On New Media
Me and my friends often sit around and talk about how to make money. All of our ideas suck. One constant refrain is that this a new economy (especially for media). We just don’t know what that new economy is, or if it makes money at all. There is more opportunity, but seemingly less reward. I personally don’t hold out hope for publishing that one book or making that one entree into the giant media machine. I think the media machine is running on fumes. However, I don’t know exactly what replaces that, pay-per-click? advertising? speaking/events? How does a creative/media person make money nowadays?
The New York Times has an interesting editorial on the new media economy:
online, when creative affirmation finally arrives, it takes a very different form than it has in New York. In the offline world, getting a “big break” is a matter of impressing a subjective intelligence, one person or a few people who look at work with an experienced eye and declare there’s something to it. Up until now, it has been intimate encouragement that has literally set the course of whole careers: a gallery offers a show, a record label dangles a contract, a prospective boss plucks one résumé from a sheaf, and a path forward is set.
On the Internet, however, it’s not one single subjectivity but a popular hive-mind that decides. The “big break” arrives when, with lightning speed and often to one’s own surprise, the inscrutable pack decides to start forwarding one’s content around.
Online, though, the audience can be yours right away, direct and unmediated — if you can figure out how to find it and, what’s harder, to keep it.
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails also has an interesting take on making it as a modern musician.
If you are an unknown / lesser-known artist trying to get noticed / established:
* Establish your goals. What are you trying to do / accomplish? If you are looking for mainstream super-success (think Lady GaGa, Coldplay, U2, Justin Timberlake) – your best bet in my opinion is to look at major labels and prepare to share all revenue streams / creative control / music ownership. To reach that kind of critical mass these days your need old-school marketing muscle and that only comes from major labels. Good luck with that one.
If you’re forging your own path, read on.
* Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.
These ideas, of course, raise as many questions as they settle. Personally, I think we’re in a brave new world full of opportunity and short on capitalization. Media is divorced from physical products that people know how to market. A whole range of middlemen are finding themselves out of work and superstars are seeing blips from microcelebrities that threaten to upend the whole thing. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and still haven’t figured it out, specifically how it can benefit me. Still thinking.
lol. Nice pic there. Well the net is changing the face of business as a whole. I think there is a bit of an ‘on the fence’ scene where consumers are still not taking the net seriously enough to start really spending money on or thru it. I blogged about the music industry and internet influence once here – http://going-global-global.blogspot.com/2009/07/indie-profitable.html
I wonder about this too. I think one day there’ll be a universal online payment network in place, where money is transferable online instantly, across borders and oceans. Once that happens everything can be monetised, in the sense that even surfing to this blog will transfer a few pennies from my account to yours. Nothing in life is free, and therefore I think the cost-free Internet won’t last forever. Costs for surfing etc will be dynamically calculated, taking into account demand, affordability and the supply cost.
Once a global online banking system is in place, it will level the playing field for everyone, especially poorer countries, who’ll be able to sell even manual labour instantaneously. Imagine some kind of commodity exchange where power and water can be traded – people in poor countries could generate power by cycling or some other kind of physical effort, and then sell it via the exchange to a power grid that needed it – same for potable water, and so on.
Yeah, I’m still thinking too.
media evolution is geographic in nature and this may be where opportunity lies. whilst the NYT is struggling to make money from the internet – the daily mirror/sunday times is going from strength to strength – same goes for some papers in India. there was a guy in colombo who used to translate the Sinhala and Tamil daily papers into english and sell it as a fax service to the embassies/ingos/ – imagine this on the internet as a subscription service.
look at the recording artists here – how do they monetize their talent and energy – from what I understand they are sold fixed term contracts for an album and the labels make all the money from their sales with no variable component to the artist. surely there is an opportunity for someone smart to step in here and develop a frontier market music business model that could move from country to country – think sri lanka, bangladesh, laos, cambodia zimbababwe etc. also apples itunes store for sri lankan music does not exist
wow.lk’s classifieds are currently the unofficial srilankan craigslist and it sucks for usablitly. hitads.lk is trying to establish itself as a competitor. there is no real ebay or bazee.com – build the sri lankan bazee.com and sell it to ebay (don’t build a cheap wannabe but build it properly on the premise of an on-going business).
it’s still hard to get a handle on how many internet users there are in sri lanka – officially it something like 400k but i reckon with those users in offices etc this goes up to about 2-3 mil which becomes a critical mass. there are plenty of opportunities – you just need to pick your little niche and go after it, or at least try it out and see if it works.
Indeed. Print is still a great last mile technology. I think if these guys shifted some energy geographically they could make money in India and the ‘developing’ world.