Digesting MESH08 — The Website is The New Album
I attended the Mesh Conference (#MESH08) last week. As expected, it left me with a lot to think about. I am a little late to the game with this recap, but here are my thoughts.
I have come to expect a cold open at the MESH conference. The conference is all about conversation. I have learned the conversation is already underway between the speakers and organizers at the curtain call. The fact they don’t “level set” at the beginning of the conference was jarring in the past but it doesn’t bug me anymore. I have since jacked into the MESH conversation-stream upriver of the event. That made all the difference this year.
Opening Keynote
Ethan Kaplan got some grief on Twitter for being a light-weight keynoter this year. Yes it is music. That is not bleeding edge, but Kaplan was the reason I attended MESH this year and it was worth it.
Ethan is obviously a bright guy. Everyone is saying so. His keynote was excellent, but the whole time I wondered “Can this be applied to the book industry?”
Basically his thesis was — experience trumps artifact. My friend Ira often talks about ‘books-as-artifacts’ when he slags print fetishists. Ethan’s take on ‘artifact’ was a little more post-structuralist. He spoke about the primacy of content-over-form — a real enabler for the digital artist. “Art as a statement of being rather than a statement of acting.” But later when the grad student talk ended it came down to this — in the past we accepted radio as free. We paid for the CD. Now the CD is free. Labels like Ethan’s will charge us for the concert. The value-pryamid just had its baseline for free reset.
Movie studios are taking a similar approach by pushing 3-D cinema. Please o please charge me $5 dollars more for the experience.
I get it, but I am not sure how to apply it to authors and books. The experience occurs simultaneously with the artifact. Are pop-up books the answer?
As I puzzled that one (I have some ideas), people tried to zing Ethan with questions. “Why would I ever pay for music?” asked one guy. “Who needs labels?” asked another. Kaplan threw out — “Labels are like VCs.” An interesting peace offering. He also said something that I bet I was the only one to pause over — he said everyone at his label is empowered to do A&R. Imagine that. Imagine a book publisher allowing an intern to land an author. What a mindshift.
Someone asked him about how much time an artist should dedicate to fan engagement. Another asked how to price the “experience”. In response to a question about CBS buying Last.fm, Kaplan indicated it was a lost opportunity to do analysis on a large dataset. Hmm book publishing definitely needs more catalog data-analysis.
He talked about advising artists not to read their discussion forums. He talked about doing digital advocacy within the organization. WBR, apparently, is the only major with a tech department. He talked about the true value in a P&L — you start by taking the supply-chain-related costs out.
For a second, just a second, he talked about APIs. I have been thinking non-stop about this over the weekend. I will post about it later. What would APIs look like in a book publishing model?
The crowd reaction seemed to pile-up around the long term viability of labels. Is WBR more legit than Myspace etc. I was reminded of that old saw — where there is money to be made, someone is going to figure out how to make it. There is still money to be made in music. There is money to be made in books. Will those people step forward please. You will be taking a step closer to Ethan and WBR. Good times.
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick on The Economics of Abundance
Kaplan’s conversation keynote was the first session at the conference. The other session that really engaged by inner-geek-publisher was the last. Mike Masnick gave a mini-economics-101 lesson about how to think about your business in an age where you can’t compete on cost. His talk is available on RabbleTV.
Basically, old-school economics is based on scarcity. New school is about abundance. By enforcing articfical scarcity (like copyright) you are actually shrinking your market. Don’t freak out just because price is approaching the marginal cost(zero). The way to make money is still the same –> differentiation. Bundle the scarce goods with your infinite goods and you are laugh’in.
The challenge for an industry like book publishing is too figure out what our scarce goods are.
Masnick offers five steps to develop the new business model.
- Break it down to true benefit. Publishers don’t sell products, we sell benefits.
- List out the components of what you are selling. Decide what is scarce and what is infinite.
- Bundle. Figure out how to use the scarce goods to make the infinite goods more valuable.
- Figure out how to distribute the infinite goods as widely as possible.
- Sell the scarce goods at a premium.
I think I will post at length on Masnick’s ideas at a later time. He uses the music industry in most of his examples so the video of his talk is worth tracking down.
Other Thoughts
- Club Penguin’s Lane Merrifield sure reminded me of Jim Buckmaster from Mesh07 — very anti-corporate and probably the most fulfilled/at peace guy in the room.
- Nice to see Digg’s Daniel Burka cite How Buildings Learn in his MeshU presentation.
- When Techcrunch’s Erick Schonfeld was sitting on one side of the Scibblelive guys, I was on the other side.
- Harlequin’s Jenny Bullough was the lone publishing type in attendance. Props.
- I hadn’t heard of mEgo before the Founders’ Stories Session. Intriguing. How will they avoid Plaxo-like-backlash?
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