If you have an at least passing interest in the way the music industry is ran these days, make sure you read this post from Damien of Ok Go (you probably heard about these guys, and even if you haven’t, chances are you saw one of their videos). It’s probably one of the best posts about the music industry I’ve seen in the last few years – up there with what Trent of NIN usually writes. Here’s a couple of selected paragraphs:

Fifteen years ago, when the terms of contracts like ours were dreamt up, a major label could record two cats fighting in a bag and three months later they’d have a hit. No more. People of the world, there has been a revolution. You no longer give a shit what major labels want you to listen to (good job, world!), and you no longer spend money actually buying the music you listen to (perhaps not so good job, world). So the money that used to flow through the music business has slowed to a trickle, and every label, large or small, is scrambling to catch every last drop. You can’t blame them; they need new shoes, just like everybody else. And musicians need them to survive so we can use them as banks. Even bands like us who do most of our own promotion still need them to write checks every once in a while. (…)

Let’s take a wider view for a second. What we’re really talking about here is the shift in the way we think about music. We’re stuck between two worlds: the world of ten years ago, where music was privately owned in discreet little chunks (CDs), and a new one that seems to be emerging, where music is universally publicly accessible. The thing is, only one of these worlds has a (somewhat) stable system in place for funding music and all of its associated nuts-and-bolts logistics, and, even if it were possible, none of us would willingly return to that world. Aside from the smug assholes who ran labels, who’d want a system where a handful of corporate overlords shove crap down our throats? All the same, if music is going to be more than a hobby, someone, literally, has to pay the piper. So we’ve got this ridiculous situation where the machinery of the old system is frantically trying to contort and reshape and rewire itself to run without actually selling music. It’s like a car trying to figure out how to run without gas, or a fish trying to learn to breath air.

Amazing writing and a great perspective on how things really work these days. Do make sure you read the rest of the post – it is definitely worth it.

If you can only read one post with big, red, bold letters today, may that post be this rant by Dave McClure ^[1] on how startups need more design and marketing studs instead of only focusing on hardcore engineering skills. Let I not distract you longer – you need to read this if you have a startup, want to have a startup, invest in startups, or just generally care for the startup business. If you are still unconvinced, here’s one of Dave’s main points:

Hire people smarter than you. Find a decent designer who understands human psychology & sexuality, game mechanics, SEO, and conversion analytics. Find someone in marketing who understands how to send an email, write a blog post, use search engines, social platforms, social media, and has done landing page A/B tests. Find investors who have a clue about the products and services they invest in, who use the products, and maybe even write/speak about them frequently. Find people as advisors, mentors, and investors, who have the same operational experience you’d hope to hire into your startup. If we all take this to heart, we might just build a few more useful consumer internet products.

Seriously, you need to read this post.

^[1]: Dave was was curiously one of the very few people we had at the first couple of Techcrunch Meetups at Mike’s place. I remember him bringing a couple of boxes of SimplyHired tshirts (I still rock one of them today). Dave was passionate about his business then, and he’s passionate about his business today – which is something I’m sure you can read through his posts.

Ah, CES. Every year, a source for technology news, gear lust, and the occasional blooper. This year it clearly delivered on the latter when Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein said in an interview with Kara Swisher of All Things Digital that he had never used an iPhone. Think about that one for a minute. The Palm CEO, who runs a company whose business is to produce a product that shares a market segment with the iPhone, said he had never used one. This post briefly comments on this.

I’m not particularly concerned with the possibility of John Rubinstein lying on stage. What concerns me is the fact that he might be telling the truth, and what that tells the Palm consumer (or potential Palm Pre buyer). Unless you’re creating a completely new market you are bound to do at least some research – which obviously includes looking at the competition. When you’re trying to solve the same problems, you will surely find yourself in a much better position if you do not ignore your competitors. Not only does examining the competition let you avoid mistakes, it also informs you of where you can do better than them.

Clearly nobody wants Palm to blindly follow Apple’s footsteps – there are other companies that excel at that. But I do suspect that there’s a lot of people interested in seeing a real competitor to the iPhone coming from Palm. I’m pretty sure that a true competing product will not come from a company whose CEO doesn’t have a clear vision of how (and what) the rest of the market is doing.

To Jon Rubinstein:

Mr Rubinstein: I’d love to give you an iPhone. Not for you to use – I still want you to use the Pre on a daily basis so you know where it needs improvement. But you do need to see the iPhone. You need to know where it succeeds, fails, and how it got to where it is today. You need to experience it in order to have it inform your own product decisions. It is from you and your team that a vision for the next Pre will emerge. But you should not assume that vision will become clear to you while wearing blindfolds.

I’m sure your future customers will appreciate knowing that you stand behind your products even after looking at others. That takes guts. Telling your buyers “Here’s what others did – we like it, but we believe we did better”. I’ll be definitely buying a Pre when that happens, because I know an informed product is better than one created in a vaccuum.