Read the article: Billy Bragg On Piracy: “A war that no one can win.”
I agree with Bragg. It’s destructive to try to shut down people who are trading music amongst themselves. Trading is how people get turned on to new music, and has helped spawn lucrative careers for many artists. The “enemy”, or the “competition” if you will, are the file sharing sites. It’s just good business to offer a better experience than the competition. That goes for any industry out there. And now especially the music industry.
His last paragraph sums things up beautifully:
However, we will not be able to marginalise the pirates until we can offer accessible, easy to use, fairly priced alternative business models that people will actually want to buy their music from. While we may never be able to sink The Pirate Bay, the challenge we face is to make it look boring, shoddy and unreliable.
What’s Your Vision?
From Hypebot.com: Nobody Cares About You, So Raise Your Baton
(http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/10/nobody-cares-about-you.html)
Another illustration on why it’s so important for us to treat our musical endeavors as a small business. And like “normal” business people, why it’s so important to be able to articulate your goals and vision.
Communicating your vision can sometimes be a very hard thing. After all, we’re artists and we communicate with our work, right? I know I have a hard time with it. At a music conference I recently attended, I jotted some basic talking points written on a note card that I kept in my pocket, and I would read it form time to time just to keep it top-of-mind. Not a “sales pitch” mind you, but more along the lines of what sort of things I’d like to accomplish in the short term with my career, and what I’m hoping to gain relative to those goals by attending the conference.
Would love to hear your thoughts on art-as-small-business and team building.
No Comments
Posted in Business, Commentary