Many of you have seen my presentation “business models matter“, which shows how the music industry has been slow to react to a changing industry landscape.
Here a video explanation by Mike Masnick from Techdirt of how an artist, Trent Raznor, is re-inventing business models for the music industry. Most interestingly: he shows how FREE can be the basis for earning substantial revenues…
What can other industries learn from this? I have a pretty clear idea: Business Model Innovation is possible!
Alex,
I believe that you participated in an event called Lift Conference 07 At the event, a Canadian entrepreneur named John Buckman made a presentation about his online music portal http://www.magnatune.com The idea is to reduce the influence of the record industry over musicians/consumers. When buying music on Magnatune, a large portion of the revenue goes directly to the musicians whilst also providing competitive pricing levels to consumers. John’s opening line during his presentation was: “Record companies are evil”. Marc Faltheim
Marc, thank you for the reminder. I was indeed there!
The music industry in general is a playground for business model innovation. Business people should be following that industry to learn…
great video Alex,i love the example of Trent REznor and NIN.
Maybe I am a bit biased because I blog about this particular kind of businss model, freemium.
I just did a post with a lot of video clips similar to this. Might be worth a look Freemium video conference
freemium is great for artists with solid fanbases already. any thoughts on a modification of the freemium model for newer artists, who are still focusing on growing their fanbases? these artists most likely do not have the resources to mount expensive marketing campaigns on par with reznor’s.
Eric, I do absolutely NOT agree! It is indeed difficult for an unknown artists to get attention. However, today this is possible with some creativity, whereas it was impossible to get attention from potential audiences before the rise of the Web. Nowadays there is an alternative to huge marketing budgets to get your work to spread across the globe…
I didn’t spend one dime on marketing and still I have a following across the globe and can live from my work on business model innovation. The whole challenge is to capture the attention of potential audiences. We moved from a world characterized by scarcity in distribution space to a world characterized by scarcity of attention…
With creativity and innovative business models it is possible to capture that attention. That is exactly the reason why some small record labels with little resources are outperforming the major record companies with their marketing dollars. Big marketing budgets work less and less. There is something about the Long Tail (cf Chris Anderson…)
Great summary of what NIN is up to, truly inspirational and so creative + innovative!
Great post. Wonder why all the emphasis is on the record industry. This is a business model for a non profit festival by ZXZW. It’s called Social Festival Model and based on open source collaboration via a creative commons license
http://zxzw.wetpaint.com/
Isnt it Trent Reznor?