Charvolant

Or: If you play nice, I’ll play nice

Coolfer.com has a post about an article that talks about ethics. A group did a study and found that people will pay more for ethically produced goods. Nothing too surprising there. Then, since Coolfer is a music blog, it’s author Glenn asked how this might relate to music. Here’s my two cents, as I posted in a comment there:

Being ethical when it comes to music has nothing to do with using green packaging and sustainable energy during recording. It’s all about where the money goes. By default, most people would probably consider an indie label to be “more ethical” than a major, and a band with no label who does everything themselves to be even more ethical.

In order for music to truly become ethical in this sense, you need to change the band to label relationship. The labels need to work for the bands, not the other way around as it is now. Once you change that, the ethicalness (is that a word?) will go through the roof.

In response, a few people seemed concerned that you would never be able to turn some people around towards ethical behavior when it comes to music. Skipping over the fact that good ethics are relative and vary greatly from person to person, they have a good point which may be true in a lot of cases. But if the band to label relationship improved (and it showed), a lot of people would become more ethical than they seem to be now.

It’s like a game. The way the internet is structured has determined the rules and the labels are like a bully who demands that the rules be changed whenever he starts losing the game. Nobody wants to play with the bully. If the labels start playing fairly, treating fans (and bands) with respect and then give them enough time to build some trust, a lot of fans would get back in the game and play fairly too.

This is a copy of my original Germaniac.com blog post from April 26, 2008

At a music industry conference he recently spoke at, Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby, was recently asked how to stop music piracy. Here is what he said:

“More people are killed by pigs than sharks each year, but because shark attacks are more newsworthy, they seem more prevalent. Piracy gets all the attention, but … obscurity is your real enemy. Fight obscurity until you’re a household name, then piracy will be more of a problem than obscurity. Until then, worry about pigs, not sharks.”

The audience, full of record label execs, really didn’t like this answer. That’s too bad, because they are forgetting one very important detail: They are the ones with the problem! While on the other hand, CD Baby is doing better than ever. In fact, their physical CD sales are up 30% over last year, while CD sales in the industry as a whole are going down significantly. So, if you were one of these troubled execs in the audience, would you be paying attention to Derek’s lesson or would you be shouting “I hate your point of view, buddy!” like one woman did? Wow.

Derek concludes, “Putting so much attention and energy into fighting piracy (as if, when solved, you’ll suddenly start selling 10 times more) - is misguided effort, distracting you from what you really need to be improving.” That sounds just like what I told Stefan Herwig, but he didn’t get it either.

People don’t stop reading an article in a newspaper or magazine to research a product displayed in an ad and they won’t stop watching a show on television to look up more info about something they just saw a commercial for. So why would they stop viewing something online just because there’s an ad next to it? The only difference is that the internet ad is clickable and ones in magazines or on TV aren’t, but the idea that someone isn’t going to leave something they like just to pursue an ad is the same on all platforms, even when the opportunity to do so is there.

So the goal of an ad online shouldn’t even be to attract clicks or entice people to take action now, it should be to make the person remember whatever it’s promoting so they will hopefully look into it more at some later time. Once that is established, you have to ask yourself what people are going to remember more, something they are interested in or something that’s just randomly there because it’s paid for? Naturally, people will remember whatever they like more, so the best place to advertise your product is to get it onto a “channel” that’s accessed by lots of like-minded people, something like a website or blog about a certain topic. The promotional value something gets in an article is much greater than any sort of traditional advertising.

Why don’t companies pay people to write about their products on topic-specific blogs and websites? Well, some do, but it doesn’t seem to be that big of an idea online yet. It’s the best kind of advertising (if it’s done right), though. Sure, you could make the argument that doing this could potentially taint the quality of the content or compromise the writing style, but a director who is aware of these issues could easily limit the article topics to those that are still perfectly acceptable for the genre of the site. Content legitimacy could also be maintained by making no promises to the paying promoter that the review or article will necessarily be positive and making sure that it remains true to the writer’s purpose, whether they aim to be objective or subjective. Subjectivity is best for the purpose of promoting a product, though, and this happens to be just how most bloggers write.

Of course, the paying “advertiser” would be taking a big risk by agreeing to pay for something that has uncertain effectiveness. But how is that any different than putting a traditional ad into a magazine or website or on a billboard? You don’t know how effective any of those will be until it’s been paid for and has been published, and sometimes not even then. Plus, the costs of those forms of advertising are even higher than what a blogger might charge to write an article about a specific product or company. When you also consider that a website or blog is much more targeted towards the type of person who would actually be interested in any given topic, paying someone to write about your product actually makes a lot more sense than paying for a full page ad in a magazine.