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May 02, 2005
Little Brother: Media Sharing Isn’t Stealing (2 of 3)
Media Networking Is A New Form Of Evolved Communication With Massive Positive Implications For Media Incumbents
When Napster first came out (the first, really cool P2P one, not the current…one) it was evident that it existed for one very difficult to mask purpose: Stealing music. People said, “No no no, I’m sharing my music,” but let’s all be honest with ourselves – we knew we were getting away with something. It was produced content that was intended for distribution and consumption in a particular format, and we were punking the record labels by opening up another channel for the content that cut them and their business model out of it. That wasn’t media “sharing” it was media stealing. I believe intellectual property rights owners have the final say on what happens to their very valuable assets and should be able to embrace technology to the extent they choose to further promote and distribute their content safely and without the threat of losing control of their assets. Given the efficacy of P2P file swapping services, there isn't a record label executive alive who wouldn't want to use it to promote a new artist as long as they could define the promotional period after which the content converts to some other business model (like paid.) But such is the problem with transformative technologies - they force incumbents to rethink their business models and find another way to make money.
Media Sharing is P2P Marketing And Promotion
But there is an opportunity to invite consumers to talk about your intellectual property to promote it. That is what every intellectual property owner wants because it sells more of the packaged version of their intellectual property, whether it is an album, song, movie, book or whatever. When I go to a concert and take a picture of the band on stage and send it to a friend, I am promoting the band. But look at how I am doing it. I am paying money to send a piece of media to someone in my personal network of friends because I am such a huge fan that I wanted to share my positive experience with someone. Media sharing is the technological evolution of interpersonal communication.
Before the era of my Verizon Wireless VX8000 camcorder phone, my parents went to a concert, (well, not my square parents, but maybe yours did) enjoyed it and then had to wait until the next day when they happened to run into a friend and they would both dismount their dinosaurs and talk about how good the concert was.
The concept here is Media Networking. Because of the powerful technology baked into the device in my hand, rather than talk about it, I can capture multimedia of the moment and zap it to my channel immediately to share with the world. If one picture tells a thousand words, Media Networking is like a conversation on steroids, replete with pictures, audio and video to convey a depth of thought and emotion that mere words cannot adequately express.
Chuck Olsen is my new friend, though I don’t even know him. Check out his video of a concert he went to where The Soundtrack Of Our Lives was playing their seriously cool tune “Bigtime.”
TSOOL is a great band. I just bought their CD. You should, too.
Like I said, I don’t even know Chuck, but a friend of mine knows a guy who saw Chuck’s video on ourmedia.org and I really appreciate his sharing it with me. Chuck is a typical Fan. Rather than telling a few friends about how great the show was or going up to a mountain top and yelling it down to the valley below or writing a review of the show on his blog, he took a snapshot of the moment in very low quality video to give other people a first-hand idea of how great TSOOL really is.
Think of Media Networking as an indexing system connecting a database of people. Unlike social networking, where each record is related to every other one in a hierarchical fashion (she has two friend and they have two friends and so on and so on) Media Networking connects people through the media they create and share in a massively relational way. So you and I both like TSOOL and that is the glue that connects us, but we wouldn’t know it unless one of us expressed it in some way. And what better way than using the media production and consumption device formerly known as the mobile phone that you have in your pocket when you go to their concert?
Today, this isn’t really possible from your mobile phone - the one device that you carry with you everywhere that has the multimedia capabilities to produce and consume content in real time. There is a link on the value chain that is missing. You can take a picture or video clip and you can attach it to an email and send it to one person, and sometimes not outside your carrier’s network. Rabble is the link that has been missing: A marketplace to post the media you create with your mobile device and a media networking infrastructure that enables you to communicate with other people through the media you and they create.
Good Or Bad For Incumbent Media Companies?
Media companies would love to embrace Media Networking as a promotional mechanism, and many of them do. Every record label maintains a mailing list of their bands’ fans to try to create community and build hype, knowing that word of mouth promotion is not only free but has the added and crucial benefit of the associated street cred you simply cannot buy at any price.
The problem for incumbent media companies starts when they cannot control the message. The marketers nightmare is creating a frictionless flow of information about their product that propagates a negative message. This happens with movies today. It used to be that if you made a bad movie, you could at least buy your first weekend’s box office take by heavily promoting the movie in the days right before the weekend. Information used to move so slowly that by the time everyone got back to work or school on Monday to speak ill of your bad movie, you already had a decent weekend. But now, people are sending text messages and capturing video clips of particularly bad scenes and sending them to their friends before the movie is even over.
So what’s a movie studio to do? If your movie is really good, the same effect can propel your movie even higher than you expected with no additional cost. Do you try to tell people they can’t send text messages from movie theaters to protect yourself from the negative effect of making a bad movie or do you encourage it because it is a way to pump up your good movie?
In this way, Little Brother is making sure Big Brother doesn’t make bad movies. (Little Brother is also rewarding Big Brother whether the movie is good or bad with a sort of instant massive marketing feedback group thumbs up or thumbs down.) The movie studios should be ecstatic about this, btw, because it forces them to create better products so that they can better do what they do to make money: Pander to consumers by giving them what they want in exchange for ten bucks. Hollywood makes so many truly fantastic movies that it is always a little surprising to me that after decades of honing the business of making movies a bad one can even see the light of day.
Incumbent media companies have a huge opportunity to involve the consumers of their content in the promotion of their content by engaging them in Media Networking. By allowing the technologically evolved version of my best description of a song or concert or movie to propagate through a series of overlapping personal networks, media incumbents can enable a new kind of super-word-of-mouth promotion for their media. By doing so, they can create not just consumers but true Fans, who will go far out of their way to organize and promote to everyone they know (and many people they don’t know) something that they truly identify with. As long as the media they allow users to capture, attach to and associate with is truly promotional to all rights holders concerned and is not the same content that they wish to sell in some other channel, this is a huge and largely untapped opportunity to mobilize fans to promote their content.
TrustKill Records, Capitol Records and Columbia Records are all using Rabble to promote their artists in this way. In mid-May when Rabble launches, Fans of bands like Hopesfall, Aslyn and Acceptance will be able to connect with their beloved artists, view their blogs, find their tour dates and locations and interact with a community of other Fans built around the concept of Media Networking on their mobile devices. Because the content is all server-based, it cannot be punked Napster1.0-style and the media participants, in this case the record labels, can control to what extent they network with their fan bases. It's a simple concept, but one that the industry has been trying to figure out for awhile and now it is finally possible and I want to thank our partners with pioneering vision at TrustKill, Capitol and Columbia for embracing our mobile media networking technology.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at May 2, 2005 10:46 AM