Although sometimes the newsletters from his mailing list parrot off the same dribble over and over; once in a while you hit gold. Either way, it’s become wildly apparent that such droning rhetoric is necessary — some people really need to hear it several times, catch an anecdote or two, and be beaten with it to understand it. “It” can be a lot of things, but generally encompasses a world of truth outside our experience… something that I know to be true that escapes you. You can call it ignorance or whatever.
For the music industry, “It” has been the Internet. Hell, for almost every major media producer, it has slapped them like a big wet trout for years now. Each one of them, from major labels to movie studios have been lobbying governments, starting up campaigns, and flooding the market with anti-consumer technologies; all in an effort to work around or against it.
Yet nothing they do will ever stop it.
Bob Lefsetz gets it. Go to his site. Subscribe to his mailing list. Heed his words:
You don’t need the old systems anymore. If you’re playing along with the boys in suits, you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, you’re laughable.
It’s a new golden era.
Is the pot of riches clearly discernible off on the horizon? NO! But the Beatles didn’t know they were going to become rich and worldly famous when they started out either.
The economics have changed. Anyone, anywhere, can become famous over-night. Celebrity grows in a petri-dish of communication; a stream that was once a one-way deluge. However, as access to global communication gets cheaper and widely distributed, that river is going to become a trickle in a vast cosmic ocean. Fame won’t mean having control of the dam furthest up-river; it will be there for anyone who can rise to the surface.