GODIN ON HIT RADIO

If you read the newsletter regularly (when it is actually written), you know I like to share wisdom from marketing guru Seth Godin from time-to-time…and always when he writes about music.  Please see below from Seth.  Sign-up for his daily blog for bits of wisdom every day without fail (the guy is amazing).

The problem with hit radio

When you only listen to the top 40, you’re letting the crowd decide what you hear.

And if you consume nothing but the most liked, the most upvoted, the most viral, the most popular, you’ve abdicated responsibility for your incoming. Most people only read bestselling books. That’s what makes them bestsellers, after all.

The web keeps pushing the top 40 on us. It defaults to ‘sort by popular,’ surfacing the hits, over and over.

Mass markets and math being what they are, it’s likely that many of the ideas and products you consume in your life are in fact, consumed because they’re the most popular. It takes a conscious effort to seek out the thing that’s a little less obvious, the choice that’s a little more risky.

Popular is not the same important, or often, not the same as good.

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INSPIRATION

Godin isn’t even in the music business, yet his passion for music, marketing, teaching, and sharing continues every day…which is amazing in itself (posts every single day).  If you haven’t signed up for his daily blog, you should.  http://www.sethgodin.com Please read below.  Obviously inspired by Lou Reed’s passing…and more importantly what Lou’s music meant to so many musicians.

1,000 bands

Brian Eno possibly said that, “the first Velvet Underground record may have only sold 1,000 copies, but every person who bought it started a band.” [*]

It certainly wasn’t a bestselling album, but without a doubt, it changed things.

The scarcity mindset pushes us to corner the market, to be the only one selling what we sell.

The abundance alternative, though, is to understand that many of us sell ideas, not widgets, and that ideas are best when used, and the more they get used, the more ideas they spawn.

Kevin Kelly has inspired 10,000 companies, and Shepard Fairey, a generation of artists.

How many bands will you inspire today?

 

GODIN ON TECHNOLOGY AND LIFE

Here is another Seth Godin post you should share. Inspiring!

Our crystal palace

Thanks to technology, (relative) peace and historic levels of prosperity, we’ve turned our culture into a crystal palace, a gleaming edifice that needs to be perfected and polished more than it is appreciated.

We waste our days whining over slight imperfections (the nuts in first class aren’t warm, the subway isn’t cool enough, the vaccine leaves a bump on our arm for two hours) instead of seeing the modern miracles all around us. That last thing that went horribly wrong, that ruined everything, that led to a spat or tears or recriminations–if you put it on a t-shirt and wore it in public, how would it feel? “My iPhone died in the middle of the 8th inning because my wife didn’t charge it and I couldn’t take a picture of the home run from our box seats!”

Worse, we’re losing our ability to engage with situations that might not have outcomes shiny enough or risk-free enough to belong in the palace. By insulating ourselves from perceived risk, from people and places that might not like us, appreciate us or guarantee us a smooth ride, we spend our day in a prison we’ve built for ourself.

Shiny, but hardly nurturing.

So, we ban things from airplanes not because they are dangerous, but because they frighten us. We avoid writing, or sales calls, or inventing or performing or engaging not because we can’t do it, but because it might not work. We don’t interact with strange ideas, new cuisines or people who share different values because those interactions might make us uncomfortable…

Funny looking tomatoes, people who don’t look like us, interactions where we might not get a yes…

Growth is messy and dangerous. Life is messy and dangerous. When we insist on a guarantee, an ever-increasing standard in everything we measure and a Hollywood ending, we get none of those.

 

 

From time-to-time I like to share Seth Godin’s words of wisdom with you.  Whether you work in the “arts” or not, you will be inspired by what’s below.  Have a great week and please share this with friends.  http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/

Decoding “art”

Of course, it started with craft. The craft of making a bowl or a tool or anything that created function.

As humans became wealthier, we could seek out the artisan, the craftsperson who would add an element of panache and style to the tools we used.

It’s not much of a leap from the beautiful functional object to one that has no function other than to be beautiful.

Art was born.

When art collided with royalty, religion and wealth, a match was made. Those in power could use art as a way to display their resources and to insist that they also were deserving of respect for their taste and their patronage of the artistic class.

And that would be the end of it, except the camera and commercial printing changed the very nature of art on canvas (and mass production changed sculpture). When anyone could have a print, or a vase, or a photo, art’s position as a signifier and a cultural force was threatened.

Hence the beginning of our modern definition of art, one that so many people are resistant to. Art doesn’t mean painting, art doesn’t mean realistic and art doesn’t mean beautiful.

Marcel Duchamp created a ruckus with ‘Fountain’, which appeared in an art exhibit in 1917.  An upside-down urinal, Duchamp was saying quite a bit by displaying it. The second person to put a urinal into a museum, though, was merely a plumber.

About forty years later, Yves Klein created ‘Leap Into the Void.’ Long before Photoshop, he was playing with our expectations and our sense of reality.

Between Duchamp and Klein there were two generations of a redefinition of art. Art doesn’t mean craft. And art isn’t reserved for a few.

Art is the work of a human, an individual seeking to make a statement, to cause a reaction, to connect. Art is something new, every time, and art might not work, precisely because it’s new, because it’s human and because it seeks to connect.

Once art is freed from the canvas and the dealer and the gallery, it gains enormous power. Politicians and science fiction authors can do a sort of art. Anyone liberated from the assembly line and given a job where at least part of the time they decide, “what’s next,” has been given a charter to do art, to explore and discover and to create an impact.

When I write about making ‘art’, many people look at me quizzically. They don’t understand how to make the conceptual leap from a job where we are told what to do to a life where we decide what to do–and seek to do something that connects, that makes an impact, and that yes, might not work.

Five hundred years ago, no painter would talk to you about ideas, or even impact. Painters merely painted. Today, you don’t need a brush to be an artist, but you do need to want to make change.

 

 

MORE GODIN

This is today’s post from Seth Godin.  Worth sharing for sure.  Please pass it on.  Marketers, this is for you.

But it only works sometimes

A glimpse is often more compelling than a certainty. For a minute or two, the drum solo on Monk’s Dream is totally and completely alive. It even makes the neighbor’s dog turn his head and stare at the speakers.

If all recorded music sounded this good all the time, it would lose its magic for me. I certainly wouldn’t spend hours trying to get my stereo just right (one more time).

Word of mouth comes from intermittent delight. Things that work all the time are harder to talk about.

Random reinforcement drives people to focus their attention and effort, because it’s worth sifting through many to find the one that’s worth it.

Sure, there are places where six sigma reliability is essential (like pacemakers). But in most markets, your audience is likely to talk about your flashes of brilliance.

Sometimes, we’re so focused on being consistent that we also lower the bar on amazing. After all, the thinking goes, if we can’t be amazing all the time, better to reset the expectation to merely good. Which robs us of the ability to (sometimes) be amazing.

But amazing is what spreads.

In markets where some people expend unreasonable energy, we get uneven results, and those results are things we seek out, again and again.

STEALING IDEAS

Take yourself back to the Pollstar Conference in February.  You’re walking to see one of your favorite people speak.  Someone you know on the peripheral… from meeting once and through the web…someone you would love to have as your best friend as you believe he or she is a genius… then you run right into them.  That’s what happened to me in LA with Seth Godin.

We only had a few minutes to catch-up as he was literally walking into the ballroom to start his talk.  So we touched on Aspen (where we met as he spoke at Aspen Live in 2004), staying up on the music business through Lefsetz, and stealing ideas.

You see I told Seth that I’m constantly stealing his ideas, but always gave him credit.  His comment back, “go ahead and steal them…take credit for them”…and he meant it.

Without knowing for sure, I believe the most important thing for Seth is that his ideas continue to spread.  He genuinely wants you to succeed. You, yes you, not him.  He writes a blog every day, religiously (which is incredible in itself), which is free for you to read.  Seth gives away his books online, not all of them, but I bet if you asked, he would send you a free copy of any of them.  Why?  Because his mission is about change, not making money.  The money comes because of the caring…and sharing.

I will continue to steal from Seth Godin, Bill Graham, Abraham Lincoln, P.T Barnum, Steve Jobs, my friends, TV Shows, movies, every book, article, tweet and blog that I read…but will always give credit where credit is due.

While catching up on my Seth Godin blogs tonight, I came across the gem below.  Please share it…sign-up for Seth’s daily blog at http://www.sethgodin.com, buy a few of his books (I can say with much bias that they are all great but you may want to start with Purple Cow, Tribes, Spreading the Idea Virus, and of course the one that got us all hooked, Permission Marketing) and it’s ok to share them, Seth gave you permission.  

Learning by analogy

The story of Hansel and Gretel is not actually about Hansel or Gretel.

You are surrounded by examples and lessons and case studies that clearly aren’t exactly about your project. There’s never been a book written precisely about the situation you are facing right now, either. Perhaps one day they will publish, “Marketing Low-Cost Coaching Services to Small Businesses Specializing in _Graphic Design in the Upper Peninsula for Dummies” but don’t hold your breath.

Marketing, like all forms of art, requires us to learn to see. To see what’s working and to transplant it, change it and amplify it.

We don’t teach this, but we should. We don’t push people to practice the act of learning by analogy, because it’s way easier to just give them a manual and help them avoid thinking for themselves.

The opportunity is to find the similarities and get ever better at letting others go first–not with what you’ve got, but with something you can learn from.

And the opposite is even more true. We over-rely on things where the specifics seem to match, but the lesson is obscured by the trivial. Sometimes when we see something happen that we can learn a conceptual lesson from, we instead jump to conclusions that the specifics are the important part.

Remember that the next time you have to take your shoes off before you get on an airplane.

WAL-MART / TICKETMASTER

Irving strikes again…and at the same time does something good for promoters, producers, venues, artists, sports teams, family shows…and yes fans too. 

The deal Irving Azoff announced on February 12^th between Wal-Mart and Live Nation/Ticketmaster will almost instantly add 500 brinks-and-mortar points-of-sale for events either playing for the promoter or a venue that uses Ticketmaster for its ticketing.  Would a Wal-Mart shopper actually buy concert or sporting tickets on an impulse?  If it is marketed, yes. 

Marketing seems to be one of the problems (besides the company closing stores) with the deal between Live Nation and Blockbuster.  The store near my house is a perfect example.  They get a ton of foot traffic and participate in the Live Nation ticketing program.  But the concert calendar they have up in the store never has dates or venues listed and the staff behind the counter has very little idea how to sell tickets to a guest anyway. 

Wal-Mart is a marketing machine.  Imagine how many people pass through the doors of a single store in one-day?  The issue of course will be price.  Most of our tickets are not scaled at “Wal-Mart prices”.  When a customer goes into their neighborhood Wal-Mart to buy Eggo Waffles and Tide, will a message in the store prompt them to purchase 30-Seconds to Mars tickets or will the price point and service charges scare them away?

This is one you should all take full-advantage of.  See how many different ways you can use the Wal-Mart ticket outlets to your benefit.  Find ways of creating destination buyers for Wal-Mart…drive traffic to their stores.  Run midnight madness promotions…get back to having fun.

The deal is done.  Make the most of it.   

Speak with you soon…

Jim