Aug 09
27
The Story Of A Movie And Of Top 40 Radio And P2P
A couple of weeks ago my older daughter told me about a great movie that she had seen called The Cove. She saw the director speaking after the showing of the movie, and he talked about how he didn't have the money to market the movie because he had overshot the budget… By the way the movie deals with, as I understand, the slaughter of dolphins and the sale of the meat, containing heavy metals, to Japanese children…
So its an activist movie aimed at greenies. Cool!
So I thought I would get in touch with the director and see if we could help, particularly in light of some of the insights that Tom and I have had over the last year or so with regard to how P2P works, and how the big studios some people are actually using P2P distribution to build visibility for their product.
I spoke to the director a short time ago and gave him a run down on the rationale for seeding P2P networks with the content in order to build visibility and, as a result, to get more sales.
He told me that he couldn't work with a business model that enabled “free”. He then told me, that ironically, he makes his money out of “free”. He told me that his photographs are stolen by businesses – often. His business model is to threaten to sue the people who steal his photographs. He gets paid and possibly gets paid more as a result that he would for a license.
Isn't it strange that someone would make their money out of a business model and then ignore the insight that is achieved when doing another project.
I tend to think that the corporate record business has a greater insight into this than many of the other businesses out there. After all, the whole record business's financial success came as a result of the notion of Top 40 radio – the free dissemination of a very short playlist of content to drive physical sales. That is exactly what P2P allows.
The whole history of Top 40 radio is fascinating.
This is the way it happened as I was told years ago by one of the top programming consultants in the US, George Burns, of Burns Media.
The story is this:
A radio exec by the name of Todd Storz (back in those days anyone who worked in radio did everything so I don't know whether he was a DJ or a manager or what) got fired from his job. He went to a local bar where there was a juke box. He had a couple of beers and started to think what he was going to do with the rest of his life.
As he pondered this question, he noticed that the people in the bar kept playing songs on the juke box and the songs that they played tended to be the same songs over and over again.
He started noting down what songs got played how many times on the back of a coaster.
The counter intuitive thought that he had, which up to that time no one had come up with in radio was this: “People don't want to hear different stuff. They want to hear the same stuff that they have just heard. Familiarity is good”.
From the jottings on the back of the coaster he had a playlist of the most popular songs of the day based on the bar's clientele.
The next day he went and saw another radio station and pitched the idea of a programming format that would have a limited number of songs on it repeated again and again and again.
Over time he and his successors found that the optimum number of songs on the playlist was 14, as I recall. The rest of the songs that were played became a mixture of familiar oldies and a couple of new ones to start gently seeding what would come next.
And it was of course, free.
And in spite of the continued repetition of the most popular songs, what happened, as we all know, was that the most popular songs, delivered free on the radio to the ears of the waiting crowds, also sold the most copies at retail.
Amazing isn't it. You get to listen to it free, and then you go out and spend ten bucks to listen to it all over again.
That is in effect what happens in the P2P environment. People download stuff to their computers for free (other than the cost of the bandwidth). And then they go out and spend money on purchasing the same stuff that they can listen to for free.
The point is that this should not be a surprise since it has been happening for all the years since Todd Storz went into that bar and came out with the idea of a music playlist.
What is strange is that people who create content, like Louie, the director of The Cove, don't appreciate that this model works. The big content companies do though. They love it, because they can dominate it. They understand that giving away something for free is not the end. It is the beginning.
My God – it sounds like socialism. Better tell Tom 