It Was “the Greatest Business in History”
Mar 3rd, 2008 by John Stodder
That’s how marketing theorist Seth Godin described the music industry in a recent talk to its executives. Emphasis on “was.” The industry now appears to be headed by CEOs who not only bemoan the loss of a time when a few companies controlled the music industry and could count on free marketing support from radio and TV, but threaten to fight their customers unless things go back to the way they were, when music was a physical product that couldn’t be copied and everyone dug the same Top 40.
From the obviously uncorrected transcript on his site, here’s one of Godin’s most intriguing suggestions:
(I)f I asked you for the name and address of your 50,000 best customers, could you give it to me? Do you have any clue? …I have every record Ricky Lee Jones has ever made including the boot legs that she sells. Rick Lee Jones should know who I am! (laughter) I have bought many of them (pause) well her agents, her people [should know who I am]. I’ve bought many of them directly from her site. I desperately want Ricky Lee to drop me a note telling me when she is going to be in town. I want her to ask me, “should I do a duets album with Willie Nelson, or should I do one with Bruce Springsteen?”. I want to have these interactions. And I want her to say, “I’m making another bootleg, but not until I get 10,000 people to buy it as patrons before I make it”. Because I’d sign up. I’d buy five if it would help, but she doesn’t know who I am. She doesn’t know who I am, she never talks to me. And then every once in a while her record label tries to yell at me, but I’m not listening because they’re yelling at me in a place where I’m not paying attention.
The forerunners of today’s music-industry realities and opportunities? According to Godin, it was the Grateful Dead.
They didn’t make any money selling records compared to the way they made money doing everything else. Part of it was, you knew if you met someone at a Dead concert, they had some things in common with you. The secret handshake, the clothes, whatever it was. And that was important and you were willing to pay money to be with those people. And after Jerry (Garcia) died it was very interesting. Because obviously there was thousands of hours to listen to but that’s not what the people missed. The people missed the place they could go to meet the people like them.
Hence, says Godin, the music industry needs to get the knack of “tribal management,” which he explains with an infectious enthusiasm and at great length. It has to do with the Internet, niches, the Long Tail and recognizing that they need permission from their customers to market to them (Godin’s idée fixe.)
We are all Deadheads now, of a sort. This probably explains why every Deadhead I ever knew took to the Internet environment like a duck takes to water.
Read the whole thing, and consider how many other businesses “tribal management” might apply to.
(And here’s another Godin post on the music industry, if you want to dig deeper.)
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