Facebook, Apple and The Future
Here’s one of the things you notice as you use Facebook more and more. You actually, probably, have more funny and smart friends than you’d previously thought. People here and there using the “Status” update to say something funny or pithy or just inappropriate. Something that makes you think or gives you pause and or makes you laugh.
I was staring at Facebook the other day and thinking about the future and about how and what it meant for media in general. Same old conversation that I always have with myself. That being, with a geometric increase in the amount of content available on the web, what were the implications for media companies, for content itself, for old-school monopolistic distribution systems.
We are entering a new age.
There Is No Them, There Is Only Us
I’ve been following the Healthcare debate and thinking about government and thinking about people and thinking about The Wire and how all of it informs my personal point-of-view on things.
I suppose I have a Hamiltonian view of the nature of man. I like and want to believe in the inherent goodness of a single man but I’d like to reserve that belief until I’ve been given evidence to the affirmative. And I have a fundamental problem with big groups of men. Institutions.
I don’t trust them.
I am deeply skeptical of their ability to do good things. I am deeply skeptical of their ability to correct themselves once they’ve been sent in a bad direction. Once big groups of people come together, perverse incentives manifest themselves, politics and bureaucracy come into play, simple problems become complex, constituencies take root, and, ultimately, things become frustrating and weird and the system subsequently breaks.
It doesn’t matter whether you call these big groups of people ‘companies’ or ‘government’ or ‘lobbyists’ or ‘environmentalists’ or ‘tea partiers’ or whatever. Well, maybe it matters a little bit.
But, ultimately, from my perspective, it all boils down to the same basic premise that institutions are comprised of people and people will pursue the incentives that the system has established for them.
The bigger the group of people, the more complicated the solution. Sometimes there aren’t solutions. I fundamentally assume that the reason big institutions have trouble finding solutions to difficult problems is because they are difficult, because the institution itself is beholden to so many diverse interests that the very assumption of simplicity is a misnomer and a lie.
I know and believe that there is a fundamental error in most of the Left’s calculati0n about the role of government and the forces that oppose its expansion. And that is that “them” exists in any meaningful way. “Them” being lobbyists or “big government” or an “other”. That there is a good force of good people in the world and a bad force.
That “profit-seeking companies” are bad and “government” is good. I don’t believe that. I believe that the same issues plague both groups of people. That the incentives in place will necessarily dictate the outcomes and that, the bigger the group, the more likely that you’ll see perversity of incentives corrupt the means of the institution.
That is to say, I suppose the only thing I truly trust is a small group of people pursuing a simple objective and having the courage and the focus to forgo other opportunities and distractions.
And a large group of people, like the Federal Government, I simply don’t trust. I don’t trust the government to spend my money wisely nor do I trust them to be efficient nor do I trust them to hire and fire based on the right incentives and metrics.
Large groups of people, like companies or the government or huge non-profits like The Red Cross, become ends unto themselves. They exist to continue their existence. And to grow. All they know how to do is eat more and more.
The Artist’s Identity Crisis
Periodically, I ask myself, “Why am I doing this?” The money is leaving the music industry. And yet there are still memes and ideas and conventions that people espouse. Yet those conventions were all created under a specific pretense. That pretense is that you’re doing it because you want to become known and recognized for the art you create and that, through that fame and recognition, you can make enough money to support yourself and live.
So people will tell you to quit your day job and people will say, “Do you want to do this full time?” and people will encourage you to pursue a course that is no longer current or modern or viable.
For some people it’s viable I suppose. For Grizzly Bear or Animal Collective there is the possibility that you can license your songs to film or television, sell out some big venues and make a nice middle class living making music.
But the fact remains that money has left the music industry. There is less of it these days than there used to be. In the old days, there were record deals. There were pots of cash and, even though there were plenty of strings, those pots of cash were waiting for a specific group of artists. And not even artists that were just the very very top. There was a class of investment that was occurring in the music industry and that investment followed a specific set of guidelines.
Those guidelines still exist of course but the payoff has been reduced to nothing or as near nothing as is prudent.
So, for example, the guidelines say that:
a) you should tour and play often to build up a grassroots following
b) you should record often
c) you should network and schmooze and line up your ducks with your lawyer and your manager and your agent and your coterie of assistants and helpers
d) you should invest in merch and schwag and while touring you should sell merch to people as a means of supporting your touring which you recognized was unprofitable
And if you do all of those things, there was a chance, albeit small, that at the end of a rainbow, after years of hard work, there was a middle class lifestyle. There was an apartment where you could comfortably pay rent every month. There was health insurance. There was enough money maybe even to raise a family. The promise of the “middling” class, as it were. The artisans and the tradesmen that formed the foundation of the original middle class development in the United States back in the 18th Century.
But now, the risk/reward on all that has shifted, as if it could, even more precariously to the right. That’s what happens when the pie gets smaller. There is simply less to go around.
So the question becomes, “Ok what next?”
Eternity and Infinity
Back in 2008, when I was just getting the band together, we covered the song ‘All My Friends’ by LCD Soundsystem a few times. We played it at, I think, our first 2 or 3 shows. The great thing about Rockwood (and basically every club these days) is that they offer a recording option for bands to pull the shows right off the board. So I grabbed the recording, sent it off to Joe Lambert to spruce it up a bit and then sent it out to my fan club. Again, this was about 18 months ago.
Various things have happened since then. Originally, Lucas Jensen at Hypeful picked up on it and voted it #18 best cover of 2008. That was fun mainly because I hadn’t really promoted it that much. A few people here and there heard it. Then, months later, I noticed that someone in the comments section of the blog at The AudioMuffin had mentioned our version of the tune. So that was strange and fun and weird as well. Because somehow, even for an artist as small as lil ol me, these little rivulets of the internet had trickled into someone’s mind and I hadn’t really had to do anything or make anything.
Then, last week, I finally got off my ass and got the show from December 2009 mastered. I emailed Frank at The AudioMuffin to see if they wanted an exclusive on this new cover of ‘Someone Great’ that we’d done, also off of Sound of Silver. He jumped on it. And then posted a nice write-up that mentioned the other cover of ‘All My Friends’ and, because it’s the internet and these songs are in digital form and easily accessible and findable, he posted the other cover and a few other things about the band.
Long story long.
Music vs Movies
On Tuesday, I tweeted that, on the website Metacritic, the average film score is 52 and the average music score for an album is 70.
This is probably not surprising to anyone that actually visits Metacritic. If you spend any time on the site, you see that there are so many albums that come out that seem “great” by the standards of critics. Whereas, for film the critics are much tougher and much more skeptical and it’s simply far less frequent that a film gets a great grade.
So why is this?
There are many possibilities.
Nothing Beats Being Right
Do you ever have a strange feeling reading these marketing blogs? Seth Godin, Derek Sivers, the cartoonist guy that’s friends with Seth Godin. It’s a not entirely new breed of self-help phenomenon. Very often they’re doling out little pieces of wisdom. Little nuggets. I read them a lot. Then there are the guys like Timothy Ferris that wrote the “4 Hour Work Week.” It’s fun to read these guys.
This isn’t a novel thought. Just that there doesn’t seem to be any direct correlation between, say, the web traffic that Seth Godin gets and the number of solved problems in the world. Actually, that may not entirely be true. But I just find it a strange and disconcerting thing. All these dudes doling out advice. And the reason they’re giving advice is because they’ve “made it”. They’ve written some best-selling books. They’ve started some cool new companies.
And the premise is that if if you can just ingest these lessons. If you can take them to heart and really live them then, maybe slowly but surely, you can remodel your DNA after these gurus and then be successful or rich or happy or whatever. And people do indeed crave that assurance. That if they just make a few switches here and there and internalize the thousands of lessons being.
I’m either a skeptic or a determinist or just a bummer. But as much as I enjoy reading these guys and think about what they write, I am still skeptical about the power of their words, or anyone’s words, to really change things or change behavior. But then, I’m doing the same thing.
And I doubt if you asked them they’d say the point was to “change people’s lives”. Rather, they’re more likely just in the business of spreading good ideas.
Nevertheless, it’s always struck me that there’s no comparison to just being right. There are many paths to success. And many ways to achieve your goals. And if you read Seth Godin’s blog or the Bible or any other weighty tome that has a lot of little nuggets of wisdom, you’ll most likely find that they contradict each other, and that they’re often helpful but in very specific circumstances. And that’s okay.
But there are no books to help you emulate Jack Welch or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. At least, I don’t really believe in them. I believe that certain people have good taste and the discipline to pursue it and those people succeed. And if they’re good writers they write a book about it or a blog about it. And the people reading that book will most likely not have good taste and, aside from hiring the author to make all their decisions for them, won’t be able to implement a lot of the rules consistently enough to make a difference.
But tell me if I’m being an idiot or a downer unnecessarily. It just strikes me that nothing beats being right.
