If you don’t adapt you will die

Entertainment is food. Consumers are hungry. They are open to more genres, styles, artists, actors & technologies than ever before. They have money. They willingly graze seeking out greener pastures. They want to pay what is economically fair; fair to them, after all, the customer is still the backbone of the entertainment industry.

Music fans, TV/film viewers and internet users are not commodities. No more do they wait patiently for weeks to buy the latest releases. No more do they pay over the odds for “imports.” No more do they wait months for film titles to become available in an accessible format that suits the distributors marketing and revenue strategy rather than the customers lifestyle and technological needs.

If record labels, artists, film studios & television networks do not make their content available on a worldwide non-exclusive basis, their potential fans and paying customers will turn against them and will resort to P2P networks. Therefore the assumed value of entertainment continues to decline and the tables are turned. The entertainment industry is the commodity, easily disposable in a throw away fashion.

The worrying trend of zoned entertainment HAS to stop. Consumers should not be restricted to watching online TV shows and other content simply because of their geographical location. “Due to licensing rights, this content is not available in your area,” is utterly unacceptable. If you treat your customers like cordoned off, compartmentalized drones, many of them will turn to whatever sources are available to consume content. This is already happening in countries where P2P downloading of TV shows is rife. They are the same countries where potential paying customers are unable to easily access the same TV shows through legal means due to a walled-garden approach.

If you continue to deliver low quality content as a last minute scrabble to get anything and everything up online, you will continue to label entertainment as a low quality, low price disposable item. Then releasing the same content at higher quality at a higher cost only distances you from your customers and fan base even more. Broadband is everywhere. There is no excuse to continue to deliver poor quality content without utilizing high quality audio and HD video.

Much of the current paradigm shift is relevant to the ‘old school’ mentality of the entertainment industry, however, despite advancements in social media, web technology and digital delivery of entertainment, there are many new players in the digital delivery sector who continue to hold these old school values while hiding behind new technology. We have reached a new low when online streaming video of TV shows out to the global internet carries geographical restrictions. Consumers don’t understand licensing restrictions, partnership deals, syndicated arrangements. They shouldn’t have to. If someone wants to listen to your music or watch a TV show or film, it should be there available to them coming out of a swollen pipe bursting of legal content. Sadly, the legal content offering is a stop/start trickle whereas the swollen pipe as we know, is P2P.

How did this happen? How did we get to a point where customers are culturally turned into “criminals?”

The entertainment industry’s complacency, bad approach, a willingness to sit tight and keep distributing CDs and DVDs and see what happens. Believing that the physical format will always be there to prop up the majority of the industry’s income. Scared to admit that record labels, once large corporations with thousands of staff on a global basis, can now be run with single digit people and laptops.

CD distributors are either dead already or dying. DVD distributors will thin out and will eventually die. Major labels, if they adapt and survive, will close their global office locations and will downsize to a centralized physical location in one city with global satellite agents working for them out of home offices, Starbucks, college campuses.

College campuses will house their own virtual independent labels, acting as a starting block for college orientated bands and artists. The artists will be automatically plugged into the campuses P2P network that will inturn share their music will other connected Colleges around the country, all sharing upcoming college acts without label restrictions or lawsuits. This exposure will form the basis of an artists nationwide appeal and will create campus touring demand.

Wild ideas? fanciful predictions? No, this is happening right now, right here. The industry is changing, your industry is changing. Adapt or die.

Related posts:

1. Music fans don’t want to just listen, they want an experience!
2. Gerd Leonhards presentation “Music 2.0 – The Time is NOW”