At CNN’s Internet Week event on entertainment, Charlie Walk said he would’ve never gone into the music business if he knew what it would be like today, Brett Bouttier said the long tail is crap and Mark Golin said he doesn’t want users to be able to comment on People stories. But other than that, they were all positive about their “brands” and their ability to monetize them on new and emerging platforms. The CNN event, moderated by Scott Donaton of Entertainment Weekly last Thursday, was packed, being second only to an event that featured Bono a couple of years back.
The only panelist who was completely positive about her brand was Gillian Sheldon, Supervising Producer of TMZ. She likes to watch what happens to a story if you edit a headline or change photo and see how many more people will click on it.
Charlie Walk, president of Epic Records, said he was mostly bullish on the future of the music industry, but monetization is their biggest issue. He said he music industry sat back on their CDs and never saw it coming. He foresees a time in the near future when the music industry will make money again—everyone will be paying $9.99 a month to access every song on their devices.
While Walk referred to his Blackberry as his ‘third arm,’ Golin said, “I use my Blackberry to kill a bug.” Editor of People.com, Golin said the new media has ruined everything. He used to have the luxury of planning content over a long period but now time is condensed. Editors have to work right through the late life cycle of a story. They can’t spend time mapping out content, but have to constantly manage it on the site. “I used to have a life,” he said, “but now I don’t.” He related how users navigate his site, saying, “They read the first paragraph. Then they go to the celebrity database because they want to see the last three stories that they missed before finishing this story. Then they go off and look at a video. And then their mind will wander and they will look at all of the dresses she’s worn in the last nine months. And then they will come back and read the rest of the story.”
Bouttier, senior vice-president of Digital Warner Brothers television, said they were working with the advertisers to try to figure out how to make money off of the different platforms. “As the new media becomes more pervasive, we can monetize that through advertising. Downloading these $4.99 aps is just a very small way of looking at the business of media. We need to create critical mass.”
The music business is quickly approaching the critical mass model. Walk talked about hearing a killer song that he knew would not only be a hit, but also had to “be in the fourth quarter campaign for somebody. We reached out to ad agencies and went right to Old Navy. They want to take this artist and—not just for a license--but for a massive multi-million dollar campaign that incorporates the artist in a whole wider scope.”
When an audience member asked him about how gatekeepers field world music, and specifically mentioned Rachid Taha’s spectacular cover, Rock el Casbah, Walk said “Just go on line and get a sense of what the mass audience wants and it’s not that. But I’m with you.” Walk said the music industry is about hits, not being hip. He said people still want to be told what is cool. (For those of you are hip, Taha’s Algerian rai band is performing at SummerStage in Central Park on July 5th at 3pm.) He talked about Billy Ocean, who’s Caribbean Queen hit of the late ‘80’s was played so much that he became a huge star. “The real issue is that if it doesn’t sound instantly familiar to someone, you’re fucked. When you have someone that’s new or a little to the left or a little to the right and doesn’t hit the mainstream per se, that’s the way things get lost. That’s one of the drawback I see today.” An audience member commented that today there would be no Bob Marley and that even Bono said there would be no U2 under today’s music industry.
Bouttier maintained that was precisely the strength of mainstream media. “All of the big films right now are sequels—franchises; Indiana Jones, Iron Man, Batman. All this stuff are things people know and stories they understand and are getting retold in fascinating ways. I personally think companies that we all represent here are in the business of top-notch programming and the long tail is crap. It’s for the guy who never got his book on the front table at Barnes & Noble.”
Afterward, audience members I talked to praised the panel’s honesty, but felt that they weren’t even preaching to the choir, but just to themselves. “It’s not that people don’t spend money on music,” Alejandro Crawford, CEO of Nolej Studios, said. “People like spending money. They spend it on gadgets like iPods.” He compared the monolithic media companies to the steel industry or to Kodak. “Why did they lose their market? They just loved selling film.”—Sherry Mazzocchi
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