It turns out that Madonona wants maximum money and doesn’t care about Undies, which is of course quite fine. She’s just, err, expressing herself.

Live Nation, formerly of Clear Channel, is about as far away from undependent friendly as you can get. They are co-Dependent central.

For more info on Live Nation / Clear Channel, please see:

• The Wikipedia entry on Clear Channel;
• This profile of Live Nation;
• The documentary, Before the Music Dies (buy it);
• These Salon articles.

Undies can now thrive in all kinds of exciting ways. As always, new opportunities present new challenges. We will continue to discuss trends, developments, industry structure and economics, and related topics of interest to Undependents. The seismic shifts in music reveal lots of cool stuff; Madonna, though, lives in another world.

The music industry has its own unique characteristics and severe issues.  However, many lessons can be learned by following it.

Lefsetz Letter on Madonna/Live Nation
Bottom line, the majors have lost their clout. Their monopoly was always distribution, and they used this to get talent to sign. Eventually they owned EXHIBITION also. So, if you wanted to play, you had to sign with them. The fact that they weren’t hip enough to know this wasn’t going to last forever is astounding, especially since trends come and go so quickly in the music business.

Lefsetz Letter on Radiohead

You can’t make a TV show by yourself. Certainly not a movie. Not that anyone can see. But you can make a record all by your lonesome, it doesn’t cost that much. And you can say exactly what you want, you don’t need to clean it up for Wal-Mart. And, you can distribute it yourself online. That’s what Radiohead is doing.

Will they make a deal with a major for physical distribution? Will they do it themselves? Or will they leave ALL that money on the table?

Undies are already very familiar with saying what they want to say.  And they already distribute themselves online.

If you can attract a growing audience for what you create, you hold a massive amount of power in this emerging space.  Use it wisely.  Learn how to make the most of these new opportunities.

All these music industry moves comes at the expense of the former financial and physical infrastructure intermediaries between Artist and Audience.

Labels provide either (usually both) start-up capital and the physical distribution network for musicians. Both those come at an extremely high price, naturally.

But when the internet enables digital and physical distribution, and musical publishing tools can be bought off the shelf for lawn-mowing money, labels lose their monopoly on access to Audience.

But as written, the Zudadeal stands in opposition to the creator ownership that has been one of the core strengths of webcomics since Day One. Webcomics can do better, and so can you.

Clearly, many creators will conclude that they don’t need Zuda at all, that winning their competition is worth, well, not much.

–JLB

Even with all the fetishization of the long tail these days, it’s important to remember that entertainment (and therefore online video entertainment) is a hit-driven business. People flock to hits, advertisers flock to people.

But agreeing on criteria is not so easy. The easiest measuring stick is, of course, the play count. But since content online never really goes away, does it matter if it takes a week or a month to reach a million plays?

Amplifier defines success differently. We submit that it’s not about raw viewers, it’s not even about video. It’s about a state change, namely, are you self-sustaining? Is your audience large enough (and do you monetize it well enough) to KEEP creating new content?

Getting Paid
Mass and Internet media inadvertently operate as a kind of ad-hoc, unofficial business school. For convenience sake, let’s just call it Greater Fool University (henceforth GFU) Students are taught (largely by example) that building a new, sustainable business isn’t necessary to become successful. The goal becomes personal liquidity. The business can be highly profitable for founders/principles without earning profits or even having trendlines pointing to future profits. One can leave the burden of creating a working business model for someone else to deal with.

With VCs moving into the Internet content space, GFU is signalling students of very recent history that imminent fortunes are going to be made. Get your game faces on. Many will do so and some will get flipped into fortunes.

The Road Less Travelled
We submit the greater accomplishment for creators is to make it work without the Deus ex Machina. Create something compelling enough to draw an audience and monetize them yourself. The means to do so are now so much easier to acquire. Your audience won’t fault you for making money from them, they’re eager to support you. Most people consider Homestar Runner the referential gold standard for that other, underappreciated school. The content equivalent of “we make our money the old fashioned way, we earn it.”

Homestar’s Matt Chapman sums up their rejection of a Cartoon Network TV deal to WIRED Magazine this way

“Being in Atlanta, we have friends that work there, but we’re not waiting for a big reconciliation,” Matt said. “What they do works for them, but if we were doing our show there, we’d still have producers telling us what to do, what to change, what to write, etc. We love the control and the immediacy that writing and creating cartoons on the website brings us. As the ideas come, we can do whatever our whim is that week.”

Homestar Runner is so popular now that revenues generated by the site’s merchandise sales allow its creators to devote their professional lives to the cartoons.

This model clearly inspired folks like Rooster Teeth’s Burnie Burns who referred to the Homestar Runner School of Economics in his 2006 SXSW keynote. (2 minutes, 20 secs)

This is the road less travelled, to be sure. It takes so much more creativity, talent and discipline to attract and sustain the interest of a large audience. But this is the essence of true success. This is not the pyrite being sold to some distant investor in public offering/fleecing. It’s real gold.

Audiences know it and most Content Creators in their heart of hearts do too.