McBride: “A Profound Shift From Content Is King”
"We are seeing a profound shift from content is king to context as king. With the mobile app revolution in full swing the need to own goes away, the need to access goes way up."
– Terry McBride in Paste Magazine
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catchy!
but WTF does it MEAN? Context is King = what, operationally, real-world? I don’t get this at all.
Metadata is just more content…so is album art, so is your website, so is what you write to your email list.
Can someone decode this for me? Or was McBride just being clever?
I agree with McBride. Context is king in everything. It’s not what you do but the environment in which you do it that ultimately determines success. That applies whatever your career or ambition. Context is pretty much all that isn’t your music but has an effect on what happens to it.
Recorded music is undergoing a change greater than at any time in its history. The new structures are being invented on the hoof just as the old ones were down the decades. How this will play out is up for grabs. That is the context. It is particularly important just now because what happens over the next few years will determine the value of recorded music in the future.
So in other words, my actual music is less important than the 10 billion factors I have no control over?
Wow, that’s great news. 2009 just got even better.
I can totally relate to the idea of context.
Go see a popular local bar band. They may not be the best players or have the best music, but if they show their fans a good time, chances are their shows will be packed.
The musical experience has many elements that aren’t directly connected to the music or the performance itself.
A lot of musical experiences are in fact awful. You go to a bar where the waitstaff is rude, your feet stick to the floor, and the bathrooms are dirty.
I think the Cirque du Soleil, which often travels with its own venue and can better control the fan experience, has the right idea.
We have lost a lot of the musical connection because so many people listen by themselves through headphones. My most vivid memories of music in my teens include where I was and what I was doing when I heard a song. I remember the social aspects of hearing the song at a particular moment.
Access is EVERYTHING.
immediacy does matter – look at the MJ catalog – would the demand have been met before it waned in the pre-digital era?
and the scope thing matters too. we can’t underestimate the broader shift to networked data-driven forms, and software. this is the first time since agriculture where we could create value from nearly-nothing (cost of storage, power, etc for any content approaches zero already). industrialization was small potatos compared to the ability to manufacture value directly from words (code). if we get this wrong we’re screwed for the long run!
when people concede points to people arguing that only live performances matter, and recorded music must be free, you’re moving backwards rapidly. a fair, nominal price that encourages contextual re-use of creative works is only possible if all parties perceive value in the underlying content. e.g. when chris anderson suggests albums are commercials (ie given away) for tours, i’d respond: not the albums i listen too! many of them can’t even be performed as they sound on record (when was the last time Johnny Cash sang Ring of Fire? Is it worthless now that you can’t see it?)!
ironically the ip debate isn’t dissimilar to the fight against compulsory royalties. They were tagged as socialism too! big (young) broadcast industry who wanted to drive down costs for artists at stations vs. fragmented, feudal music industry, fighting upstarts because it hadn’t figured out how to fully monetize their medium (radio). Ultimately the commie solution (compulsory royalties) not only generated huge revenues for the companies who fought it so hard and so long, they created the environment for mass-music, that culminated in stadium rock in the 70s and money-pressing plants via CDs in the 80s. The key back then was getting a simple thing right: recorded music has tangible value, and when set fairly even low face-values can generate enormous revenues overall. The social network (audience-artist axis, not the internet), not any given channel, is where products and profits lie going forward.
There are so many varying opinions circulating about what will happen to music – I can fully understand the recording artist’s frustration with discussions like this. Context vs. Content is one avenue. Musical content doesn’t matter vs. The content of The Beatles music is ultimately important. The New York Times recently ran an op-ed piece saying music “might” last another ten years. And my favorite headline: “The Music Industry is Playing Taps”.
There is a very fine distinction that is not being addressed in any of these discussions. The artist needs to decide is (s)he a recording artist or a performing artist? The recording artist will have a much harder time in this musical climate to make inroads simply because there is so much music available if you are not performing how will people find you? If you are a performing artist, your recorded product is the calling card that gets you gigs, pays a fee for your performance time and CD sales become a passive stream of income.
Another important distinction is defining what level an artist has reached within his/her career. Are you a hobby band that plays in bars? Are you semi-professional spending as much time on your music as possible while working odd jobs to pay the bills? Or are you a professional musician, and your livlihood is made strictly from music?
The music experience has been lost to isolation as people listen by themselves these days whereas during the glory years it was an interactive experience in your living room; in the car; at a concert or other public venue.
What is the intent behind your music? That is the defining question that will make everyone’s opinion of what will happen to your music a non-issue. Define your intent and the rest will follow.
Janet Hansen
Scout66.com
It seems like everyone is just way over analyzing McBride’s statement.
This does not appear (to me) to be fodder for a philosophical debate.
He’s simply saying that you don’t need to own (on your hard drives) a giant pile of MP3s when we can all simply access (via paid, free, ad-supported, whatever) songs (content) from our wireless devices; anytime and from almost anywhere.
This statement does not imply that there is some Orwellian paradigm shift occurring that undermines artists or the importance of content; it’s simply a technological preference (connected thin client over clunky fat client).
I can’t see how this statement implies otherwise.
Maybe the need for ownership is in decline, but it’s hard to see what the alternative will be. I’m not going to pay a subscription to ‘rent’ music from a company that could go under any day, no matter how many places I can access it from. I want DRM-free files that are mine for life. Maybe that makes me a dinosaur, but this mindset still represents the majority of the music fans.
Janet – I think ownership of a product, in some tangible (not necessarily physical) sense is very much part of the experience. The ability to touch, hold the jacket, pass around the gatefold booklets, and disassemble the package was a big part of the new-record experience in vinyls heydey. It was a social occassion when a friend got an album from an artist you liked – people literally planned to come over to listen to it and hang out! The ability to roll j’s in the crease didn’t hurt! 😉
Neil – There’s a lot of research indicating you’re not a dinosaur, but a norm. I teach college juniors in a digital design program, and was shocked to discover they preferred physical to purely digital music products. Interestingly their definition of “physical music product” differs from that of older folks: the “product” may not have any music-parts whatsoever, but be a redeemable download product, like t-shirts or buttons with songs linked. They recognize the conversation value of the packaging, be it a nicely printed gatefold jacket or sleeve, or a tee they can wear in public. For artists, the latter has potentially as great a value as the former.
Bottom line: a focus on the experience is an important component of any broadly useful solution. Downloaded or atom-based.
To say that context is more important than content is a pretty philosophical statement to make. It is not one very widely understood and I think it is reasonable within this discussion to expand on what it means more generally.
To be a successful artist you need to have an awareness of or a feel for the world where your work is being presented. You have to be relevant in that world for recognition. The values change from one genre to the next but the same is true for all: No relevance, no recognition. No recognition, no success. I’ve spent my career watching people fail to grasp this in favour of holding to more commonplace outlooks like simply being good enough (whatever that means). Good enough is never enough.
Most of these people are artists no longer. It usually had little to do with their music not having sufficient genius quality or emotional resonance (content). It was always their failure to navigate the environment (context).
The majority of musicians I know here in the UK have little sense of what the significant changes in the music world mean let alone know how to deal with them. They do what they do and hope fate delivers a gift. Access winning over ownership probably won’t make that much difference to them anyway as artists. They will still earn little to nothing from their recorded works. Same as it always was in that regard.
Justin, Stop being stupid, or just get in line for a Major label record deal with the rest of the people who don’t get it….
“I want DRM-free files that are mine for life. Maybe that makes me a dinosaur, but this mindset still represents the majority of the music fans.”
^^I definitely think that reflects the majority of consumers. I could be wrong. Mobile is cool, for sure, but people still want to own music.
I’m interested, though, I need to go back through all my Digital Youth surveys and see if this is a generational thing.
I agree with Bruce that McBride probably just meant most fans don’t feel the need to own music if they always have access to it.
But I still like to ponder the content vs context discussion as it relates to the total musical experience.
On the one hand, music as an entertainment form is unique because of the special properties of music. On the other hand, there are so many other experiences that people can participate in that music can lose out to something the fan perceives is a better experience. It’s not that they will eliminate music (they’ll still be listening to it), but they may perceive it as secondary — like background music in a store — if other experiences dominate.
The downside of this is “some albums are playing hard to get”. You need to be equipped with hardware and to know how to use it to get them.
For me, the problem has appeared a few times this year when an album is sold only in certain markets or areas and they don’t accept foreign shipping adresses or IPs.
And for my mother, the problem is that she doesn’t have a clue on how to use the hardware.
So the problem of accessability of content might be a different story for every potential customer.
But if every generation has their own gadgets that basically do the same, which is play music, timeless music from today might not get to stand a chance against the major catalogues, which have already gained the attribute “timeless” decades ago when the ancient business model worked.
“… timeless music from today might not get to stand a chance against the major catalogues, which have already gained the attribute “timeless” decades ago when the ancient business model worked.”
That’s what is relevant to me. Why listen to a new band playing Beatles-like music when I can just listen to the Beatles?
When I can choose from a century’s worth of recorded popular music, I will seek out the best, some of which was recorded decades ago.
Perhaps what Terry was trying to say in a quotable soundbite is that with platforms taking shape, we need to recognize their importance in getting content to people. Content is impoverished without effective delivery. Platforms are meaningless without content. Whereas the KIK mantra was a nice way to explain away serial failures, now it’s part of a bigger picture. It’s not rocket science. You just need to be where the action is. It’s horse sense. Go west, young man.
If context is so important then how come the best, most relevant and important musical movements have almost ALL emerged from the worst, youth culture rich, shit hole dive settings?
Could it be that young quality music itself is all that is required to drive the momentum?
All you meddling, know nothing, middle man, baby boomers need to stop force feeding your nostalgia to the young and get out of the way. Only then will a more realistic sustainable middle class music industry emerge.
But it cannot and will not sustain the weight of you old school Napoleanic despots….so it’s mandatory retirement for you…or you can hang in there and continue eating your young.
brendan b brown
wehatus.com
search engine bots only sees in your website is ‘text’ for them to categorize and indexed your website…and of course the ‘relevancy’ of the content. Therefore, have a quality content(rich) for them to hunt you down…