Abubilla Music

Tip of the Week: The Digital Strategy

Written by Jimmy

In recent blog, I mentioned that we’re allowed to talk about business 11 minutes a week over pizza and each time cover three topics; the first was ‘The Great Doubling’ and the second topic  is the ‘Digital Strategy’.    Here’s 6 things you need to know:

• The Scary World Outside our Website, where The Bird’s Nest is hidden:   First, what the hell do we mean by ‘digital strategy’?    Both words are horribly wrong, of course.  By digital, we mean everything that goes on after you click your explorer or safari buttons.    By strategy,  we just mean we have to sort out what the heck we’re going to do in that big vast world outside our little website.  Having a strategy seems very grown up, so we sorta want one.  But we’ll do this DIY, Abubilla style, trying to answer:
  • How do you build a seamless brand across your own website and all the other sites:  FaceBook, My Space, Youtube, LastFM, etc…?
  • How do you control your songs and make sure when folks search on the title they can be found, where you want them, how you want them?
  • How do you tell your story on youtube?
  • How do you control search without paying gobs of money to google to manipulate listings?
  • How do you communicate across the archipelago of other communities like yours –  the little DIY islands of Abubilla fans suffering without knowing us?
  • How do you really reach all the members of the Bird’s Nest, who don’t know about us yet?  [More on The Bird’s Nest in later news, but this is the group of folks that subscribe to our Newsletter and click on it as soon as Louise sends it and then click thru her news.  They are a small group, but really seem to like us – they are our Promoters and we’re going to bring them inside the tent and help us build a song thru voting buttons!]

• Miracles and Vapours:   Slaughtered Foxes and Onion Flavoured Mead:  Second, to be clear, no one knows what’s going on.  Now, I purposely listed the questions above to flush out the folks that will say… Man, these guys are clueless, I know the answer to every one of these.   While I welcome all answers, I will start with a bold assumption that might break down dialogue a bit — no one has any clue what they are talking about regarding ‘digital stuff.’  (This isn’t about e-commerce, by the way, which is somewhat sorted, except for the wonderful battle between eBay, Amazon and Google for ‘marketplaces.’)  For the rest, we are in the ‘miracles and vapours’ stage of understanding.  Just as dark age ‘doctors’ explained illnesses in terms of satanaic possessions, vapours, dark and light fluids racing about the body, we have all sorts of witch doctors telling us what is going on.  But, like the witch doctors before them, they are only able to point to previous events to justify themselves — they can NOT predict anything.    I go to probably 2 ‘digital’ talks a month, with some gel-haired hipster standing before an audience of older executives talking about this wonderful world — they love to talk about Facebook, Compare the Meerkat.com, Double Pits to Chesty, etc… And they tell all the gray hairs that they are missing out and need to have a digital strategy and everyone agrees.  I agree.  But all we are doing currently is explaining the things that worked; we don’t know why they worked and we don’t talk about the 100’s of things that didn’t work.   We are at the ‘miracles and vapours’ stage:  ‘Well, King, the Queen has fully recovered from the fever — she was wearing the fox hat at the time and eating an onion.  I have order all foxes to be killed and wrapped around your subjects and we will be mixing onions into the mead.’

• Creating a New Brain, but Not Figuring Out How to Feed it Sustainably:  Third, there are wonderful, wonderful things happening and our little brains are going to get bigger.   I mean it.     A digression on humans’ views of  ‘futuring.’    For the last  150 years, we’ve been pretty systematically trying to predict the future, as we try to understand the relationship between ‘economic progress’ and technology, and as we sadly started equating human progress with economic progress.     And sytematically two things started happening — we massively ‘over-predicted’ macro change and massively ‘under-predicted’ mico-advances.  By Macro, I mean ‘infrastruture’, physical movements, etc… And while the advancements have been spectacular (my grandfaster was born into the world of horse transport and was able to watch the moon landings and see the Concord fly over head before he died), they have never come close to what we predicted.  As mentioned in Major Matt Mason, my generation thought we’d be vactioning on Mars in our lifetimes.  In contrast, we have never come close to predicting the massive progress in micro-innovation — genetics, information flows, our new digital world.  An iPhone is simply miraculous in what it offers and was beyond all our imaginations 25 years ago.   In the context of under-estimating changes on the micro side, what is happening in the digital world is transforming completely how our children are learning and can access and process information, and I think all this is transforming their brains and in a few generations those brains will be 3-4 times more productive then ours.   And no one really knows what’s going on because it is our stupid pre-digital brains trying to predict what is really going to happen.  We’ve got opposable thumbs, but that’s about all that is going for us in this space.  But imagine what happens when education starts leveraging the simple fact that our children have instant access to all information and can be in a discussion with a community on any topic 24/7.    BUT… these new great grandparents of the digital age generations have also created a fundamental problem.  They are massive consumers of a world of information that they didn’t create, for the most part, and won’t pay for.  These new vast Brains will get hungrier and hungrier and will consume more and more.  But they are benefiting now from the old empires of music, book publishing, news, etc.. all feeding them for free because older consumers are paying enough  for physical stuff still to let the gasping companies barely get away with it.  These old empires are literally like the colonists of the past, trying to give bits of land to the revolutionary workers and peasants, not recognising that this won’t appease anyone.  But, when the workers and peasants finally win, they are going to be stuck trying to figure out how to feed their brands.  And suddenly ‘economics’ will appear.

• So Go Buy Pubs and Invest in Digi-Design.   So the fourth thing, is that good old economics will raise its ugly head here to sort out the feeding of these big brains.   As they say in Jerry Maguire, Show ME the Money Jerry:

So, while we don’t know how this will sort out, there are a couple things that are pretty clear.  One, we should all buy pubs, Digi Design stock and start writing songs about deodorant.  Cuz some of the money stuff is getting clear.  First, pubs are cheap as chips right now and the one thing that is happening is a massive revival in live music – musicians are building their followings on line and paying the bills by doing small gigs.   Second, to feed their brains all the kids are creating a lot of the content themselves; this is more than just youtube videos, it is about great music- so buy Digi Design stock because Pro Tools will explode.  Third, the ‘brands’ are entering, and are taking all their money that used to go to TV and spend a boat load on sponsoring songs to act as sound tracks for their ads.  Fourth,  we have seen the second wave of killer apps (ebay, Amazon, google, Facebook) but things won’t settle fully for a couple more waves.  It is important to remember how ‘new’ all this stuff is and how we still don’t really understand all of this.   Only a few years ago Facebook was explain as a social networking site bringing together like minded people who have never meet and will never meet.  Now it is described as mainly a community between close family and friends, with people having met 85% of their friends recently.  And fifth, we are beginning to see the early expressions of how musicians will operate in this new space, but … not really.    Everyone is finding their way, and it is the kids that are going to determine how this sorts and they sure as hell don’t know yet — their brains are big enough yet.

• The Rise of the Spotty Teenager:  Fifth, the folks that will sort it out are all teens right now, 13-17.  And so, our ‘Digital Strategy’ will be written by our Teen Assistants, who join us every Saturday to help us figure out what to do.  And they will be writing very cool blogs and guiding us thru this space and advising Abubilla Music, who’s youngest artist is Mike and seriously clueless about this stuff.  Our oldest is Martyn 73 and he still talks to us about ‘when is Lou’s monthly mailing going out?’ and brings in a little stamp moistener for the end of month newsletter.  Bless.   So that’s kind of it then, we’re setting the kids off to sort thru the five questions and when they have answers, we’ll post them in our ‘how to guides’.  And we start by saying we’re clueless.  We point out that no one knows what they are talking about and no one can because humans never get this kind of thing right.  And we say our brains are big enough to absorb what these gets might say anyway.  So we’ve managed expectations pretty well I would say.  But my goodness we will have a Strategy.

• And ‘in the end’, it will all be answered in Kenya.   And we sort of know one thing.  That if we form the right community.  And we try to do a little good that we will find our little audience in the digital space.  So while we’re sending the kids off to fly thru cyber space, as Kings of the Biosphere…our little community will be formed and sorted on the plains of Kenya.  And that story is left for another time.