Music industry watch
Seth Godin talks about the music industry
Seth Godin wrote up a transcript for a talk he recently gave -- I wish I could've been there to listen to it. While its not as ground breaking as David Byrne's writings, it captures the essence of the music industry today:
... when the typical person is a teenager, they’re spending a lot of time looking for more. “What’s the new thing, what’s the next thing, what’s the new thing?” But these guys don’t want that. They want to remember THEN, they don’t go looking for the new thing. And, it’s not your fault they were baby boomers, it’s not your fault the baby boomers are getting old.
At the excellent San Fran Music Tech Summit last week had a panel with a guy who worked on the original Napster. This guy now works for a music label and was totally surprised by the fact that teenagers stopped buying CDs. Its clear to me that the labels are blind not only to technology, but to general trends in their customer base. Having a marketing person like Seth Godin chime in rounds out what the Internet has been saying about labels for quite some time.
Posted by Mayhem at March 3, 2008 09:39 AM
While Bryne's article was nice and well informed, I didn't see anything groundbreaking about it. I'd say it would be hard to write anything groundbreaking about the music industry or its future. Everything that can be said has been. The only groundbreaking to be done is action -- of which there has been plenty in the past year, from labels dropping DRM to artists dropping labels to media becoming web-friendly. More more more! :)
