Music. (Photo via Justin Ward and livemusicblog.com)
I was talking to someone a few hundred times smarter than me about Seth Godin. Let’s call this someone ‘Jim’.
Now, I’m a Seth Godin fan, no two ways about it. Jim’s a fan too, but he thought maybe things weren’t as clear as Seth was making out, especially when it comes to music. See for example here and here.
So I decided to get answers. Below is my facilitated discussion. In bold is Seth’s original comment, then Jim’s counterpoint and Seth’s reply to the counterpoint in italics.
Seth
Seth Godin: “People don’t listen to companies, they listen to people.”
Jim: “Clearly some people do still listen somewhere/sometimes/somewhat to some companies so if you’re running one you should still try to get your message out there in a traditional way while simultaneously trying to breed word of mouth.
Seth Godin: “We listen to companies when we think they “are” a person. That’s a circular argument, but I mean that we think of Apple as a person, for example, or we used to think of Starbucks that way. If I ran a boring company like GM, I’d work as hard and as fast as I could to be personal.
Not ‘Jim’.
Seth Godin: “People care very much about who is sitting next to them at the concert”.
Jim: What about people for whom music is a disposable commodity? They’ll love a song, buy the ringtone, chuck it on the iPod and then a month later forget about it. They go to shows just to hear the hit song but won’t care who is there and won’t have their identity tied up in the type of music they listen to.
Tribalism might work for The Grateful Dead, but they are at the extreme. How does this model work for a band like Matchbox 20?
Seth Godin: Hey, if the other people with Matchbox 20 ringtones and at the concerts were 50-year-old geezers, you can bet that I’d stop buying their ringtones.
Not the facilitated discussion.
Seth Godin: “It’s not about, anymore, how many people can you reach. Super Bowl, doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant.”
Jim: Springsteen had the #1 album in America after a Superbowl appearance. How can you say that Superbowl/reaching the most people possible is irrelevant to music?
Seth: The #1 album in America is irrelevant. That’s like saying that the best way to be a millionaire is to have a million dollars. It’s an artefact of a different generation, not a scalable business model. In a long tail universe, the challenge isn’t to somehow get picked by Clearchannel, it’s to own your own channel.
Jim: Given that the artist is the avatar of the fan and not vice versa, can a fan’s (or group of fans) input really improve the quality and sales of an artist’s music in the medium term?
Great art is not created by committee and by extension, not created by the wisdom of crowds. Fans would have told Paul Simon he was nuts if he’d asked whether he should go and make an album with a bunch of South Africans.
Do you agree?
Seth: I TOTALLY agree with this. Violently agree with it. Art is art.
And then peace reigned again.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Andrew McMillen 04.15.09 at 3:44 pm
Nice one. There’s a great voice interview with Godin on music here: http://www.musicmarketing.com/2009/03/seth-godin.html
Liam Casey 04.17.09 at 2:20 pm
I’m not sure I fully understand or agree with Seth’s reply about the number of people you can reach being irrelevant.
Springsteen is a bad example, given he came from the old industry model and has a well established career already. A Superbowl level event just reminds people who he is. It doesn’t establish him as an artist. He did that 20 years ago, and he revived it with The Rising.
Surely the grass roots approach would only take a small time artist so far up the long tail. Sure, some artists will reach a point at which they’re satisfied with their success or exposure, but others will grow past that point and need a larger platform / marketing support to push to the next level.
Sad reality, the Boss and the Stones are going to shuffle off sooner or later. Who then will play these level events? The Superbowl isn’t going away. Are we all assuming that there will no longer be superstars?
Justin Ward 06.18.09 at 1:02 am
Please credit the first photo in this post to photographer Justin Ward and livemusicblog.com. Cardinal rule in web blog etiquette is that you cite where you get your sources from, including photographs taken by someone else.