TheWayoftheWeb

My Bauer Media colleague Dave Cushman has raised some interesting questions in an excellent blog post: 17 lessons for the new marketing.

Hopefully he’ll forgive me for pointing out that as an ex sub-editor and production editor, blogging has had an effect on his spelling! Unless assetts is a clever pun!

He raises important questions about the purpose and value of content in the modern world. One which is navigated via Google, RSS, social networks, and chat. One in which it’s possible to find almost any information/content for free if you have the time. And Bill Drummond’s 17 project is definitely a good trigger for thinking about new ways to consider content.

I do disagree that having an almost infinite amount of music means it loses value – in terms of interest, and whether participating always gives rise to a richer experience than being part of an audience – even of one. As a musician, I’ve had some appalling times trying to play with groups of people – and I’ve had some superb times listening to recordings alone or with friends. And sites like Last.fm allow me to listen to far more music than I’d have encountered via broadcast media.

And in the modern world, long dead musicians are being remixed, reproduced, and mashed into new symphonies by people who weren’t even alive for the original recordings. It’s not about retreading the path of the minstrel back to the dark ages by dismissing recordings, but embracing the new ways of continues creation for a piece of content by new artists and new technologies.

Perhaps this is one of the most important lessons – and one which necessitates the move from broadcast. That of constant change. What may work for me at one moment can change within seconds, and the only person who will know that change has happened will be me. And that constant change is only made possible by broadcast technology (ever wondered by uploads are so much slower than downloads?) being re-purposed by the end user in the same way as radio gave rise to pirate stations, and video and digital TV gave rise to lo-fi film-making.

What we’re both striving for is a new outlook and way of doing things to ensure future relevance and success. David sums it up with his opening question for editorial/media types:

What do you do if you don’t have any content?

And points out how that leads to the likes of Google, Youtube, Wikipedia and Twitter. Interestingly only one of them is an undisputed financial success, but in terms of content, they have an almost infinite amount and yet create nothing except the context in which to access it all.

When asked about resourcing levels, I once heard someone say ‘Content will take care of itself’. I don’t believe that’s true. What I believe is that ‘Content will be created by itself – and it’s our opportunity to take care of it’. And that means the creation experience, the publishing experience, the marketing experience and the live experience. All things that traditional media companies have experience of doing, and  could now begin to perform as a service, rather than an end in itself. After all, as David would say, we’re in an era of unfinished symphonies.

(And I’ve since learned that it applies to Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy:

“The percussion loop is the “belly break” sampled from a Bob James‘ cover of Paul Simon’s “Take Me To The Mardi Gras” which was also used by Run DMC on ‘Peter Piper’. The voice at the beginning of the song is a sample of John McLaughlin“. – from Wikipedia.