Radiohead Takes Page from Jam Band Playbook – What’s Shaking Up Your Business Model? October 25, 2007
Posted by David Fontaine in Business Community Management.trackback
Bands, like The Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam, Dave Matthew’s Band, Phish, WideSpread Panic (Jon Gatrell’s favorite group) and others, have thrived creatively, personally and financially by embracing the collective, the community, their fan bases and going against the grain of the traditional music business – for example, allowing bootlegging (not moonshine….but concert tapes and videos that spawned underground trading communities and industries).
At the end of the day, what’s good for the community, like grilled cheese sandwiches (never ate one, wasn’t a huge Dead fan ……but you get the point and it shows some love to my colleagues in the Bay Area), is good for the artist – the King or Queen (cue Freddie Mercury) of that particular supply and demand chain.
Radiohead, a critically acclaimed and commercially successful UK band, is going against the grain (if there is any grain left in the music industry). The band is a free agent – no label – and is offering its latest album (“In Rainbows”) for download only (at least for now until the box set comes out for $80 a pop) and fans, interested parties (like myself) can literally name their price for the download. When it comes to settle on an album price, the site simply states, “It’s up to you.”
Wait for it….wait for it…here comes the point, which is painfully obvious to anyone who has been paying attention. The music business has already been turned upside down, on its side, twirled in a couple spin cycles and bounced off a cliff.
Now comes this news.
Over the past 10+ years, there have been any number of digital distribution, e-commerce case studies that trumpet the potential for
e-commerce to transform or disrupt traditional business models – of course depending on your individual perspective. Napster, eBay, PayPal, Amazon, Yahoo, iPods and iTunes, P2P networks, My Space, Google……Those were game changers of the past generation, even though they are all still relevant, important and in some cases really innovative and cool.
In the case of Radiohead and the music industry, here is yet another wrinkle for retailers and suppliers to consider. But at least this is a familiar ripple and not a complete sea change.
For companies of all types but retailers and suppliers in particular, the next wave of e-commerce, Web and social computing applications are going to change the rules of “the game” just as dramatically. Mashups, Wikkis, Blogs, Second Life, integration of IM are new ripples in the ocean, but some of them could drive wholesale sea changes for business.
In B2B, we talk about Actionable Intelligence, Web 2.0 and Software as a Service/Managed Services as game changers. Do you have any thoughts about what the next game changer could be for your business?
