Kodak fell victim to disruptive technology
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MARCH 1, 2011 – Wall Street Journal
Small Tech Gets Religion
Entrepreneurs Find Churches Are a Savvy and Profitable Network to Target
By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN
When Jim Elliston, a former nondenominational pastor, decided to start a technology company in 2007, he turned to a customer he knew best—the church—to win initial business.
Mr. Elliston says his firm, Clover Sites Inc., of Newbury Park, Calif., has since sold its website templates and Web-hosting services to more than 4,500 churches in the U.S. He also counts those institutions’ members among his company’s clientele, crediting referrals for providing a steady stream of leads.
He started out promoting his business by placing an ad in a booklet for an annual church-leader conference. From there, he says the business started growing through word of mouth. Some 95% of his business now comes from churches.
“It’s a very connected market,” says Mr. Elliston, who also promotes his business by investing in Google Inc.’s AdWords for search terms such as “church website” and “church Web design.”
Prior to building Clover Sites, Mr. Elliston says he didn’t come across any website-development firms trying to appeal specifically to churches. “We realized there was a huge gap,” he says.
The number of U.S. churches has been growing steadily, while at the same time becoming increasingly tech savvy. There are roughly 350,000 churches in the U.S. today, up 12% from a decade ago, according to Infogroup Inc., an Omaha, Neb., database company. These include some 7,900 mega churches—those whose congregations number at least 2,000 attendees on Sundays.
Small firms that provide an array of services—from audio/visual expertise to website development—are finding that houses of worship can be a lucrative market.
Among them is Clark Inc., which designs and installs audio, video and lighting in Alpharetta, Ga. Regardless of their denomination, churches often refer the company to other churches, says co-founder Houston Clark. “It’s networking above and beyond what we would typically experience in the secular market,” he says.
Brad Weston, owner of Renewed Vision LLC, also in Alpharetta, agrees. “It’s somewhat uncommon for churches to think of another church down the street as a competitor,” says Mr. Weston, who has sold his company’s audio and visual-presentation software to more than 9,000 houses of worship. “It was straight through word of mouth that I got more and more customers.”
Churches are increasingly embracing technology. Many now have websites and social-media profiles, and some rely on audio and video tools to aid congregants seated far from the pulpit.
Germantown United Methodist Church in Germantown, Tenn., uses the services of several small technology providers, says Donna Thurmond, communications director. These include a Web-hosting, information-technology, videography and software company. The church, founded in 1840, has YouTube, Facebook and Twitter profiles. “We prefer to work with a small business if we can,” says Ms. Thurmond, adding that the church has about 1,000 regular attendees on Sundays. “It’s a trust issue and the feeling that we’re talking to the person who’s going to be doing the work and not someone who’s three levels away.”
Barbara Kahn, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, says promoting products or services to a specific demographic is a wise strategy for small businesses. “They don’t have the resources to go broad,” she says. “It’s easier to focus than to try and get everybody.”
By narrowing their efforts this way, small businesses are likely to “develop an expertise,” a rationale that applies to all types of clients, including churches, adds Ms. Kahn. “You can imagine if I do it one time for a church, and there are things I learn, I can apply that knowledge to the next church I work with,” she says.
Targeting houses of worship can be especially effective because these offer the added potential of exposing a business’s offerings to each of their members. Getting a pastor or church leader interested is key, says Mara Einstein, a professor of media studies at Queens College in New York.
“Who better to sell your product or service than the man or woman standing in front of [the congregation] on a weekly basis? It’s someone they have a relationship with, and more importantly, it’s someone they trust,” she says.
To be sure, many churches haven’t been immune to the effects of the recent recession, and even for those that are financially stable, entrepreneurs trying to get a foot in the door may find it difficult if they lack religious affiliations.
And as much as referrals can help businesses, bad work can put their reputations at risk among the congregation.
“Anything that provokes an emotional reaction because it’s done wrong can result in bad word of mouth, particularly when you have groups that value each other’s opinion,” says Ms. Kahn. “People tend to talk more about dissatisfaction than they do satisfaction.
How innovation has come to mean different things on different coasts
by Gillian Tett
(Financial Times, 2/16/11)
In recent decades, a curious paradox has hung over the American economy. On the west coast, a gaggle of entrepreneurial companies, filled with some of the country’s brightest brains, has been scrambling to track data in the smartest and most innovative way.
Companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook are now able to monitor what consumers and businesses are doing around the world in real time. They can track everything from book purchases to friendship links and the consumption of breakfast cereal.
But on the east coast, another collection of highly talented brains has been delivering a very different form of innovation. Wall Street has produced a plethora of products and processes that has made the financial system more complex and (often) more opaque.
But while bankers have used cutting-edge computer technology to, say, develop ultra-fast automatic trading strategies, the data-handling innovations developed on the west coast have been slow to move east.
As recently as six years ago, traders in the credit default swaps market, for example, were still conducting deals by fax. Banks’ back offices were not standardised and regulators could not collect data from them in anything resembling a timely manner.
Beyond banking, many other parts of the financial world went almost entirely untracked by regulators, who remain behind the technological curve.
The question that hangs over the Office of Financial Research, being set up as part of reforms to the sector, is whether these different west and east coast worlds can now meet – and apply Silicon Valley-style innovation to the financial system as a whole. Can the techniques that allow Facebook to aggregate data on online friends in a flash be used to track derivatives trades, say?
Optimists argue that the answer is yes, given the extraordinary strides in computing power that have already occurred. Officials linked to the OFR have started talking to companies such as IBM about how to transplant innovations in the non-financial world into a coherent form of data collection in finance.
But pessimists retort that financial companies have little incentive to co-operate; after all, opacity has on the whole served Wall Street well, enabling traders to enjoy fat profits.
Either way, the really big question is whether the type of entrepreneurial, innovative drive that inspires Silicon Valley can be transplanted to the state sector.
“If you really wanted to revolutionise [data collection], you should ask somebody like Google to run it, and pay them properly,” observes one senior banker, only partly in jest.
Right now, however, that prospect seems even harder to imagine than a world where the OFR starts to fly.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
By Lucie Greene
Published: February 11 2011 17:36 | Last updated: February 11 2011 17:36
Forget dictating the trends, these days brands are throwing the ball into the consumer’s court. Crowdsourcing – allowing your audience to decide on your product via social media, forums, and high-tech web customising programs – has become the buzz phrase in fashion.
This month, for example, New York luminary Derek Lam will launch a new collection via eBay. The affordable line will be unveiled with a runway show during New York fashion week and designs will be put to the vote on eBay.com in a three-stage process. (Only the favourites will go into production.)
Then there’s Burberry. This year the company will launch a new mass customisation website allowing any fan to customise a classic trench coat in any number of colours or fabrics, embellish it and add a monogram. They can then show their style to friends, who will be able to order it too. This follows Burberry Prorsum’s January men’s wear show in Milan, which was screened online. Viewers were able to click and buy instantly from the runway, receiving their products two months later, several months ahead of the usual autumn deliveries. Customers visiting the site could get instant advice with “click to chat” or “click and call” options, meaning staff were on hand to answer queries immediately.
Never before has the consumer had so much control over what, how, and when products are available.
Talking of the eBay tie-up, Jan-Hendrik Schlottmann, Derek Lam’s chief executive, said: “We wanted the consumer to participate and to have an open dialogue with them about it. It’s such a smart way of doing things. We’re testing the water so we know up-front what people want. You’re not throwing mud at a wall and seeing what sticks.”
Indeed. Derek Lam is using eBay’s 90m-strong global community as a way to trial the brand’s diffusion line later this year. “It’s a prelude. We know lots of people love Derek Lam’s aesthetic but, through eBay, we can find out what they want [from a contemporary line],” says Schlottmann.
At Burberry there are similar hopes for instantly knowing what styles and designs are popular. Imran Amed, founder and editor of the website www.businessoffashion.com, says: “My instinct is that it [clicking to buy] is not a huge driver of volume. But it’s a powerful additional data point, like a mass focus group that helps to determine orders for the regular retail channels down the road.
“One of the biggest challenges brands face is deciding how much to produce, and of what. In the past they’ve usually relied on a combination of gut instinct and previous seasons’ sales to decide but even the best merchants make mistakes. Using the wisdom of crowds, some customers say what they like in advance.”
Levi’s has already used the web to democratise its campaigns. This month, for the second time, its poster girl will be chosen from a competition on Facebook. Contestants can enter by uploading their details and a final five will be chosen by the company before being voted on by registered users of Levi’s website.
Crowdsourcing is also used by those seeking advice. Launched in 2009, www.fashism.com, a social shopping site backed by celebrity couple Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, now has 40,000 registered users offering advice on fashion buying choices.
But all this interactivity does not appeal to everyone. “I think among many luxury consumers there’s a fatigue of choice,” says Ilaria Alber-Glanstaetten, chief executive of Provenance, a consultancy that is part of global advertising agency M&C Saatchi. “For every consumer who wants to design their own bag, there’s another who just wants to be told what to buy.”
The question is whether that traditional consumer will become a minority. Threadless, a US-based crowdsourcing company launched in 2000 selling T-shirts created by designs submitted from users, has reported revenues of $38m. Groupon, a buying site that allows groups of customers to apply collectively for discounts, effectively guaranteeing a store demand for its products, has rejected a takeover offer from Google reportedly valued at $6bn. And last month Burberry reported a 26.3 per cent increase in third-quarter sales to £480m, partly due, it said, to younger customers attracted by its digital marketing. Which makes it hard not to think that when it comes to crowdsourcing, both companies and consumers are buying into the idea.
…………………………………………..
www.burberry.com
www.dereklam.ebay.com (from Feb 16)
www.facebook.com/levis
www.threadless.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
TVBizwire
Is Apple Planning on Making TV Sets? Apple Insider
“Apple’s recent investment of $3.9 billion in components is likely for device displays ranging from the iPhone to the 27-inch iMac, and could signal Apple’s intention to build a television set up to 50 inches in size, investment firm Piper Jaffray believes.”
So begins a report by Neil Hughes at Apple Insider.
The article quotes Piper analyst Gene Munster as saying, “While Apple’s commitment to the living room remains a ‘hobby,’ we continue to believe the company will enter the TV market with a full focus, as an all-in-one Apple television could move the needle when connected TVs proliferate,”
The story then says that Munster “estimates that 220 million flat panel TVs will be sold in 2012, and 48 percent of those — or 106 million — will be Internet-connected. He sees Apple potentially selling 1.4 million units in 2012, which would add $2.5 billion in revenue, or 2 percent, to the company’s bottom line.”
Finally, the article says that Munster, “sees the TV business for Apple growing to 4 billion in revenue in calendar year 2013, and 6 billion in 2014. He said Apple’s component investment, believed to be in displays, could allow Apple to procure screen sizes up to 50 inches.”
The Wall Street Journal
OPINION
JANUARY 3, 2011
How Videogames Are Changing the Economy
From Silicon Valley to China to media, they are leading the next productivity revolution. So hug a geek today.
By ANDY KESSLER
This fall, the Chinese National University of Defense Technology announced that it had created the world’s fastest supercomputer, Tianhe-1A, which clocks in at 2.5 petaflops (or 2,500 trillion operations) per second. This is the shape of the world to come—but not in the way you might think.
Powering the Tianhe-1A are some three million processing cores from Nvidia, the Silicon Valley company that has sold hundreds of millions of graphics chips for videogames. That’s right—every time someone fires up a videogame like Call of Duty or World of Warcraft, the state of the art in technology advances. Hug a geek today.
What a switch. For centuries, the military has driven technology forward, fostering new waves of industrialization and corporate use. James Watt’s steam engine was perfected with the help of a cannon-boring tool. Computers were created during World War II to calculate artillery firing and to break codes. The military bought half of all semiconductors until the late 1960s. Even the first global-positioning systems (GPS) were funded by Congress, not for navigation but as a nuclear detonation detection system. Add microwave ovens from radar, Blu-ray discs from lasers, or Velcro and Tang from NASA, and there’s no doubt how much government acquisition programs have shaped our lives.
Fifty years ago, President Eisenhower was worried enough to declare that “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” No need to worry anymore. That game (pardon the pun) is over: Welcome to the entertainment-industrial complex.
Consider the Apple iPhone, often touted as the tech symbol of our era. It’s actually more evolutionary than revolutionary. Much of its technology—color LCD displays, low power usage, precision manufacturing—was perfected for hand-held videogames like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, which sold in the tens of millions. Think about how much more productively workers are now able to communicate because of some silly games.
It’s all about productivity. Last week, kids of all ages dropped everything to plug a $150 device called Kinect into their Microsoft Xbox 360 game consoles. Five million sold in the last two months. Kinect, which uses algorithms to recognize faces and gestures and respond to voice commands, allows Xbox players to use only their own movements, no controllers or button pushes needed.
Sure, there are still some algorithms developed for, say, F-16 pilots’ fire control. But without gaming, this technology would be expensive, one-off stuff that never sees much use. Much as keyboards and mice and fast graphics have driven corporate productivity for 40 years—killing carbon paper and Correcto Type—the next decades will be driven by tools that can harness voices and gestures.
All it takes is one application. High-margin industries like finance usually deploy these things first: The early adopters could be traders in commodity pits signaling like crazy folk. The rest will follow.
Videogames will influence how next-gen workers interact with each other. Call of Duty, a military simulation game, has a mode that allows players to cooperate from remote locations. In World of Warcraft, players form guilds to collaborate, using real-time texting and talking, to navigate worlds presented in high-resolution graphics. Sure, they have funky weapons and are killing Orcs and Trolls and Dwarves, but you don’t have to be a gamer to see how this technology is going to find its way into corporate America. Within the next few years, this is how traders or marketers or DNA hunters will work together. No more meetings!
Even the entertainment and media businesses will be transformed. In 1985, Neil Postman of New York University wrote a book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” disparaging the media for ruining discourse. Postman died in 2003, but I wonder what he’d think today: Online ad sales are now more lucrative than newspaper advertising, as marketers follow their customers. Netflix video streaming will change the cable TV business. The videogames Rock Band and Guitar Hero have taught the media how to package something that’s at least 30 years old, in this case music you play along with, and sell it as if it were new.
So why has the military been displaced? For one, capital formation. Governments had the unique capacity to raise (read: tax) the enormous capital needed to fund state-of-the-art projects. But a fully functioning stock market can raise billions for productive commercial applications, bypassing the military connection. Hate Wall Street all you want, but it’s now better than wars at driving progress.
Second, displacing the military is about high sales volume. Often that means lower costs. The $300 Roomba automatic vacuum, which the company iRobot says it has sold to five million customers, helps drive down the cost of the Army’s robotic bomb removers. Volume is especially good at spurring the creation of new applications. Hardware is nothing without software and apps. Caffeine-fueled coders won’t even think about writing apps unless there are millions, if not tens of millions, of potential customers.
Once consumers adapt to these entertaining applications, corporations figure out how to use them to increase productivity. Smart companies are harnessing Facebook connections. Twitter all of a sudden matters. Voice recognition is displacing operators and other frontline workers. Next in the work place will be 3D technology.
The economy is not going to create wealth just because we print dollars, build fast trains, put up windmills, or even assemble military supercomputers. (For the record, Google has the largest and fastest supercomputer, spread over dozens of data centers.) Even China will someday learn that wealth only comes from productivity. That’s found in a different place every cycle—and the stock market will find it first and fund its expansion. So where is it now? It’s staring us in the face and amusing us to a better life.
Mr. Kessler, a former hedge-fund manager, is the author of “Eat People—And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs,” forthcoming from Portfolio.
http://on.wsj.com/gkFDSh
The New Rock-Star Paradigm
Succeeding in the music business isn’t just about selling albums anymore. The lead singer of OK Go on how to make it without a record label (treadmill videos help)
By DAMIAN KULASH JR.
My rock band has leapt across treadmills, camouflaged ourselves in wallpaper, performed with the Notre Dame marching band, danced with a dozen trained dogs, made an animation with 2,300 pieces of toast, crammed a day-long continuous shot into 4½ minutes and built the first ever Rube Goldberg machine—at least that we know of—to operate in time to music. We are known for our music videos, which we make with the same passion and perseverance we do our songs. Our videos have combined views in excess of 120 million on YouTube alone, with countless millions more from television and repostings all over the Internet.
The band OK Go is no stranger to viral video success, with combined views in excess of 125 million on YouTube alone. Lead singer Damian Kulush explains how video works into the band’s strategy.
For most people, the obvious question is: Has this helped sell records? The quick answer is yes. We’ve sold more than 600,000 records over the last decade. But the more relevant answer is that doesn’t really matter. A half a million records is nothing to shake a stick at, but it’s the online statistics that set the tone of our business and, ultimately, the size of our income.
We once relied on investment and support from a major label. Now we make a comparable living raising money directly from fans and through licensing and sponsorship. Our bank accounts don’t rival Lady Gaga’s, but we’ve got more creative freedom than we did as small fish in her pond.
For a decade, analysts have been hyperventilating about the demise of the music industry. But music isn’t going away. We’re just moving out of the brief period—a flash in history’s pan—when an artist could expect to make a living selling records alone. Music is as old as humanity itself, and just as difficult to define. It’s an ephemeral, temporal and subjective experience.
For several decades, though, from about World War II until sometime in the last 10 years, the recording industry managed to successfully and profitably pin it down to a stable, if circular, definition: Music was recordings of music. Records not only made it possible for musicians to connect with listeners anywhere, at any time, but offered a discrete package for commoditization. It was the perfect bottling of lightning: A powerful experience could be packaged in plastic and then bought and sold like any other commercial product.
Then came the Internet, and in less than a decade, that system fell. With uncontrollable and infinite duplication and distribution of recordings, selling records suddenly became a lot like selling apples to people who live in orchards. In 1999, global record sales totaled $26.9 billion; in 2009, that figure, including digital purchases, which now represent 25% of sales (nearly 50% in the U.S.), is down to $17 billion. For eight of the last 10 years, the decline in revenue from record sales has gotten steeper, which is to say the business is imploding with increasing vigor.
Music is getting harder to define again. It’s becoming more of an experience and less of an object. Without records as clearly delineated receptacles of value, last century’s rules—both industrial and creative—are out the window. For those who can find an audience or a paycheck outside the traditional system, this can mean blessed freedom from the music industry’s gatekeepers.
Georgia singer/songwriter Corey Smith has never had a traditional record contract, but in 2008 he grossed about $4 million from touring, merchandise and other revenue, yielding roughly $2 million that was reinvested in the singer’s business, according to his manager, Marty Winsch. Mr. Smith makes his recordings downloadable at no cost from his website, and Mr. Winsch emphasizes that they are promotion for his live shows, not the other way around. “We don’t look at it as ‘free,’ ” he says. “When people come to the website and download the music, they’re giving us their time, their most valuable commodity.” Recently, Mr. Smith entered a partnership with a small music company, but unlike a traditional label deal, the arrangement will give him 50% of any net revenue.
Mr. Smith’s touring success, unfortunately, isn’t indicative of industry trends. Live performance, once seen as the last great hope of the music industry, now looks like anything but. Live Nation, the largest concert promoter in the U.S., recently reported that concert revenue is down 14.5% since last year. A report by Edison Research found that in 2010, 12-to-24-year-olds went to fewer than half as many concerts as they did in 2000; nearly two-thirds went to none at all.
So if vanishing record revenue isn’t being replaced by touring income, how are musicians feeding themselves? For moderately well established artists, the answer is increasingly corporate sponsorship and licensing—a return, in a sense, to the centuries-old logic of patronage. In 1995, it was rare for musicians to partner with corporations; in most corners of the music industry, it was seen as the ultimate sell-out. But with investments from labels harder to come by, attitudes towards outside corporate deals have changed.
These days, money coming from a record label often comes with more embedded creative restrictions than the marketing dollars of other industries. A record label typically measures success in number of records sold. Outside sponsors, by contrast, tend to take a broader view of success. The measuring stick could be mentions in the press, traffic to a website, email addresses collected or views of online videos. Artists have meaningful, direct, and emotional access to our fans, and at a time when capturing the public’s attention is increasingly difficult for the army of competing marketers, that access is a big asset.
My band parted ways with the record label EMI a little less than a year ago. While we were profitable for them, our margins were smaller than those of more traditionally successful bands, because our YouTube views don’t directly generate as much revenue as record sales. Our idea of what constitutes success and how to wring income out of it eventually wound up too far apart from EMI’s.
Now when we need funding for a large project, we look for a sponsor. A couple weeks ago, my band held an eight-mile musical street parade through Los Angeles, courtesy of Range Rover. They brought no cars, signage or branding; they just asked that we credit them in the documentation of it. A few weeks earlier, we released a music video made in partnership with Samsung, and in February, one was underwritten by State Farm.
We had complete creative control in the productions. At the end of each clip we thanked the company involved, and genuinely, because we truly are thankful. We got the money we needed to make what we want, our fans enjoyed our videos for free, and our corporate Medicis got what their marketing departments were after: millions of eyes and goodwill from our fans. While most bands struggle to wrestle modest video budgets from labels that see videos as loss leaders, ours wind up making us a profit.
We’re not the only ones working with brands. Corporate sponsorship of music and musical events in North America will exceed $1 billion in 2010, up from $575 million in 2003, according to William Chipps, author of the IEG Sponsorship Report, a Chicago-based newsletter that tracks and analyzes corporate sponsorship. By comparison, the U.K. music licensing organization PPL reports that record companies’ global annual investment in developing and marketing artists stands at $5 billion. The numbers measure slightly different parts of the industry, but from an artist’s standpoint, one thing is clear: Outside corporate investment in music is rapidly climbing into the range of the traditional labels’.
Still, this model isn’t much use to unknown bands, since companies tend to bet their marketing money on the already established. This brings us to one part of the old record industry that no one seems to know how to replace: the bank. Even in the halcyon days, profitable labels were only successful with about 5% of their artists. Contracts were heavily tilted in favor of labels, so that the huge profits on the few successes paid for the legions of failures. Labels aggregated the music industry’s high risks. Even if there are newer, more efficient models for distribution and promotion in the digital era, there aren’t many new models for startup investment.
“That’s the billion-dollar question,” says Ed Donnelly of Aderra Inc., a company that helps touring bands record their live shows and, right there at the venue, sell the recordings to show-goers on custom-decorated USB flash drives (OK Go is a client). “Sure, I work with a lot of young and unheard-of bands,” Mr. Donnelly says, “but I’m not a venture capitalist, and I have no interest in trying to totally replace the infrastructure that labels used to provide. I’m trying to give tools to young bands who are doing things their own way. What labels sold were recordings, what we sell is an experience and an emotional connection with the band.”
Though his system can’t provide the six-figure advances that young bands landed in the 1990s, it can be one crucial puzzle piece in a band’s revenue. The unsigned and unmanaged Los Angeles band Killola toured last summer and offered deluxe USB packages that included full albums, live recordings and access to two future private online concerts for $40 per piece. Killola grossed $18,000 and wound up in the black for their tour. Mr. Donnelly says, “I can’t imagine they’ll be ordering their yacht anytime soon, but traditionally bands at that point in their careers aren’t even breaking even on tour.”
What Killola is learning is that making a living in music isn’t just about selling studio recordings anymore. It’s about selling the whole package: themselves. And there are plenty of pioneers leading the way. Top-shelf studio drummer Josh Freese sold his album online with a suite of add-ons. For $250, fans could have lunch with him at P.F. Chang’s; he says the 25 slots he offered sold out in a day. One fan sprung for the $20,000 option, which included a miniature golf outing with Mr. Freese and his friends.
Singer Amanda Palmer made over $6,000 in three hours—without leaving her apartment—by personally auctioning off souvenirs from tours and video shoots. The New Orleans trombone rock band Bonerama advertises online that they’ll play a show in your home for $10,000.
Not every musician takes the project of selling themselves literally, but the personality and personal lives of musicians are being more openly recognized as valuable assets. The Twitter account of rapper 50 Cent arguably has wider reach than his last album did, and Kanye West has made an art form out of existing in the public eye, holding spontaneous online press conferences and posting rambling blog entries.
This isn’t so revolutionary an idea. Pop music has always been a bigger canvas than beats, chords and lyrics alone. In his early days, Elvis’s hips were as famous as his voice, and Jimi Hendrix’s lighter fluid is as memorable as any of his riffs, but back then the only yardstick to quantify success was the Billboard charts. Now we are untethered from the studio recording as our singular medium, and we measure in Facebook fans, website hits, and—lucky for me—YouTube views.
—Mr. Kulash is the lead singer and guitarist for OK Go.
How to Make It in the Music Business
As record sales continue to decline, some bands are finding alternate routes to success. Here are some guidelines for the new music landscape.
Some bands are finding alternate routes to success by tapping into the app market or reinventing the music video.
Apps could be the new albums.
Many bands, from Phish to rapper T-Pain, have developed their own apps, which fans download to their smartphones, typically for less than a dollar. With features such as remixing tools and games, apps can offer bands a deeper connection to their fans. Developer RjDj makes apps that pick up noises through a phone’s microphone and weaves them into the music, promising a new version on each listen. The company has created apps for the U.K. rock group Clinic and the film “Inception” and its Hans Zimmer score.
Fans don’t just buy records, they make donations.
Via a crop of sites such as PledgeMusic and ArtistShare, acts are soliciting donations directly from fans for tours and recording projects, offering donors access and clever swag. Recently on Kickstarter.com, a Las Vegas “lounge legend” named Richard Cheese raised more than $21,000 to make an album called “Let It Brie.” He promised to thank donors of $250 by name on the record.
Keep reinventing the music video
A clever music-video concept can be a band’s best marketing tool, and savvy acts apply their creativity to their videos as well as their albums. For its song “We Used to Wait,” the indie-rock band Arcade Fire collaborated with Google Web developers to create an online video that incorporated customized maps of the viewer’s hometown into a dreamscape that spilled across multiple browser windows.
Rework the classics
Pomplamoose, a San Francisco guy-girl duo, has a repertoire of its own endearingly warm pop songs and videos, but it was their homespun versions of hits by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Michael Jackson that raked in millions of views on YouTube. Then the group broke into the mainstream with another set of covers: performing holiday tunes such as “Deck the Halls” in TV ads for Hyundai.
—John Jurgensen
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