Natural's not in it..

"Along the way, we as a society seem to have chosen to encourage the rich and powerful to exploit the poor and less fortunate. I can’t help but think this is the result not just of a failure of our politics, but of American journalism, as well." Richard Meeker, Willamette Week, Portland, OR

Are you willing to pay $600 for an online music service?

Disrupting online music services

Last Thursday in my Digital Strategy class at the University of Oregon, the students and me spent a few hours trying to upend assumptions and clichés in different business models. Following some of the ideas in Luke Williams' book, Disrupt, we took the first steps in crafting a disruptive hypotheses by looking at disruptive marketing opportunities and then settling on some disruptive ideas. The Monocle magazine example of creating the subscription-premium plan for pricing, by breaking the pricing cliché, sparked a lot of new ideas. We haven't yet reached a single, disruptive solution but we did get to a disruptive idea: How can we disrupt the competitive landscape of the Internet music industry by delivering an unexpected solution? That idea is an extension of my post - Why does Pandora exist? This particular exercise will continue into next week but in the meantime some interesting results came up when we started to ask each other what were our favorite online music Apps or web services. We started out by asking ourselves - What if record labels didn't exist? What do record labels do, and what would happen if they disappeared? Here's some responses:

  • 1. The connection between consumers and musicians will no longer scale
  • 2. No one would track royalty payments
  • 3. We'd focus more on bands
  • 4. Revenue would flow directly to bands
  • 5. No more financial investments in bands (Labels as banks)
  • 6. Bands would have to work harder to build communities
  • 7. It would be harder to find new music
  • 8. Band's wouldn't have credibility without record labels


    • Clearly there are some assumptions in that list and so we set about dismantling them:

  • 1. We decided that labels are not absolutely necessary to create scale but they do have a role. Musicians have the means today to create scale
  • 2. This is not true as there are plenty of royalty tracking services and after all, labels report royalties to the musicians - no label, no need for reporting. More importantly, for what we were trying to determine, we decided that only a minority of music consumers would really think about a label and royalty payments
  • 3. We agreed that musicians would have to work harder to get our attention. We also think that music fans already focus on musicians far more than on labels
  • 4. We agreed that this is a positive result. Cutting out the middleman
  • 5. While this is a negative result it is not entirely true. There are different ways for musicians to raise money - Kickstarter.com for e.g.
  • 6. We agreed that musicians should be always working hard to build communities - even if record labels were still around - there's no such thing as a free lunch etc..
  • 7. We decided that this is not entirely true. Music discovery services abound on the web. Not having a label promoting you could be a negative but not the end of the line.
  • Not true. Some bands have already found new markets - Radiohead, NIN etc. Some, but not most, labels give a band credibility but as we were looking at a mass market we decided that only a minority of music fans would consider not having a label as harming a musician's credibility


    • Ok, so we dismissed some assumptions but I still had a question. Given that my students had posed the first list of considerations re a label-free world without having time to research the subject, I asked them - what do record labels actually do..? The answer - we don't know? Which is very interesting to me. Or not. Research is critical. Read the rest of this post here.

    Clutter of Pop: My vinyl album and book project

    The vinyl album summary

    We all interact with music at a primal level. I have long been concerned with the idea that the digitization of music removes a great deal of the feeling that we respond to when we hear great music. Nothing can compare to being at a live music concert, listening to a band with hundreds or thousands of other people that share the same empathetic feeling as you. I will argue though, that the analog sound of a vinyl record captures that feeling way better than a CD or MP3 file can.

    At it's heart, this project is not about a return to vinyl or a move away from the ease of use of digital music, it's simply about a passion for the vinyl record album and the hope that musicians will keep releasing vinyl recordings of their work and that people like yourself will continue to buy and collect them. 

    The album will represent an analog version of my solo recordings. Recordings made beyond the time I spent recording and playing with Gang of Four andShriekback. In all I will press 19 songs to vinyl and also make available previously unreleased material as MP3s. 

    The book summary

    For many years now I've been scratching away in digital form, writing essays and reviews and posting them to my various websites. The music side of my thinking gets posted at Pampelmoose and the digital thinking gets posted at I Am Dave Allen and my work as a digital strategist gets posted at NORTH. I'm not only passionate about vinyl records, I am passionate about books too, so it seemed only fitting that I gather together a mixture of essays about music and digital strategy and get a book printed. Here's a sample music essay and a sample digital essay. Consider the book a companion piece to the album.

    An education: Digital to analog

    This project is not just about me. I teach a Digital Brand Strategy class at the University of Oregon, and from my work and learnings with the students the idea for this project was born. I spend time with students who were "born digital," that is, they grew up surrounded by digital devices and technology. When it comes to music they have known only digitized files in the CD and MP3 formats. I realized that I wanted them to build something that isn't digital, that exists as a tactile piece to be enjoyed, to be held and, in this case, to be listened to. A vinyl double album! 

    In other words, we will use the digital web to help create a non-digital artifact. 

     

    The author Rick Moody spent November 2010 interviewing me..

    Rick Moody

    An Inter­view with Dave Allen

    Dave Allen was the fero­cious bass player in one of the most fero­cious and mov­ing Eng­lish rock and roll bands of the late sev­en­ties, Gang of Four. Allen appeared on the band’s first two albums, their best, before going on to found Shriek­back with Barry Andrews of XTC. There, in a more funk-oriented envi­ron­ment, his bass was even more cen­tral to the band’s sonic iden­tity. After leav­ing Shriek­back in the mid­dle eight­ies and found­ing an inde­pen­dent record label, Allen went on to have an unde­ni­able sec­ond act in the United States (where we are reputed to have no sec­ond acts), first at eMusic.com and then Intel, where he was a Direc­tor in the Con­sumer Dig­i­tal Audio Ser­vices depart­ment, and later as an exec­u­tive (and founder) of var­i­ous mar­ket­ing and brand­ing agen­cies, among them the agen­cies Nemo and Over­land. He is cur­rently Direc­tor, Insights & Dig­i­tal Media at NORTH. Now in his mid-fifties he blogs reg­u­larly and is a gen­eral cul­tural critic of the inspir­ing sort both online and off. He speaks reg­u­larly at national con­fer­ences and at cam­puses in the Pacific North­west, where he lives. In Jan­u­ary 2011 he will join the Uni­ver­sity of Ore­gon as an adjunct pro­fes­sor work­ing with Deb­o­rah Mor­ri­son, Cham­bers Dis­tin­guished Pro­fes­sor of Adver­tis­ing, teach­ing a class on Dig­i­tal Strat­egy in Brand Mar­ket­ing at the School of Jour­nal­ism & Communication.

    I was intro­duced to these more recent man­i­fes­ta­tions of his work by Court­ney Eldridge, who sug­gested I inter­view Allen. I con­fess that my preconceptions—that he might be some­what fierce, opin­ion­ated, and dis­in­clined to con­duct a nice, enter­tain­ing inter­view just for the sake of it—were mostly borne out. As befits a man who knows a lot about the Web, this inter­view was con­ducted entirely in that ethe­real topog­ra­phy, with­out a sin­gle moment of face to face con­tact. We shipped the results back and forth for about four weeks in Novem­ber 2010. This is a com­pletely col­lab­o­ra­tive sequence of ones and zeroes, there­fore, and one that is marked thor­oughly by Allen’s inten­sity, his inquis­i­tive­ness, his energy, his pas­sion, his enthu­si­asm. As some­one who lis­tened fer­vently to Gang of Four at the time of its great­est accom­plish­ments, I am happy to say that I found this man and this inter­view expe­ri­ence very sat­is­fy­ing. It is pos­si­ble to age grace­fully with­out giv­ing up an inch.

    Read the interview here.

    The inevitable end of year wrap up..

    Pampelmoose Portland Dave Allen

    Collapsing infrastructures..some thoughts on books, music, movies, Kanye West, Rick Moody, Aesop Rock and 900 Bats. Deeper thoughts about digital strategy and whether the Facebook/Social Media BS bubble will pop. Oh, and a new teaching gig at the University of Oregon. Whatever... it's all here.