Why I FAILED

Why I Read Kiyosaki

Check out this recent post from Robert Kiyosaki for a taste of why I try to read everything he writes.

Ever since I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I’ve been a huge fan of this multimillionaire’s writing. I find him easy to understand because he approches everything as a teacher. I’ll talk about his ideas and lessons another time, but wanted to be sure to point out this post while I had a sec. Be sure to check out the rest of his Yahoo Finance content too - plenty more to learn.

Word of Mouth Formula

There’s a complex theory about word of mouth talked about over at Daily Fix that I’ll try to simplify here:

WOM = O x U x S(C) - told you it was complex.

Stick with me though, because it’s kinda cool and since word of mouth is the most potent tool you have as a musician, this is a great concept to explore.. What’s being said is that the affectiveness of word of mouth equals originality multiplied by usefulness multiplied by the credibility of the seed.

My intrepretation is that the key to successful word of mouth is having an interesting but useful message that is also believable and easy to get out (think of scattering seed). We tend to think that people talk about stuff because it’s interesting, but that’s not the case. People also have to find something useful before they will tell their friends and neighbors about it.

But even that’s not enoght. People will only open their mouths when there is no fear of personal failure. They have to have confidence in their ability to communicate the message as well as what the message is. In other words, they need to be able to say it clearly and easily and trust that their word won’t be challenged later on too.

WOM = O x U x S(C) - make sure your message (or your “brand”) is originally useful, trustworthy and easy to talk about.

Subway Records

When I was first married, my wife was quite impressed with the fact that I graduated from the University of North Texas with a degree in music. I told her to not be too impressed because I knew that I would never get a gig because of a degree. Soon after, on a trip back home to New York City, we were walking through the subway when we stopped to here some musicians set up near a ticket booth. I turned to her and said the players were probably graduates too.

I shouldn’t have joked!

Check out subway records to see what I mean. Here’s an entire record label developed to get the music of street performers recorded and out into the hands of the public. It’s one of those perfect “duhs!” once you hear what’s going on.

The music business is changing before our eyes and there are new opportunities to take advantage of every day. Make sure you take advantage of what’s around you, the wins will be HUGE!

Emotional Realities

If I had to choose the one reason for my failure in the music business, it would be that I believed talent was enough. As I’ve written before, and will again and again I’m sure, talent (and skill) is not enough to make you a success.

Tom Asacker has written a great peice on this over at his blog: a clear eye. Using a magician and New Coke as examples, Tom succinctly explains why “being the best is not the route to success.

Yes, the “fact” was that the quality of his magic was beyond compare, but the “facts” didn’t matter much to his audience.” What mattered to them was how they were feeling during his performance - their “truth.” And their “truth” was that they were less interested in his technical proficiency and more interested in being entertained.”

Don’t ever lose sight of the fact that you are attempting to make a living in the entertainment industry. Fact is though, everyone is - yours is just more obvious (which actually makes it easier than most). What struck me as particularly interesting in this post was the story about New Coke. Tom sites the taste tests that proved unequivicably that New Coke would be a smash. Yet it turns out that taste had nothing to do with it - the company was asking the wrong question. New Coke failed miserably precisely because it was new. “Classic Coke”, as it later became known, was just that - a classic drink. Folks that drank it liked to drink something with a long history and cool story. They didn’t want anything new.

This all illustrates something I learned many years ago: people always have two reasons for everything they do: the one they tell you, and the real one. If you can figure out the real one (and they might not even know it themselves), you’ve got it made.

Quality, Value, Service, Caring and Integrity

Every industry has overused words. Words that are so common that they don’t mean what they used to mean or have simply come to mean nothing at all. Avoid these words, especially if you’re talking about yourself.

Over at Business Week, I read about five such words: quality, value, service, caring and integrity. While some of these are unlikely to be used by musicians and bands, I do want you to think carefully about the words you are using. Are they empty and trite? Overused and meaningless? BORING?

We live in a cluttered world and if you want to stand out, the first place to start is with your words - spoken, written and plastered all over town.

iStockphoto

The internet is spawning hundreds of new ways to make money every day and you can be a part of it. All you need is an alertness and an openness to change. Ever heard of iStockphoto? It’s a website full of amateur, and some professional, photographs available for commercial use for extremely cheap prices. What’s that have to do with you? Plenty.

As this excellent article notes, iStockphoto is doing two things simultaneously.

First, it’s totally changing the rules of an industry that didn’t even know it needed change. It has traditionally cost a lot of money to get professional photographs for commercial artwork. Whether for ads, magazines, brochures, presentations and stuff like that, finding good images was expensive. Conversely, if you were a photographer or agregator of images, you could make a great living because of scarcity. In otherwords, images were expensive because they were hard to get. Meaning each image was expensive. iStockphoto is changing that by offering the use of great looking photographs very cheaply (they’re not alone by the way, there are several other sites doing the same thing. Most notably everystockphoto and stock.xchng.)

While that last point may seem like a bad thing, and if you were a pro photographer making a great living, it is, it actually brings my to my second thought: Second, iStockphoto has created a way for lots and lots of images from lots and lots of people to be easily available. What that means is there are now a slew of folks making money from their photos. This has opened a once closed market to a bunch of new folks. Are they getting rich? No. But a whole lot of little fees can add up. Especially compared to a few big fees (which most of these photographers never got anyway.

My ultimate point is that this happening to music too. MySpace has already helped “unknowns” gain fans, and there are similar stories all over the net. There are also countless (and I mean countless) places music is needed just like photographs. You could have a piece of that business.

More Opportunity

Here’s an interesting post about the proliferation of additional stuff you can market in the digital age.

“When Robbie Williams’ last album was released three years ago there were 10 bits of content: the album package itself, a few singles, and associated videos and ringtones. When his new album was released on Monday, there were 164 bits of content. These include material for DualDisc, individual tracks for music download stores, and a whole set of different ringtones, ‘wallpaper’ and special bundles of content, some of which is exclusive to individual mobile carriers like T-mobile and Sony Ericsson.”

This isn’t necessarily a great thing as the article points out. First, not everyone is going to need, want or buy all of the offerings and most importantly, the more stuff that’s offered ultimatly devalues everything else. But, it does point out the dramatic change in an industry that used to offer two items - a single and an album (if you’re even old enough to know what those are).

I personally think 164 is a bit too many, but what would happen if you were known to always offer 1,6, 99,100,122 and 145? Or what if you figured out what 165 is?