Building a business on free presentation
Tuesday, November 06, 2007

So last night I had the pleasure of speaking at Building A Business On Free. I kicked things off by talking about the music industry from an outsider's POV, comparing and contrasting being a new artist with being an internet startup. I have to say researching this talk was an eyeopening experience. To any new online startup who thinks they've got it hard, imagine if your VCs ran your ops team and could decide to just stop promoting or manufacturing your product, and in fact could stop you from manufacturing it or marketing it too! Scary business, huh?

My Building A Business On Free presentation is here.

This was followed by a great panel discussion which I learned loads from, not least from the insightful Andrew Dubber who had a great no-nonsense take on things, completented by Kieron (who runs the small label that owns Nizlopi) and Davey from The Crimea, who recently gave away their album for free, and so were able to bring practical insight to the discussion.

It was an interesting chat - we spent a lot of time talking about strategies for success for individual acts (mostly of the Godinesque "remarkability" flavour) although it would've been great to discuss what new equilibrium we thought the industry as a whole might find. I'm sure I'll be able to read about on Andrew's blog sometime though :-)

There was also this guy who seemed uppity that we weren't acknowledging the role of music producers in the process. My own personal response is simply that it doesn't pose a particularly interesting problem (at least from my POV) - no matter how bands make money or what they do with their music, they'll still want to make great sounding records, and they'll still need producers, so I don't really see what the matter is. He also criticised music retailers for "not doing enough to sell music" which is perhaps true (he produced an act that merged jazz and hip-hop sounds and HMV pointblank refused to stock the album in both section, a perfect illustration of endemic pigheadedness) but then he praised the supermarkets and other retailers constantly doing new things to drive the price of goods down and get customers buying. This struck me as a terrible example, because if there's one set of producers getting shafted more than musicians by major labels, it's farmers getting driven to the point of bankruptcy by major retailers insisting on lower and lower prices.

All in all, a mind expanding evening, and one that's apparently left Jey plotting to get to Xmas #1, something I entirely support, as long as a get a cameo in the music video.

(One thing I did learn in terms of presenting is how much the space matters - I kind of had a bar in my way and then had to lean on it to get near the mic, adopting the "conversational barman" pose, so it was hard to get into the right frame of speech and restrain myself from chatty rambling. I think it was alright, though, but something I'll watch out for in the future!)

Labels: business, music, panel, presentation

3 Comments:

 The World's Greatest Music said...

Maybe HMV were right not to stock that guy's album. Maybe it wasn't any good, and didn't have the exposure necessary to be bought in HMV. There is only so much space in the racks.

11:05 AM  

 Guy P said...

/me concedes this is also a possibility. not least as the idea of a jazz/hiphop fusion makes me feel a bit weird.

11:48 AM  

 Dubber said...

I can help on this one. The album was by Soweto Kinch, who is not only a very good rapper, but he's pretty much Britain's best saxophonist. MOBO Award for best jazz act and everything.

Here's his Wikipedia entry

And - for the record - I paid full retail for his album, but I got it at a little independent record store / internet cafe. Didn't even bother looking in a chain. Idiots.

2:06 PM  

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