Two very insightful interviews posted this morning:
Chris Wilson over at The Marketing Fresh Peel interviews Piers Fawkes of PSFK as part of his Future of Work series. Fawkes opens up on his views of the changes in the workplace that Gen-Y will face:
Gen Yers are going to work for scores of companies and they need to remember that companies aren’t there to give you a job, they’re there to make a profit in constantly changing times. They seek a relationship with staff based on flexibility and delivery. They’re not going to have the bandwidth to help people with developing what is an antiquated perception of what it ‘career’.
If Piers is right, and I suspect that there’s a good deal of truth to this, then we’ve only begun to fathom the economic changes to our current systems that will be necessary to support this sort of workforce.
It’s a good interview. The entire series that Chris has put together is well-worth your time.
*****
Gerd Leonhard posts today an interview he granted to Rollo & Grady on the state of the music business and the need for transparency:
The only chance (the labels) have – and that goes for everyone, not just the majors, but also the indies – is to drastically open up, put their cards on the table and start doing business like everybody else. This means being transparent, sharing, putting deals on the table and making them public.
There’s a lot more to the interview, and it’s worth your time to read it in full (the Rollo & Grady link contains the full transcript).
It is worthy of note, I think, that the indie labels that have best-survived these tumultuous times are those whose very business model is rooted in transparency – Touch and Go (whose founder, Corey Rusk, is credited by many with inventing the 50/50 – expenses model1 ), Dischord, Merge, Secretly Canadian and Thrill Jockey have all continued to operate at a profit by virtue of both continued musical relevance and an open business model that makes them a natural home for artists wary of major label models. The open model also, it is worth noting, left Touch and Go vulnerable to the predatory instincts of the majors, most notably Capitol Records as part of a well-publicized fiasco over the backcatalogue of the Butthole Surfers.
None of this, of course, dispels Gerd’s larger points – which are quite prescient. I particularly enjoyed his take on labels’ necessary embrace of Twitter.
Good stuff, indeed.
- Under this model, the label pays for manufacturing, distribution, and advertising. Artist and label split profits 50/50 after the expenses are recouped [↩]
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