"How not to die" for Old Skool Media orgs

I don't think the old skool media really recognises the true scale of the threat that it faces in rapidly evolving online technologies and cultures. And that's shocking to me, with such obvious, alarming and tangible writing on the wall.

By old skool media I mean the traditional music industry, traditional publishing industry and traditional broadcast industry.

I was speaking earlier to a good guy involved in the music industry. (Someone we hope and really should become a client).

He had heard of MySpace but not YouTube. (My thinking is he needs to be very aware of both).

In case you need bringing up to speed, here's a description of MySpace care of CNN:

"MySpace, which launched just two years ago, is currently the most popular social networking site in the world. It makes it easy for people to customize their home pages with personal photos, art, color and music, along with market-revealing lists of favorite activities, books, music and films. Users can get site-wide bulletins, but they mostly communicate with friends or intriguing strangers they've expressly allowed into a network. Bands often use the site to debut their music."

And here's a description of what YouTube do:

"With its revolutionary technology, YouTube has given people the ability to easily, upload, tag and share video clips through youtube.com, across the Internet, and through email as well as to create their own personal video network."

So both services are hugely popular.
Both offer a normal, non-technical person ('the consumer'!) the ability to pitch into a community website, to quickly and easily start doing cool stuff (either with your own web pages or with videos) and find other people, and share with them, and start conversations and generally have fun.

I believe that services like these - which have very publicly achieved a critical mass and are thriving online ecosystems of real people doing real things - and many more which haven't even bubbled up yet, pose huge threats to the aforementioned old skool media players.

Why does the new media threaten the old media?

The old skool media mindset is one-way, 'broadcast'.
It's "we produce -> we distribute -> we charge <-> sometimes we listen to feedback", and you can broadly apply that model to old skool media whether the production is newpapers, music or film.

What people are now experiencing online is radically different to that.

What people are getting online from the new guard of web services (which are services, usually delivered via websites) like MySpace and YouTube is "we all produce -> we all share -> we don't pay -> we all communicate".

• This is setting my expectations as a consumer.
• = This is setting the expectations of the current customers of the old skool media.
• = What we expect is radically altered.

To me it still seems to me that many of the old media organisations are hiding from this truth:

• Online newspaper content behind firewalls.
• Music companies on a hiding to nothing with the DRM.
• Film makers still spending mega-billions on the Hollywood-command-and-control, big film star, big budget turkey.

Have these guys even heard of the Long Tail????!!!!!!!!!

So what has actually changed that the old guard don't (yet) realise?

• Fundamentally, how people want to recieve and 'use' their media has changed
• How people are want to pay has changed
• Who is in control has changed

If I'm in old skool media, and can see the light, what can I do about it?

Join in right away and being putting the web at the heart of your business:

• Get lots of your media content online
• Start giving small chunks of stuff away
• Start always putting everything you do on your websites (gigs, video, articles, events, interviews, short films, plans, audio clips, photo libraries)
• Foster communication / build your communities of interest / allow cross-communication at the grassroots
  • Via blogs
  • Via forum/chatrooms
  • Via wikis / whatever other interesting useful new stuff is out there
  • Via email
• Start with your old payment models, but giving free tasters but immediately begin considering new monetization channels

Further reading: Fred Wilson, an NYC venture capitalist's view

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