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Editor's Notes

1. Introduce myself
2. They were hubs of creative energy and capital. They also housed massive egos, especially through the 70s and 80s as record companies were profitable and growth was strong. The consolidation and corporatization of the industry made the egos bigger and the paychecks larger. Something was being destroyed in the process.
3. But in 1999, the egos took a serious blow.Napster and Peer to Peer distribution put a huge crack in their business model as how people discover and acquired music changed. It quite famously took us a long time to notice this or even admit that our business model was now broken. Blame the egos, blame the cost of changing.
4. In 1999, the revenues of the global recorded music industry peaked at 40 billion dollars a year. Depending on who you ask, It’s been dropping about 10% each year since then.
5. But something more interesting also happened. Control shifts in 1999 from the industry and the media to the consumer. The disruptive shift hits music (and newspapers) very hard and all the rules change. Within a decade, the ecosystem around music is totally different and the dominant players are all different. Clay Shirky’s “collapse of complex business models” is very much the story here. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/ (but if you have seen an Apple or Google Keynote, you can tell we still have the egos)
6. Let me take you through how a label’s business model worked
7. Discovery:Labels had entire departments dedicated to getting our music played everywhere. You’ve heard the phrase “sex, drugs and rock and roll?” You can thank our promotions teams for fueling that whole era. If any of you know the history of Casablanca records – the disco label of the seventies – you know what I’m talking about.
8. Labels made vinyl and cassettes, then ultimately CDs and DVDs, which was what they were good at. They’ve become become pretty good at getting digital products out too and that’s become a pretty decent business for them but it has only slowed the decline, not stopped it.
9. Having music fans love the artist and their songs was a pretty cool by product of selling them stuff but a lot of the big labels didn’t think it was all that important. Certainly not a business model.
10. A product to a record company exec is the sound track to someone’s life. We have to realize that our products don’t exist in a vacuum and that thecontext and process in which a music fan discovers and uses that music matters as much as the act of buying it. Maybe more.
11. Creating a platform for music fans to interact, discover, talk about and share music means we need be offering something more valuable than a digital music file. It has to be better than what I can get for free from the internet with a few key strokes.
12. These are the players and their value is not in units sold – the slides that Ken showed were the wrong measurement of these companies. Their value is different than we’re used to seeing. Spotify and other access models actually have the potential to generate MORE revenue than we used to get from recorded music. Mangling Gibson: The future (and the revenue model) is there but it’s just not evenly distributed.
13. So if that’s the great opportunity for us, how do we get there?
14. Labels are in an ideal place to create these “generative” values – if they can change.Kelly’s definition: A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.
15. So what does this conversation look like?
16. If we don’t recognize and amplify the value of the community and the ecosystem around the artist, labels are stupid and doomed to irrelevance.
17. To do this, you need people, process and technology. These are the tools that labels MUST provide to stay relevant. If we don’t, there are people and companies ready to provide this to artists directly. This is TopSpin’s business model.
18. We’re now regularly in the top tier of sites dedicated to music, beating our competition in terms of traffic and engagement.Our goal was to bring back music fans from the places where they were going instead of our sites, which had become bad brochures for selling a record. They were ghost towns between releases.The real test: Do a google search for one of our artists.
19. Free tracks, Early preview listening parties, exclusive events for fans, meet and greets backstage. It’s about adding value to the music that fans are buying and rewarding people who engage with us and with the artist. Most importantly, over time, You’ll see us do a LOT MORE for fans who still BUY from us instead of stealing it.
20. Once you know who the fans are and what they want (and don’t want), you can start offering them great products and services. This doesn’t mean we wont still work with the high street and online partners. This is just another channel for us.
21. This last step closes the loop. To listen to them, you need to find them where they live online and to sort through the data we collect on them in a meaningful way: We’re doing surveys and going to social networks with our Neolane forms so that we can collect the fans from the sites that we don’t control.
22. English speaking countries don’t get this but anyone outside the UK will know that they often get emails from artists in english and with a link to WalMart or Best-Buy, US retailers which arent available globally. How much more rude could you get?