South By Southwest’s been ahead of everyone all along
Tomorrow, I’m going to be talking about this on the show, but I wanted to explain it in better detail. Recently, a team of music executives got together in New York to try and figure out how to save this whole mess about losing billions of dollars a year (even though the President of the RIAA made over a billion dollars all by himself last year) and they came to the conclusion that Music 1.0 is dead, whatever that means. New plans have to be hatched, new schemes have to be unfoiled, etc etc etc.
All they have to do is look around.
South by Southwest (SXSW) has, for the past three years, given out a gigantic torrent filled with one song from each act that performs at the festival. This year, the package chimes in at over three gigabites. That’s more gigs than a low-to-mid level iPod can handle. Every year, thousands of people download this file. Hell, this year’s package has only been up for little over a week and already 500 people have begun to seed the thing.
What good is three gigs of singles, though? Well, apart from being a fantastic free taste for the festival (to lure in ticket sales), it’s also the digital equivalent to what the festival is itself; a way for new bands to be given time in our ears. Even if one only 10 percent of the songs get a proper listen in your ears, you’re still allowing yourself to listen to seventy new bands.
This torrent enables bloggers almost a year’s worth of bands to highlight and brag about to their friends. It allows casual fans of mainstream music a free shot at hearing an entire community of indie acts. It allows venue promoters a chance to see a shortlist of what is hot with the kids these days, and it allows retailers to predict what to stock.
Wired has an excellent cover story this month on the future of the ‘free’ market, and mp3s have to be included in this discussion. Much like Gillette gave away razors to sell blades, bands are going to have to give away mp3s in order to sell concert tickets.
But it’s more than that. If Music 1.0 is something dead, then we must have in place a business system that is truly 2.0, and that means integrating interactivity into the mix. It’s not just the end of days in terms of selling overpriced CDs, it’s also the end of the one-way road of musicians selling to customers. In the past 3 years, the internet has shown us a fantastic way of gaining a crowd, and that’s social networking. In plain speak, word of mouth at the base level, where everyone gets a say, and the pyramid of free-market capitalism collapses.
Of course, one could argue that nothing needs fixing, that the slow demise of the music industry will benefit both the listener and the artists, but not the machine that’s kept them apart. That’s where SXSW and organizations like it truly shine, because they can exist without the machine. One might argue it would be better to have people like them in charge.
