The musician's lot is not a happy one. We know this, we've seen plenty of evidence, but here's another piece (via Dan) that just might give a sense of just how futile the act of making money from music is becoming...
Over on TorrentFreak (a blog covering all things around bittorrent
technology), there's a report on how much money Lady Gaga made from
Spotify for a million plays of her songs...
How much do you think? Go on, guess. A MILLION plays.
How about $167?
Or, if you prefer, 0.017 cents per play, or to bring it back to real money, 0.01p per play.
Now, you maybe don't know if that's a lot or a little, compared to what musicians may be used to receiving for plays of their songs.
Well, not so long ago in 2003, if a song of yours was played on Radio 1, you'd receive a massive £18.44. PER MINUTE (though of course the amount was less if you were on regional or local stations).
But still, one 3 minute play of a Lady Gaga song would make her £55.32.
Or indeed a THIRD of the totally amount of money she's receiving for a million plays on Spotify.
Much as I love Spotify, I really can't see how it's going to continue if the people who're making the content for it only receive such paltry rewards for their efforts. It's barely better than piracy...
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UPDATE...
So, the ever-on-the-pulse Dave Stone points me in the direction of this on Music Ally... a rebuttal, of a kind...
“Firstly, any payment to STIM would only represent a fraction of the payments rights holders receive and only for music played in one country (in this case Sweden) as we pay not only collecting societies, but also publishers and the record company to play their music,” says a spokesperson.
“Secondly, the figure (unrepresentative as it is) is from a short period just after our launch last year, way before we’d established ourselves as a music service and built up a large user base. Specific payments are of course confidential, but this is certainly wide of the mark.”
There's obviously more to this than meets the eye. Yet until someone clarifies how 'wide of the mark' it is, we'll never know whether artists are getting a good deal or not. I wonder if anyone will come out with some real figures..?
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ANOTHER UPDATE
So, Mat has found this... from Steve Lawson's blog, who's also done some quick maths on this, but using some sources suggestion that the real figures are ten times this (as the $167 is just a royalty payment... there are other things to include).
So maybe the decimal point needs to come forward a place... 0.1p per play.
And it points out that's she's also had 20 million paid downloads...
...but that this is a TOTAL figure across every platform, not attributable to Spotify, but rather to the promotional effort as a whole. She's not done badly, either way.
My point on the whole affair remains this though; compared to what they used to receive from listens to a song, there's another whole chunk of musician income that's disappeared.
What are your thoughts on the social bonfire/advertising fireworks principle of ‘not either/or, but both…’? A long term proposition, or just a step along the road to something else…
To be honest, I think that you're right about the need for both, but given human nature I also suspect that there'll always be more of a need to encourage businesses to do the hard yards of continuous daily interaction.
"Fireworks" seems so much more appealing if you're in the corner - as does magic, generally - but the real value comes from the daily commitment to the "bonfire" work. To being open and responsive to the people-what-buy-your-stuff
Equally, I think this plays to the thoughts in my chum John Winsor's latest book: "Baked In". We've allowed ourselves to believe that somehow the magic of communication can overcome mediocre product and service delivery.
Just get the right ad, the right campaign architecture, optimise the spend etc etc... and it'll be sorted.
The truth is - and always has been, I suspect - that excellent communication can make the best of a bad job but the real value comes from making the job better.
Tesco is a great example here - while advertising has played a role and the strategy is good (though identical to the one that one Safeway received plaudits for in the 90s) the real value is created more in the way they keep on going - working out ways to make things better for the customer.
Bonfire communication enables this kind of approach to business - more two-way, more responsive, more human but much more hard work. By contrast, fireworks communication tends to be prone to the outbound dialling and pointless display!
You speak to a wide variety of folks around the world… who gets it, and who needs to get there quicker?
It's hard to generalise, but I think in the client community the biggest discriminator is probably those who see making communications as a factory function and those who don't.
By this I mean those who by dint of volume have had to professionalise and develop processes for communications development. This tends to embed really unhelpful practices and ideas in the business (like "what's our message?") and make it harder to envision other kinds of communication.
It's also really hard to unpick the vested interests when budgets are huge - large amounts of money makes marketers conservative; they feel the need to not be seen to be p****** it up the wall.
For those who haven't professionalised communication as a core function of the business, it's easier to show how the bonfires approach can be embraced without entering the world of sharp suits and flower-arranging.
Smaller, more entrepreneurial businesses tend to fall into this camp.
I guess the agency model we've ended up with doesn't always help. I kind of see the purpose of a media agency like PHD being reframed as 'connecting companies with people', however that best happens. It often involves talking to other people in organisations beyond marketing departments though (HR, IT, sales and so on...).
Is it inevitable that marketing (and agencies) must break out of the 'mass communications silo' to take a much more company-wide role?
I suspect you're right here. Part of the problem for all marketing services businesses is that their ability to create value is often limited by the clients they have - by the marketing clients in particular.
It's not just creative agencies who come across as florists and astrologers: marketing people are often seen this way by other business functions.
It's interesting, isn't it: while marketing's big ideas are now everywhere (brand, consumer etc), in most organisations marketing is no closer to real leading the company's activities than it was back in the 1950s and 60s.
One of the central things you talk about in ‘Herd’ is the need to ‘light many fires and see which one(s) take(s)’...
..how’ve you found selling that into marketers who’re used to lighting fast working fireworks? Any tips?
Boring answer: the place to start is probably by understanding where the marketers are coming from - what the other issues and conversations they are party to which are shaping the context to this particular issue.
Sometimes there's already a willingness to accept the relative ineffectiveness of past firework activity; sometimes not. Sometimes there's a willingness to accept the world is complex and inherently unpredictable so you'd better; other times this just scares the bejeezus out of clients.
Find out this kind of stuff and adjust your pitch accordingly.
HERD answer: seeing what other companies are doing always helps. Particularly successful ones.
Finally, what do you foresee in the future for the bonfires and fireworks?
I rather suspect that the future for fireworks advertising is going to be rather less rosy than many imagine.
Of course, we'll need these gunpowder-fuelled punctuation marks (and shows of corporate virility) but increasingly a combination of the bonfires model and the Baked-In idea (making things better and making better things) are going to prevail.
Less glamorous but rather more valuable to our clients - and for those agencies who do it well, too.
Dear eBay
Hi, how are you doing? Oh, not well?
Well yes, I kind of gathered that from the fact that at the beginning of the month you started to send me (no doubt as part of some sort of 'lapsed customer re-engagement program') an email EVERY SINGLE DAY...
....under the snappily titled 'Daily Deals'. Yeah, I spotted that they were daily. Nice.
Every day. Every single day, without me asking for them. Thanks for that.
Just quickly, I thought I'd list down what actually may be wrong with this...
...partially for you, and other companies, to think about when looking at big email databases full of emails (including mine) and wondering what to do with it...
...and partially as a cathartic rant from a new dad who had five hours sleep last night and just needs to VENT.
1. It's just spam
No matter what sort of relationship you've had with customers before, if you start emailing them more than they deem 'socially necessary', you take the 'relationship' and turn it into 'advertising'.
Which may be what you want to do. But to the customer, it just becomes more spam clogging up their inbox.
Use advertising as advertising, and use emails as the opportunity to start a conversation.
PS. There are Nigerian Princes who would consider sending you emails daily as overkill...
2. It's not even targeted
I've used eBay a fair few times... I'm not any sort of power user, but there at least 25+ transactions that may give you a hint about the sorts of things I like. Guitars, gadgets, and other random micselleany.
I imagine you have all this saved up against my profile, and could use it to target the 'deals' you show me a bit more cleverly. Instead, the things you've told me that I can buy (and therefore think I may be interested in) include amongst other things...
5-1 Disney Hair Styler
WWE Smackdown 2010 for Xbox OR PS3
Stila Make-up set and bag
Mega Bloks Streetz Construction set
Jedward T-Shirt
Hannah Montana Sleepover pamper kit
I don't know what I did in the past to persuade you that I was a Disney fixated, crossdressing wrestling fan who was supporting Jedward in this year's X-Factor, but I'm now kind of worried.
Either that, or you're just sending me a random list of shit that's available to buy in eBay.
Oh, it is the latter? Phew. I can't let people know about my Jedward fandom...
...on which matter, now that we're talking about it, I'd like to confirm that Jedward are the single most likely entity to save music...
...as it's entirely possible that when they win X-Factor this year on charm and showmanship alone, it'll bring every eccentric in the country out of the woodwork and into audtions, and next year's competition and all those after it will simply resemble the clown school that the X-Factor actually is...
...which means people might actually having to look elsewhere to listen to music. We can but hope, anyway. Meanwhile, back to the point...
3. It's NEVER-ENDING
...ok, I exagerrate slightly. It can be ended, as you helpfully point out near the top of the emails. But rather than an instant 'if you don't want these emails, click and we'll stop', it instead has the following message:
"If you no longer wish to receive our Daily Deals emails, no problem,
just click here and you will be removed within 4 working days."
Oh eBay, I worry about you for two reasons.
Firstly, you've clearly got such awful automation in your system that if someone does click on the link, of of your guys at eBay has to manually look through the database and switch off the link. There's no other excuse for it taking four days.
Which means that secondly, if someone does think (like I did) that they really don't want to get an email with two pointless offers every day, then they have to go through another four emails of something they clearly don't like or want. Which isn't really a great way to make people like you.
So, eBay, please understand that yes, you were kinda fun and useful once, but now that you have taken to treating me to daily spam, I shall from hereon in have to reciprocate with growing indifference, annoyance, and an increasingly small likelihood to ever use you again.
Kindest regards 'n that
John
PS. Say hi to Boo.com when you see her...
Ain't this the truth?
(Via Zoe P)
Huge, almost feverish anticipation swept the internet when Google wave was announced. The reality some weeks later is that people seem to be:
i) waiting for an invite
ii) have an invite, but haven't had the time or inclination to stop what they're doing and 'wave'...
iii) have an invitation, have tried it, but found no-one they want to wave with for any real purpose, so stopped using it
Why? Well, I don't think it's a 'product' thing...
What is Google Wave?
Ok, a quick recap and opinion on what Google Wave is... having tried it (I'm part of iii above), it's clearly going to be a useful improvement on email.
Going back to my third year physics, conventional email is essentially a series circuit. If one bulb goes, the whole circuit stops working.
(pics from here)
In terms of email, to maximise collaboration between 4 folk you'd send it to someone, who forwards it to someone else, who then sends it to someone else, and it arrives back in your inbox with input from everybody. Then everyone's input is included.
If someone doesn't send it on, the circuit breaks, and nothing happens... until, like Christmas lights, the bulb is replaced.
In comparison, parallel circuits don't need every bulb to work in order for the others to keep working. The others keep on working until you eventually replace the dud bulb.
If you attempt to make traditional email systems a 'parallel circuit' (usually by including everyone in the email all at once), then you undoubtedly end up with a disparate set of people's input strewn across different emails...
You get multiple iterations of the email, sometime simultaneously, which isn't really all that collaborative... and more often than not, he who shouts first shouts loudest in email chains...
Anyway, it's clear that Google Wave has been created to get over this problem, and it's clear we could do with something to help us over it... but why hasn't it taken off?
A fairly rubbish launch strategy
Google have launched things very successfully before using the 'limited invites' method... just think how precious Gmail invites were, and the great word-of-mouth that the service received from those who had it.
But why is it not yielding similar success for Wave?
Well, of course, it needs everyone to change system. If you were on Gmail, you could still talk to people in with work, hotmail, yahoo or other email accounts. Gmail spoke the same 'universal language' as the other systems, so still let people connect.
Wave's not like that. It demands that everyone signs up to Wave in order to do stuff together.
And here's the problem... if you have a limited invite system in place, but need everyone in any group that want to 'Wave' together to have an invite in order to make it work properly, then there's going to be an issue...
...essentially you've designed a beautiful parallel circuit, but you're only letting one bulb use it at a time...
Fixing the problem
So, how can they rectify this issue? Obviously they don't want everyone testing it at once... I'm sure there's all sorts of load testing issues and refinement stuff they're up to.
But perhaps they should change the way they distribute invites, or change the language they use to do it?
Ask people something like 'want to collaborate with others on Google Wave? Then write a quick outline of the project, give us the emails of the peopel you want to collaborate with, and we'll invite them for you...'
Rather than inviting people as individuals, invites teams of people as 'projects'.
And then all of those people will be able to see what Wave can really do for them...
Barcodes? The future of shopping? Is this some weird sort of retro post? Like when the newspaper does 'today in 1972...'?
Because, of course, there's nothing new about the barcode... it was first tested in US supermarkets in the sixties. As technology goes, it's as old as the hills.
So how on earth can it be the future of shopping?
Because what matters nowadays is not the barcode itself, but the reader...
Supermarkets (and now other high street chains) have been putting the control of scanning in the hands of customers for a few years now... not as an advantage to the customer, necessarily, but as an automation of a job that used to be done by checkout assistants.
(...the economic labour market implications of this helps explain why the five members of Girls Allowed had to find alternative employment...)
It's not really a move that's putting the customer 'in control' of course... the important part (price comparison with other possible competitors) is locked away.
With developments such as this, and through years of watching shop assistants at work, we've all been taught by the shops how to scan barcodes...
However... imagine you could take that barcode, and scan it with something else... something that lets you compare prices across every outlet, order it online... and essentially through market forces means that the price you pay becomes as low as possible...
Well, that scanner is here. And it costs £1.19. And it's an app for the iPhone 3GS called Redlaser...
It works like this; you fire up the app, and it uses the camera on the phone to take a picture of any UPC barcode you hold in front of it, as the video explains...
When I first heard about it, I expected it to work on things like books, CDs and the like... but then I tried it on baby milk...
...which quickly told me that our local pharmacy were charging £1.19 for something that costs £0.58 in Boots.
I still can't quite get my head around just how big a step this represents in the way our economy works... but it's taken me back to my Economics degree and a thing called Perfect Competition.
Like many things in Economics, Perfect Competition was just a theory based on unattainable assumptions... infinite buyers & sellers, costless transactions, zero entry/exit barriers and so on
...read the wikipedia entry here for a full explanation)...
...but the one assumption that is close to becoming fulfilled by Redlaser is Perfect Information; prices and quality of all goods in the market are known to every seller AND every buyer.
Perfect Competition as a theory has many ramifications... but perhaps the most important is this; it becomes impossible in the long run for any company in the market to do any more than cover their costs.
So for instance, if I have perfect information about everyone who sells Aptamil baby milk, and there is no 'transaction costs' which set any seller apart (e.g. I can order from all store in bulk via the internet), then I'll always just order the cheapest one.
Which means for both the retailer (Boots) & manufacturer (Aptamil), I'll only ever give them the least possible money for the baby milk.
If everyone did that, for every product, that manufacturers and retailers would only ever break even, as market forces will continually drive down prices...
(Now, that's not of course how everyone behaves now... but it's got me thinking of something that's worth a separate post. And I think there's more implications for the Perfect Competition hypothesis from the internet too, but I'll go in to them on another separate post too...)
So we'll all have perfect price information, but what about the other half of Perfect Information; the quality of products?
How can we possibly begin to share the information about a vast array of products across society in a way that bypasses manufacturers and retailers...
...oh, hang on, right you are...
Whatever it is you're buying nowadays, there's a discussion/forum/review on the internet from other people which will guide you as to the quality of the product you're looking at.
What does it all mean?
Well, in a world where people have access to Perfect Information about just about every market, what implications does this have for branding?
Is traditional branding a mechanism that only works to protect price premiums in a world of imperfect competition? Will I find out about the quality of products from other people, then the cheapest place to buy it via mechanisms like Redlaser?
I'm certainly going to be thinking about this a lot more in the weeks to come... probably at 4:00am when I'm feeding James with all this bargain baby milk we've been buying...
Guest puppy feeder... Jason Spencer
Jason is Managing Director of PHD North in Manchester, and is nicely fostering the 'Feeding The Puppy' spirit there... he recently attended the 'Science of Success' seminar in Manchester featuring Malcolm Gladwell & Daniel Goleman, and has come away with four main thoughts inspired by what he heard there...
...'can I share them on Feeding The Puppy?' asks Jason. You certainly can, Mr Spencer...
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3. Beware success
If you only ever shout about yourself, people are going to stop listening…
Alongside the history of Fleetwood Mac and the turning point in the American Civil War (more on that another time…), Malcolm Gladwell offered his own take on what has caused the financial crisis we have found ourselves in.
It is all down to “expert failure” and how we deal with overconfidence in others. We tolerate it rather than condone it. Or at least we have done until now.
There is a five stage process:
expertise – success – confidence – overconfidence – disaster
This is essentially the chronology of the recent banking crisis and can be specifically seen in the demise of companies like Bear Stearns for instance. In gathering as much information as we can, we become more confident in our ability to predict outcomes. It makes us experts.
This leads to a “miscalibration gap” as Gladwell coins it, where we believe we have more knowledge and control over situations than we really do have.
While a bit of overconfidence is no bad thing – do we really want surgeons who fail to reassure us that everything will be alright? As Gladwell pointed out – too much blinds us to the reality of what is going on and clouds judgement. His view is we should encourage humility in our experts, rather than expertise per se.
This got me thinking about successful brands. A little
humility goes a long way.
Big brand behaviour or behaving like a market leader is all very well but it goes back to the point I make earlier around speed dating. You cannot ignore the “you” in all this.
If you only ever shout about yourself, people are going to stop listening.
Brand confidence is a good thing. But never forget that the most important element – the target audience/consumer. Or it may end up in disaster.
Does this work for brand leaders in practice as well as theory? Can brands really suffer from some sort of Shakespearian hubris? Let me know what you think….
I'd seen this video around in a few places (including Rosie's, Fiona's and Simon's blogs), and I wasn't going to re-post it here... but I now have:
It's promoting the Economist's Media Convergence Forum in October in NYC, and it's a treasure trove of facts, stats and info on the things that, when you piece them altogether, help build a picture of how the world is changing.
(Steve, in his endearingly grumpy way, points out that some of the stats might be a little shaky...)
So, why did I repost when I wasn't going to?
I saw that it was actually created by Xplane, the visual thinking company. Their mission is to 'create understanding' by helping their clients find simple, clear ways to visualise things
I've got a book written by founder Dave Gray called Marks and Meanings I'm a big fan of, and generally think they've got a great approach to simplifying complicated things to explain them well.
It's something I try to do with my own work, and encourage a culture of at PHD.
I guess I'm on the right track; Ted at The Conversation Group took the first half of this 'Future of Advertising' presentation (didn't listen to the audio) and presented it to a University class over in California... which I guess means it must be pretty self explanatory.
So yes, I think we've all slept through enough presentations where people read the 50 words they've written on a chart off the screen.
Let's keep it simple.
Mark at PHD in San Francisco posted this up that he found... a chart of predicted media split up to 2020.
But the box in the top corner for me is telling the real story; by 2020 80% of the hours we spend with media will be 'digital'. Which, let's be honest, might as well be all of it.
Faris pointed out the other day that even if a medium isn't digital, people will use digital things to 'augment' it themselves anyway. Sharing their thoughts on the X Factor through facebook, twitter, forums etc. They take non-'digital' media and make it 'digital'.
And he also pointed out, rightly, that it's increasingly irrelevant to keep using the term 'digital'.
We need more 'Post Divisionalist Thinking'. It's not 'digital' and 'traditional'. You can't separate the two on a media plan, or indeed for the people you're trying to reach out to.
At the risk of sounding trite, it's all just stuff. Things that you, as a meadja person, use to try and connect people with companies.
We didn't group the old stuff together because it was all made of atoms, or all broadcast over radio waves. So we shouldn't group the new stuff together because it's all made of digital bits.
