Authentic voices: microbusiness lessons from the entertainment industry

Posted on | December 9, 2008 | 1 Comment

Do you remember, back in the ’70s, the profound disgust so many music fans felt when Chuck Mangione released his Feels So Good album? He and his label made a bunch of money but the music was so mainstream and (according to some listeners) bland — deliberately, I suspect, in order to appeal to a broader audience — that he was said to have “sold out”?

Do you remember the complaints about the music industry back in the ’80s, about all the labels that had “gone corporate,” cranking out pre-packaged artists according to some arcane formula that was supposed to bring in lots of money for the labels (and, one hoped, the artists) by appealing to as wide an audience as possible?

I guess, in some ways, you might call it the Anti-Long Tail.

That has always been a problem with the entertainment industry. If you want to produce a piece of popular entertainment that will sell a lot of copies or tickets or whatever, you will almost certainly be required to either dilute the authentic voices of the artists involved or manufacture your own artists (who may lack both authenticity and talent but who represent a “safe” bet in a risky business).

The harder you try to make money, the more likely it is that your artists/authors/musicians will lack a unique voice, the kind of individuality-in-art that generates loyal fans and makes the difference between, say, the music you “don’t mind” hearing in the aisles of the supermarket and the music for which you’ll stand in ticket lines for hours.

You could make a lot of money off the “don’t mind” music — for awhile. But “don’t mind” music or books or movies have a very limited shelf life. And the nature of this business is changing, thanks to the way technology is forging direct connections, past the erstwhile gatekeepers of popular culture, between the fans and the artists themselves.

You see, it’s possible to make money (and even be profitable) without producing a string of “hits,” but it’s only possible if you recognize the dual nature of the business you’re in. As a business, you have to make money to survive. But your mission also has to be about making and selling genuinely good stuff.

Last week, in her Booksquare blog, Kassia Krozser wrote this:

This is where I believe we are going to see an incredible rise of independents, publishers who get that small is beautiful, that there is profitability and then there’s profitability.

Chuck Mangione made a lot of money with Feels So Good.

But the Grateful Dead had a cult, a tribe. They never aspired to make the kind of money that a Michael Jackson or a Brittany Spears made, but that was okay. What they did in the music business was consistent, moderate, enough. And, on the plus side, there was no crash and burn.

If you ran a record label, which would you prefer?

In this day and age, large or small, companies have to understand that the days of telling people what they think/like/want to buy are over. They have to be capable of taking direction from their newly empowered customers because those customers have a much lower threshold of tolerance for bland than they used to.

I’m not going to say it’s impossible to do that stuff if you’re “corporate.” I’m just saying it’s much easier and comes more naturally when you’re micro.

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