sheer memory power of these brands. The MTV guitar riff (created by Elias Arts and originally accompanying the “moon landing” visuals at MTV’s launch) is a million miles (and many years) away from what MTV is today- yet it’s familiar to so many.

There are quite a few great companies out there in the world of sonic identity, yet it’s a field that receives little attention.
My experience when attempting to evolve audio brands at corporations has too often been that people just don’t get excited about them. At one company, I had over half a million dollars in my budget for a visual identity and fairly basic website. After much case-making, I got $20,000 to try to develop an audio brand.

We are bombarded with visuals today. Millions of dollars are spent on creating a visual identity - why so little attention paid to a few notes that impact a different part of the brain, literally increasing “mind share”?