Vote Now for My Music and Media Panels at SXSW

A little background: Every year in March, luminaries from all over the world descend on Austin, TX for the South by Southwest Film, Music and Interactive conference.

Read my coverage of last year’s event here. I shot a bunch of video and kept a daily blog, managing to get up close and personal with Quincy Jones, mingle with programmers, directors and producers during the day and catch sets by Dinosaur Jr. and PJ Harvey at night. Definitely a memorable experience.

This year, I’ve submitted some proposals for the industry panels (both touching directly on the multi-platform concept contained in this blog) and if selected, will get to present these workshops to the attendees – a thrill and an honor, to say the least.

Please help me out by taking a minute, clicking below, signing in and voting. Once registered, click on the thumbs-up symbol to vote. And feel free to leave comments or ideas about the panels, especially if you’ll be attending this year.

PANEL #1: Vote here for “Web-First Publishing: How Alt Weeklies Can Survive”

Panel #2: Vote here for “Creative Content Management and B(r)and Marketing”

Homemade Music Symposium 2009: Conference Wrap-Up

Five years ago, any music industry conference would feature hours of discussion about how to get your compact disc into the hands of DJs on FM radio, or tips on how to press and package a CD that wouldn’t get buried on the desk of an A&R executive at some major label. A lot has happened in five years. On Saturday, June 13 and 14, Hillsborough Community College and The Artist and Writers Group hosted the Second Annual Homemade Music Symposium in Ybor City, and in the combined 18-plus hours of discussion, commercial FM radio was not mentioned one time.

Instead, Saturday’s daytime programming included panels and workshops like “Alternative Media Promotion,” “Marketing, Touring and Band Management” and “How to Get the Most Out of a Studio Session.” Panelists included bloggers (Bryan Childs, Ninebullets.net), social networking specialists (Julia Gorzka, Brand Tampa) and local media (Lee Courtney, WMNF; Curtis Ross, Tampa Tribune; Julie Garisto, St. Pete Times as well as Creative Loafing’s Leilani Polk). Mr. Courtney was the only radio personality in attendance. (Tampa’s 88.5 FM is a community station that still allows their DJs to play CDs – they even sometimes play records.).

The Homemade Music Symposium’s goal is to educate nascent and struggling musicians in the ways and means of the music business and industry trends. It also included out-of-town industry folk and special keynote speakers – this year, it was Tunecore’s Peter Wells and Tony Michaelides, a local author from Manchester, UK, who’s colleagues and contemporaries include Factory Records’ Tony Wilson, David Bowie, U2 and The Stone Roses.

Conference attendees were mostly solo singer-songwriter types, with a sprinkling of MCs, publishers and managers as well as other local bloggers and marketers looking to get involved in the music scene or learn about new media. There was a lot of talk (maybe too much) about Twitter and Facebook, and of course the familiar geographical gripe of how Florida is difficult to tour/break out of, because there are no surrounding states (The closest top 10 market is Atlanta). A good portion of the crowd was visibly older, some dressed in flowery shirts and flip flops, and plenty of eyes glazed over when the topics inevitably circled back to “Tweeting” and social networks.

Sorely missing from the panel of experts, especially on the panel labeled “Area Record Labels and Artist Managers,” were representatives from the handful of local Tampa imprints, namely ADD, New Granada and 24 Hour Service Station (Geri X, Win Win Winter and The Beauvilles). 24 Hour owner Marshall Dickson stated that he would definitely be involved next year, but that this time around he just had “too much on his plate.” The only current label owner in attendance was Ivan Pena, who runs Mohawk Bomb Records (Soulfound, Ascending to Avalon and Rise of Saturn). Pena seemed optimistic about the Tampa Bay music scene, and about the fast-changing online industry, but insisted that artists need to tour incessantly and start treating their band like a business or risk failure.

The “Music Critics” panel, unfortunately the last session of the day, seemed to be the most pessimistic. One girl in the crowd asked for suggestions on how to become a music writer. The entire panel discouraged her. It may be in fashion for music writers to be moody and begrudging, but one would think their passion for music could somehow keep their chins up, not to mention grateful that they still have jobs in the age of Rotten Tomatoes and aggregated, user-generated reviews at Amazon.com.

Toward a Mindful Immolation

It seems once a year, we celebrate the birth and resurrection of the prophet Jesus Christ, but when it comes to acknowledging his actual death, we choose to remind ourselves not annually, but daily – by displaying or wearing totems of the apparatus that was used to kill execute him. Like wearing a pistol-shaped amulet to commemorate the life of Gandhi, or lighting a torch to honor Joan of Arc.

Let us not forget that we must indeed die (sometimes horrible, painful deaths) before we can be resurrected. Sometimes we must burn our nations and buildings to the ground in order to build new ones, eradicate ideas in order for new philosophies to sprout, completely destroy ourselves to be born again (most times figuratively, sometimes literally). The mythic quality of the phoenix rising from the ashes or the boulder being rolled away comes from the fact that you never know what new form will arise.

What we are guaranteed is that it will never be what came before. It will not be the same old thing. It might be leaner, bigger, stronger, smaller, uglier or more beautiful, but it will have learned to adapt in new ways and it will transcend and include its previous incarnation.

Samsara – the death dance, the dramatic deterioration and burning pain that is the material world – is, after all, what challenges, tempts you and makes you stronger. Be conscious of this in choosing what things you let go of (daily, annually, every minute). Too many social “burning rituals” (Pre Heat, Afterburn) have become nothing more than a communal, albeit Utopian, reason to party, leaving the interpretation (or lack of one) up to the individual. They have lost the ceremony and meaning found in events such as Zozobra or Burning Man.

In all things, make as many changes as you deem necessary, and never be afraid to consciously burn that motherfucker to the ground and compassionately build it back up again.

- Easter 2009

Digital Transformation and Counter-Culture Butterflies

(I recently left a comment on one of Wayne Garcia’s blog posts that elicited some response and got me motivated to expand on it. So here’s the original post (with my comment) or just read the expanded 2.0 version):

At Creative Loafing in Tampa, we recently went through a digital transformation and a shift to Web-first publishing. It has required a philosophical change throughout every department that wasn’t easy for some people (especially editorial, who suffered the most layoffs). We are by no means experts yet, but I believe that what we’ve accomplished can be viewed as a model for the future of journalism, and that our content will retain its voice if we can stay true to our mission, our vision and the cause of what until now has been the alternative newsweekly (Village Voice, etc.) a form of print media based on dissent, investigative journalism and counter-culturism.

People are consuming/using news and information very differently now. They get it online, they read it in print, sometimes in long-form in-depth stories, sometimes through sidebars or graphic-intensive blurbs, through video, on Twitter (try searching #green), via RSS, e-mail messaging and the mobile Web. You can’t really call a company that does all this a “newspaper” can you? Indeed, newspapers are changing into something else. And so are we all.

Writers or “Journalists” (yes, even Bloggers) there will soon come a time to put your egos down and allow your ‘editorial voice’ to be lost in a community of voices. This is OK. It’s like being Huey Lewis during the “We Are the World” sessions – you’ll eventually get your verse (or three). Professional writers will also need to become editors curators, and fast. There has been a shift in the food chain, and you’ll need to adapt to survive. You will learn to manage other people (the contributors to your blog or site) and will need the skills to headline, link, aggregate and tease in 140 characters with as much voice (and SEO-friendliness) as if you had 5,000 words to work with. This doesn’t mean that a Tweet can replace investigative journalism. We need both. Whoever writes the 5,000 word long-form piece needs to also be able to link to that story from other networks and Tweet the story to their followers. And have a digital camera with you at all times (I’ll say it again, the Flip cam is the new pencil), because there might not be a freelancer available to “get the shot” a week later. Not only are the lines between editorial, marketing and distribution becoming blurrier, but the methods of gathering news are changing. And it’s NEVER a question of either/or, we will always need an integral approach to all content across all platforms.

Marketing people, you’ll need to learn to let go of the “brand.” Let it seep down into social networks and get twisted by tweets and scrambled by tiny URLs. The conversation has become the content and the content has become the brand. Publish globally and engage locally. Befriend the influencers within your community, so that when you need to push content or promotions, it’s as easy as dropping it into fifty manholes (that’s right, I said manholes) and affecting the entire water supply. But stay on top of your feedback. The upside of a social network can quickly become a killer if your product isn’t of value. Don’t position your brand there unless you’re prepared to have that conversation. In the words of my new friend Chris Brogan, “If you want one-to-many, we already have that, it’s called traditional marketing.” Using social networks to promote your product without any customer service in place is “like installing a thousand telephones that you never plan on answering.”

Whose Voice is it Anyway?

Defining Your Audience: Info-Voyeurs or On-Stage Participants?

A standard marketing rule is to understand your demographics – know who your audience is, and speak to them. But with the fragmentation of the media industry (print, web, mobile, video, et. al.), the question is quickly becoming: how do you speak to your total audience? Both retirees and college students. The indie-rockers and the hip-hop kids. Bikers and cyclists.

The answer is slowly emerging: you establish a community (or a network of communites) in which these users can interact with each other, make sure it is hosted and curated by a trusted voice (or voices) in the field and then allow your users input into the news-making, -gathering and -publishing process. However, after you begin to integrate blogging tools or feature user-generated content, who these people are - and the way in which you speak to them – quickly changes.

The Pareto Principle (or 80/20 rule) when applied to audience  has recently been said to look more like 90/10/1 – with 1% of the community creating the actual content, 10% interacting with it and the rest, simply “looking.” In fact, we’ve recently taken to calling our consumers some pretty curious names, like “lurkers” or “voyeurs.” I wonder if this implies the creation of our content is simply egomaniacal or something more deviant (like flashing or mooning)?

The Spirit of Giving

I can’t wait until my daughter turns to me and finally says, “It’s OK, Dad. I know there’s no Santa Claus.”

It will mean that her next step will be to actually understand the true spirit of giving – not receiving, not exchanging, just giving.

I think that what we go through as children on the journey from the pre-conventional floor to upright modern thinking readies us for the next phase of our conventional wisdom – religion. Simply put, just because we outgrow Santa Claus does not mean we outgrow the giving of gifts. There is a spirit that takes hold of us all during the holiday season (in majority, due to the media and despite the commercialism and advertising), regardless of what we call it, that allows us to experience an opening of our hearts and a giving of our spirit to others. We volunteer our time. We reach out and help those less fortunate. We spend what little money we have on gifts for our friends and family, and they in turn do the same. There is a great spreading of wealth and blurring of social status. Two days out of the year.   

Content Delivery: A 7-Platform Visualization

This is the 2.0 model we’re currently using  at Creative Loafing to visualize, market and deliver our content through seven very real, very distinct platforms. It will continue to change and adapt over time to fit new media, new content and new audiences – but for now, this is what we’re dealing with.

Content Delivery Model 2.0

A. Platforms (numbered here 1-7) are portals through which content is delivered to an end-user:

1. Printed material (newspaper, magazines, even printed collateral such as shirts, flyers, etc.)

2. Web (Web sites, social networks)

3. Messaging (typically a  branch of Web - this can include e-mail, text, Twitter)

4. Mobile (A combination of Web and Messaging, but definitely a platform of it’s own – WAP sites, iPhone Apps, the Mobile Web)  

5. Audio (CDs, podcasts, even word of mouth)

6. Video (DVDs, Web video, digital billboards, POP screens)

7. Events or experiences (physical or street-level events, performances or personal interaction)

B. Content flows in streams. These can be adapted to any industry (music, etc.) but in this model are for the purposes of the publishing industry and are labeled sales (red), editorial (yellow) and marketing (blue). Since these departments typically create or drive content together, these streams are depicted as “braided” or flowing simultaneously. (The publishing model also allows for Operations and Circulation – two departments that support content delivery and can be the “subject” of content, but that typically do not create it).

C. The Qualities of the individual streams can be

1. Static / Archivable (stored media, media on “the cloud,” physical media)

2. Forwardable (most of the messaging platform - e-mail, re-tweets, as well as word of mouth)  

3. Interactive (2-way interaction with a medium, mostly web- or event-based)

4. Degradable (as in a newspaper that deteriorates or a memory of an event that fades)

D. The platforms (or portals) themselves are not mutually exclusive. Audio content can be a podcast, but it can also be word of mouth. Video can be an individually-viewed YouTube clip or a digital billboard in full view of everyone. Content can (and should) be delivered through more than one platform at a time. Content can also be a multi-platform experience such as a Web site (2) forwarded to you via e-mail (3) and then viewed via the mobile Web (4) (see illustration), or printed material (1) handed to you at an event (7).

E. All platforms represent outbound delivery and are not directly related to (or limited to) sense receptors of any one end-user. The audience interacts with content based on varying combinations of stream qualities and platform relevance. A printed artifact can engage the sense of touch, sight and even smell. Video affects sight and hearing (excluding touch-screens). Event-based content typically takes advantage of all the user’s senses for a given length of time.

Most people are familiar enough with the publishing model: editorial content is supported by advertising, marketed within a community and circulated to its readers. Simple enough. Same goes for the Web: content is framed by advertising and marketed via search/e-mail platforms to an ideally immediate and plugged-in readership or audience (that is loyal to the writer/artist, voice of the publication or the company brand). But for the purposes of our model, any creation of content (book publishing, music, art, film) and the housing and delivery of it (management, distribution) must be viewed as one living, integral system.*

*In genetic terms, consider these sales/advertising elements as the power stores, the mitochondria that will create the food or energy within the cell to drive and deliver content outward. It is the job of the marketing “nucleus” to maintain that the brand identity and editorial “DNA” is properly replicated or “transcribed.”

The (Flexible) Future of Media

There has been a shift in the media and publishing industry. Here on the inside, it’s being talked about to death. I’m so tired of hearing about how “Craigslist killed the classifieds.” What started as a company memo that made us all take pause a year ago (and be grateful we didn’t work in the classified department) is now something that my friends, who aren’t even in the industry, are mentioning casually over lunch.

“It’s like Craigslist and the classifieds, man. Why pay for it when you can get it online for free?”

While in-depth news stories, research and reporting will never go away completely, the methods of journalism are definitely changing. With the shift from print to web there is a deliberate push now for more easily digestable chunks (catering to shorter, on-screen attention spans) and more multi-media, user-generated or “sticky” content, which in theory paves the way for more of the almighty “pageview.” Long-standing film, art and music critics are also losing their jobs to web-based rating aggregators – the mean calculation of the masses defining the value of a work instead of an educated and respected figure within a community giving voice to the culture. In short, it’s a hot mess.

With technology becoming more ubiquitous, there are sure to be gadgets and widgets for everyone (I saw another homeless man with a cell phone the other day). But the only way an individual can develop or evolve is by “taking the role of other,” so it stands to reason that all of us being somehow connected by the “wi-fi matrix” really can’t hurt in the long run. As society fragments and compartmentalizes to keep up with our own devices, like so many moths reflected in a fractured mirror, hopefully we’ll see more people drifting toward the middle. And hopefully that means more people catching onto shit like recycling, going green, voting independent, etc. but also being actively engaged in much smaller niche markets (like St. Petersburg’s much-too-short-lived resurgence of shuffleboard or a local coffee or movie club that actually meets somewhere instead of online). Hopefully soon, within these smaller groups, we will start to see a decrease in the polarization of liberal/conservative, left/right, red/blue and the beginnings of a truly pragmatic system of people (of all colors and values) that are not only unafraid to change position, but that understand it’s what you must do to survive.

Any complaints at this point from the publishing industry are going to be the same complaints we heard when the music industry model collapsed. Labels existed solely to loan money to an artist (at a rapacious return) for recording, marketing and distribution services, something an artist at the time couldn’t do on their own. Then along came high-quality studio software and the internet, making it possible for these musicians to produce quality recordings, distribute themselves digitally and market themselves globally. If only artists could manage themselves, they’d be set, right? But people still know good music when they hear it (when FM radio isn’t cramming pre-fab down their throats) and the consumers sure as hell adapted to the new model; and marketers (like iPod) sure as hell stepped in to take advantage of it. So why are we so goddamned surprised by all this?

The solution is simple. Koestler talked of “fixed rules, flexible strategies.” What we need is ”fixed content, flexible platforms.” And in marketing to this new breed of consumer, we must communicate integrally (see below), on all quadrants. And that means providing them with content that is relevant to their lifestyle (or at least one of their niche groups) through an interface of their choosing. And once you establish a trusted relationship with someone, you can change the format all you want. The New York Times could announce tomorrow their transition to a “smoke rings only” format and you can bet your life that (for a month, anyway) a good number of people would stand on their rooftops squinting at and trying to decipher those rings. Because their lives are defined by the content. The content is what gives them meaning. And meaning never needs an upgrade.

Ultimate Oddball Gaming Polyhedron

Currently bidding on a 7-sided die on eBay. I’ve got big, big plans for it. Can’t say much more, it’s all very top secret at the moment.

The Integral Approach

Various Integral Diagrams (Click to Launch)

Going forward, I will tend to discuss things called holons, quadrants, levels, lines, stages, states, etc. For those that aren’t familiar with these concepts, in 1978 author/philosopher/scholar Arthur Koestler stated that “no man is an island, he is a ‘holon’,” that all things (humans, atoms, words, ideas) are whole/parts, simultaneously consisting of both assertive (typically male) and communal (typically female) tendencies. Then, in 1995, author/philosopher/guru Ken Wilber added that all holons consist of four quadrants: individual (interior and exterior) and collective (interior and exterior). This shed a whole new light on the worlds of philosophy, spirituality, biology, medicine, politics, you name it. It meant that when discussing any subject, all four quadrants had to be taken into account. You couldn’t just talk about the religious (individual interior) experience without also considering the context of the person’s psychological (individual exterior) development as well as their cultural (interior collective) upbringing. This, combined with much psychographic evidence from Lovejoy (The Great Chain of Being) to Don Beck (Spiral Dynamics) provides us with a pretty complete (integral) view of the human experience and their place in the universe. Really exciting stuff, I know.

But at least now we’re all on the same page.