Nov 14, 2015 |
A lot of people confuse “the news” with “how the world is”. That’s not what the news is about. The news is the unusual, the extreme, the extraordinary, the exception.
The news draws attention to the world acting out of character. It’s the shocking event, the natural disaster, the criminal, the abnormal. Occasionally there are remarkable things to celebrate in the news. Mostly – all too often – it’s tragic, incredibly upsetting and frightening. Bad news about the world causes us to feel that the world is an increasingly terrible place. But the opposite of bad news is not good news. It’s the ordinary. The small. The everyday.
You want to know how the world is? Go out into the world. You want the world to be a nice place? Mostly, you’ll find that it is – and there are always opportunities to make it nicer and kinder in small ways. Those bad people you see in the news? Those awful events? Those tragedies? They’re not typical of anything. Not of a place, nor of a type of person, a faith or a time in history. They are in the news because something happened that is way outside how the world usually is, and what people ordinarily are.
This morning I have taken the dog for a walk. I’ve fed the cats. I’ve made porridge. I’ve had coffee. I’ve done dishes. I’ve checked email. I’ve listened to music I like. None of this is news – it’s utterly ordinary. And it’s no less of a reflection of “how the world is” than what you will see in the news today. Probably more so.
Terrible things are happening in the world. But mostly, it’s incredibly ordinary. And what a wonderful place it is to do ordinary things. Daily, unnewsworthy things that make us and those around us happy in small, unremarkable ways – every day, for as long as we have.
Apr 4, 2013 |
I’ve been looking at music business figures in the news today. I really shouldn’t.
The problem is that macro-economics tell a story without meaning. There is no useful knowledge that can be gleaned from Online music licensing revenues pass radio for first time. Why? Because the fortunes of a very few artists skew the results every single time.
So focusing on online music licensing as a business strategy only becomes a reasonable response if you’re Ed Sheeran, Adele, Coldplay or Mumford and Sons. It’s not just unhelpful information, it’s scarcely even descriptive.
Take, for instance, a headline like “UK album sales up on previous year”. That might simply mean “Adele released a record recently”. In aggregate, it gives a false picture.
Or what about the idea that physical sales for music are down? Other than in aggregate, maybe, it’s nonsense. It might say something about the fortunes of a sector, but it’s no basis for strategy for an individual act.
What if the sales of physical products are actually UP for the top half a dozen acts, significantly DOWN for the next 100 artists or so, and UP for pretty much everyone else (the so-called ‘long tail’)? The fact that those 100 next-tier artists are collectively so significant financially means that the overall aggregate is down.
My point: it adds meaning to the results when you start to slice the data up. Even only a little bit. Even with an arbitrary, rhetorical number like 100.
Coincidentally, I also received a press release from the PRS this morning, claiming that more money had been paid out to their members over the last year than ever before. I sent back an email asking if that information could be subdivided so we could see the relative growth between the top 20% and the bottom 80%. They declined.
But without even very simple analytical dividing tools like that, aggregation is utterly meaningless as a method of understanding the music business. If one artist (or five, or a hundred) can utterly skew the overall results, then a total is empty information.
And that’s what nearly every ‘state of the music business’ report is based on.
