The CD died for me today…

April 30, 2011 By 1 Comment

Today is a sad day for me. I’ve finally come to the conclusion I’m never going to buy a shiny musical disc of music ever again, putting a stop to the denial I’ve had for the past decade as I’ve watched the rise of digital media and the fall of physical editions.

You might think I’ve gone slightly mad – for years I’ve been watching and writing about the rise of digital technology, and lamenting the lack of change in creative industries, particularly the music industry which still tries to hamper innovation with licencing rules from the era of piano rolls.

And yet I have to admit to a personal state of denial inspired by my obsessive librarian tendencies.

I’ve long enjoyed alphabetically and chronologically ordered entertainment collections, whether CD, DVD or videogame. I bought the books and magazines to find out more about bands and then became the guy who would research every song he liked on Wikipedia and Last.fm. My music habit runs to the £1000s in vinyl, CDs, and attempting to elevate my nerd status by playing guitar and bass, and occasionally DJ’ing to try and legitimise it!

But if you want to experience what it was like to be a scribe when the printing press arrived, or a blacksmith who saw cars driving past his workshop, go and buy a CD in the average town.

Image courtesy Hoveringdog on Flickr (CC Licence)

For some reason, I fancied buying a CD today. Despite the availability of Spotify, Soundcloud, Last.fm, Youtube, Mflow, Blip.fm and Myspace, I thought I’d save a little bandwith (For American readers – when you complain about bandwith restrictions on broadband – we’re lucky to get a quarter of the harshest American cable monopoly). So I thought I’d browse alongside picking up some food essentials in some fairly sizeable shopping outlets…

And CDs don’t exist any more.  Outside of the ‘chart’ of 10, 20, or 30 albums, noone stocks anything. At the same time, I can buy gift vouchers for every digital music service while I’m at the checkout till.

Dan’s Tipping Point:

To get an album in even the right genre, it was easier for me to drive home, go online, and purchase music rather than journey into the centre of town to visit the one specialist music shop and be able to browse more than 30 CDs in one location.CDs are gone…

 

And yet…

I still belive that vinyl will continue to do well in the future, because it’s a great ‘artifact’. In the same way as I still buy print editions of books I love after reading them electronically, there’s something in the delivery of a vinyal album that encapsulates art, emotion, memories etc, and whether or not it’s an audiophile lie, there’s something in the ceremony of dropping a needle onto a record.

CD’s don’t do that. They were a luxurious convenience that arrived around the time I bought my first ‘proper’ stereo seperate system, but they don’t provide a great memento.

And now I wonder when we’ll hit on the right format for film. If print provides the physical archetype for text, and vinyl is the physical high point of music as digital is the most convenient form for both, could anyone argue the VHS or DVD offer anything to film fans? I’d hate to think the laserdisc was a good idea, or to go back to projectors, so perhaps film is still missing a medium (For videogames it had to be a cartridge!).

I wonder how many of us are writing about embracing technology, yet still get surprised when we see it passing?

Filed Under: Digital Culture Tagged With: , , , ,

Celebrating the most important marriage of the week…

April 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

And no, it’s not the royal wedding. As much as I hope Kate and William have a long and happy life together, they’re not friends or acquintances, and as part of a consititutional monarchy, they’re unlikely to have any effect on my life. I’m celebrating the marriage of Delicious, the incredibly useful and powerful social bookmarking service which was neglected since acquisition by Yahoo, with new owners AVOS, which despite sounding like a major shopping website, is actually the new company from Youtube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

I’ve written in the past about Delicious alternatives, and how I ended up moving from using Delicious as my primary bookmarking tool to using Diigo with Delicious as a backup. But this could change things.

  • Hurley and Chen have a lot of experience in social information sharing – that’s essentially what Youtube is. Upload your video data and use some quick and simple social tools to hopefully get a response.
  • Delicious may have stagnated but there’s a huge amount of data there, just waiting to be utilised more effectively.
  • The AVOS press release regarding the acquisition references making it ‘easier and more fun to save, share and discover‘, plus ‘The YouTube founders plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload‘. Two of those issues have been key to Delicious, and the third is something which is become an increasingly timely problem.

And lastly, I have a bit of a hypothesis that this may be a project that Hurley and Chen will look to build longterm rather than setting up for an acquisition in 18 months as happened with Youtube. Firstly, Delicious has been on the block for a while, and social bookmarking tools aren’t exactly hot commodities. Secondly, this isn’t their hope to make enough cash to live on for the rest of their lives – they’ve been there and done that. Much like Kevin Rose and Ev Williams are ‘pivoting’ what they are working on, or Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder, is returning to Reddit as an advisor, I suspect Delicious could be something that Hurley and Chen cared enough about to acquire and set-up as something they hold onto – if not, why spend the money on acquiring an existing community when their names and expertise could probably build up something from scratch to the same level pretty fast with no acquisition cost?

That last paragraph is all optimism and speculation, but one thing I do know is that we’re sure to see some positive changes to Delicious, and it’s now being run by people who really know the power of data, social and sharing.

Filed Under: Useful Tools Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

‘Do The Work’ by Steve Pressfield

April 25, 2011 By 5 Comments

I previously received and reviewed Seth Godin’s Poke The Box, and now the nice people at the Domino Project have sent me their second book, ‘Do The Work‘ by Steven Pressfield. It’s particularly interesting as I wasn’t really familiar with Pressfield, having never got around to reading ‘The War of Art‘ or his fiction novels, so I was able to experience the print format in a fresh way.

One of my criticisms of Poke The Box was that I was already a fan of Seth Godin, so the shorter, more concise manifesto approach felt like more of a retread than a new fresh idea, and the brevity meant that it felt like some of the meat of the issue was missing. Having enjoyed Do The Work, that’s perhaps more of a problem when you’re already familiar with an author and their ideas, as although it follows a very simple level of commentary, it felt more inspiring and useful. Mixing two font sizes within each 1-2 paragraph section also encouraged me to approach it as a book to dip into every so often as a motivating voice, rather than looking at it as something lengthy which needed to be consumed from beginning to end.

‘Resistance aims to kill’

The basic concept of the book is to follow the battle that takes place against the force of resistance on a specific project. Whether that’s producing something artistic or entrepreneurial, Pressfield paints the picture of you as a knight facing down the dragon of resistance, and isn’t afraid you keep beating you around the head with the various ways resistance appears, and how it can be overcome.

It opens with the various ways resistance can appear, and then pushes you on through starting a project, the middle, and completion. I won’t go into details, as that would probably remove much of the reason for buying it – like Poke The Box, it’s more motivational than necessarily educational, although you can certainly pick up quite a few tips and techniques to actually get stuff done along the way (I will say putting a limit on how much research you do before starting an idea is a good one).

It’s very much about Getting Things Done, and as I flick through it again, I’m not sure whether it’s encouraging or shouting at me like a drill sergeant. Either way, it does feel like Pressfield is contained in the pages, to berate me for not getting on with a project, or to suggest a quick way to possibly overcome some resistance.

Considering it costs less than £6 at the moment in hardback, it’s well worth picking up, even if at first glance you might wonder about spending cash on something only running to 98 pages. But it’s not a book to be judged by length or weight – it’s a book to be judged by whether it results in getting you, or someone you know, into gear and completing a good project. And for that it’s worth the price – and I reckon everyone knows at least one other person who could benefit from the same voice pushing them to get something started, push through the resistance, and get it completed!

2 dominos down…

It’s interesting to see what happens with the Domino Project. I don’t think any figures have been released to indicate what sort of numbers it’s managing to reach, and even if it’s inspiring a handfull of people, then it’s achieving something of value for others, even if Seth and Amazon aren’t making a lot of money out of it!

It would definitely be interesting to see more books become available from a wider range of industries and subjects to hopefully read people who aren’t already established creative or marketing experts, and see what they would want to push as their manifesto, much as the TEDBooks launched as Kindle singles.

It’ll be interesting to see what comes of both publishing projects, and it’d be interesting to know how many people got on with a project after reading ‘Do The Work’. It’s certainly reminded me of 2 or 3 things I want to investigate their year…

Filed Under: Books, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The importance of beating your own drum…

April 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

There are certain people I follow on social networks who tend to share things outside of the normal technology, social media, marketing echo chamber, and one of them is Stuart Witts, who’s as likely distribute bizarre Lego creations as digital insight. He recently shared the following video, which sparked some thoughts…

Firstly, that video has been watched almost 10 million times since June 2010 as I write this. 32,000+ people have left comments and 64,000+ people have liked it – and it’s been featured on sites such as the blog of Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet.

So whether or not you think the drummer is talented, funny, or making a fool of himself, it’s proved popular. And you’ll certainly remember him far more than the rest of the band…

Right about now, I’m guessing a fair number of you are thinking about this from a marketing or advertising perspective and wondering ‘How could we do something like that and go viral?’

That’s not the point!!!

Don’t get inspired by that video.

The inspiration comes from the approach of the drummer. He probably didn’t start playing drums with the dream of wearing a gold suit jacket and playing in a cover band. It’s also pretty unlikely that anyone taught him to drum the way he does in the video. And most importantly, he’s not doing it at the expense of the song – he’s hitting all the right beats, and providing the right backing for what is meant to be the chance for the guitarist to shine.

But he’s doing it in his own way, and that’s what makes him worthy of conversation and sharing.

Now picture your industry, content, and marketing:

If those band members were representating your business competitors and their marketing strategies, one brand may have secured the traditionally starring role of the singer/guitarist.

And the rest are probably much like the bass player in the video. Doing the basics, fitting into the perceived look and feel of their industry and peers. Occasionally giving a little flourish, but generally plodding along.

Neither is particular memorable.

But certain brands are able to use their passion, belief and drive to stand out far more than anyone thought possible by doing things in their own way. And that’s what makes a brand memorable, allows people to share it without shame, and encourages people to interact and purchase from it.

But what if they don’t like us?

Now, you may think that the drummer looks like an idiot, and I’m mad to suggest your brand should be twirling drumsticks when it could be providing a nice safe steady beat. Like any £100 drum machine could do.

But that assumes that bland tolerability drives purchases and sharability more than actively loving or hating something.

Far better to have a growing army of people who love what you do, and will passionately hoover up everything you can offer.

Being actively disliked by a large number of people hasn’t stopped the Daily Mail from being the second most popular newspaper website in the world, as sad as that makes me. And it’s built a large number of people who not only like what it does, but pay money to it for that product.

Being actively disliked by some people means that they might be driven enough to explain why they don’t like you, which lets you decide whether to do something about it. And just by responding to them, you can increase your business.

If you don’t run the risk of some people disliking what you’re doing, you’ll never run the risk of being able to be loved by people who are willing to part with their scarce attention and money.

Here’s to the mad drummers.

 

Filed Under: Content Marketing, Digital Culture, marketing, social media marketing, Viral Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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