the Atlantic: Hip Hop Invented Modern Music Economics

Here’s a summary article on how a music genre strongly rooted in an American microculture was ahead of the broader music industry and economic mores of entertainment macroculture, marketing and branding. And I mean micro culture—as in city, class, ethnicity and neighborhood-specific.

“Russell Simmons became the first rap entrepreneur to look beyond mere music and attempt to market the ghetto-quixotic lifestyle preached in hip-hop’s lyrics”…

By seeing record sales as a secondary, even tertiary revenue stream, hip hop paved the way for modern economic thinking about the music biz.

Columbia University launches 3-year JD/MBA program

I’ve posted before on the ROI of certain US graduate tracks given unbounded US higher education costs. Issues include disingenuous marketing campaigns by graduate schools, graduates’ oversupply and shrinking slots of high paying jobs that permit repaying unprecedented student loan debt. US student loan debt of $830 billion recently surpassed that of US credit cards.

Columbia’s new package found here is the clearest evidence yet that some academic programs, most notably law, are structurally overvalued. They take too long and cost too much. This is aside from oversupply issues. And longterm returns on investment have trended questionable.

That a supplier of this tier of graduate education–US News’ 4th ranked law school and 9th ranked B-school–is effectively restating the value of two of academia’s’ most revenue-generating and sought after credentials is historic. In New York and the northeast Columbia sits in a competitive and crowded higher ed neighborhood and its differentiation should particularly reverberate. There’s no mandate for a 3-year legal program per the ABA’s own Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools. Columbia and the ABA know its bar passage rate and practitioner preparedness will be fine with 2 years of training. 200 199 ABA-approved US law schools may have just gone to the potty on themselves. Business schools are surely doing a double take too. And rightly.

R. Kelly’s “When A Woman Loves”: when the music business goofs up and makes music

Something went wrong at Jive. And R. Kelly put on his booster rockets. This is other world. Or rather the real R&B world. Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding and James Brown are smiling.

I’m a self-appointed wannabee music critic. Credentials: 14 years of violin + daughter of a man with a jazz collection that belongs in a museum + almost credible wannabee expert on Italian opera–mostly sopranos and mezzo sopranos–some of which I know by heart. After high school I wanted to attend Juilliard. I wasn’t prepared. Plus impatient.

But I love music. All kinds. This song by R. Kelly is a delicious freak accident of major record label doing. I say it because big labels mostly don’t do artistry, and hardly any R&B. They obstruct. They have formulas and repeat them to generate predictable returns. Like film sequels. Fixed income. It’s a bad business model for art (yes, I’m assuming there’s a good one). It’s how you build a plane or a widget but not create music.

I could write a longer post, but will just assert the following in no certain order:

• Unlike your ipad, some shoes or your orange juice, this could never come from anywhere in the world but America.
• Unlike math or history, it could never directly be taught.
• When you study great practitioners who have come before you, it will show.
• Daring to authentically differentiate amongst a sea of convention commands not only attention but brand respect.
• America’s finest art began in the lowest place–the cotton fields–with a sound that still moves and which we have never abandoned: the field holler.
• From Vera Hall murmuring, to Ella Fitzgerald scatting, to Louis Armstrong’s gruff vocals, American music, like visual and other art, isn’t just what you hear or what is even intelligible, or what you planned, but what you feel.

Click play. Because formulaic music outlets may not put this in rotation–despite a palpable demand signal (one need only see the hits and youtube comment stream). And the flute lines are hypnotic.

Update:
Here are my favorite comments on the video from Youtube:

key customers, thought leaders, and marketing savvy from Nicki Minaj

“If a gay guy impersonates you, you are a bad bitch. Period.”–Nicki Minaj

Profound.

This isn’t just mouthy rapper speak. It’s a sophisticated marketing comment from the 25 year-old female raptress. She’s on the current cover of OUT magazine.

While part of a team that successfully pitched a marketing campaign to Serino Coyne–the premium NY advertising agency for Broadway musicals (Cats, Dreamgirls, Les Miserables, The Lion King, Annie Get Your Gun, The Producers, Hairspray, etc.)–I learned this from partner Rick Ellis: musicals and campaigns approved by gay males are hits. It was a key metric. If they voted “no” you needed to be worried.

Minaj’s comment is a blunt, Hip-Hop app of Rick’s wisdom. Gay males have certain thought and creative leadership intuition across entertainment and Minaj understands it, is bubble bath comfortable in it, and in real deviation from her genre’s culture, calls it out. Her choice to do OUT’s cover was hers alone she says, and a smart and due thank you to her gay and particularly gay male fan base. And all before her fall album drops. I don’t remember an artist who was out-shining established artists on whose tracks she contributes only seconds of lyrics and whose album was more anticipated and buzzed up than hers appears now.  Well done.

1500 CEOs cite Creativity as No. 1 leadership competency for the future

I’m a long-time down-size critic. When a firm downsizes, I always ask, what’s the real problem they aren’t solving. It’s a tactic, not a management strategy. Done regularly when management lacks ideas. And then what: you’re smaller–so are your competitors– and you still lack ideas.

An earlier CEO poll cited in Newsweek’s recent article on Creativity is an underscore. It’s about box leaving and game changing. Charlie Rose is on the case too. As of course Richard. Linchpin too. And here’s fast company’s 100 most creative listing.

a one-click clinic in branding

This is a tall glass of water in a tumbleweed and cracked dry land: James Hugh Potts II, LLC.

And how bad does it have to be for a law firm and centuries old category of service provider, to differentiate by branding itself as being customer focused and human.  Amazing.  This practitioner brand is, sadly and to my great relief, a shattering exception to the rule.

running barefoot

These are my exceptionally clean 10-year old running shoes. Reebok clearly returned something on my investment.

I’ve never felt a shoe like them. They’re clean because I only run on beach sand or an indoor track. I put them on and take them off trackside. They offer a glove fit with no discernible relative motion between foot and shoe. They tilt me forward onto the ball of the foot. I’ve enjoyed them.

But in light of interesting growing research on running revisited recently in this NPR story, I’m giving them up.

 

The difference in foot angle on landing in-shoe vs. barefoot—and the shock transmitted through the heel up the leg into the hip joint—versus being mediated significantly muscularly through the leg is persuasive for me.

Protected: epigenetics: “Why Genes Aren’t Destiny” + the Haiti factor

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

new underground solar panels: Cheap, 3D and 6x More Efficient

This research from the Georgia Institute of Technology changes things:

Scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created the world’s first 3-D photovoltaic solar system that actually works underground.

Using optical fibers common to the telecommunications industry, researchers seeded them with zinc oxide nanostructures–much like the white stuff found on a lifeguard nose. Those nanostructures were then coated with a dye-sensitized material that converts light into electricity. The electricity is then captured using a liquid electrolyte surrounding the nanostructures.

So only the very tip of the cable needs to be exposed to actual sunlight.

This technology could really displace many panel-based solar systems and is a formidable accomplishment for the southeastern engineering school, away from nanotechnology and sustainability academic enclaves like MIT or the west coast:

This 3-D system can be easily concealed, leaving rooftops panel-free. It gives architects and designers new options for incorporating PVs into buildings. For each cable is only 3-times the width of a human hair.

“This will really provide some new options for photovoltaic systems,” Dr Zhong Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology said. “We could eliminate the aesthetic issues of PV arrays on building.”

Prezi

This changes things. In business we sell. We pitch. We show. We solicit for others’ buy-in. Sometimes we have a captive audience and must give a presentation. Prezi totally rethinks visual presentation, and offers a truly alternative way to convey ideas. A radical departure from the tradition of MS PowerPoint, led by an intriguing management and design team and encouraged by savvy investors, Prezi signals that a new field of more diverse conveyance choices has arrived.

Barry Nalebuff asks, “Why not?”

This still timely talk by Yale professor and businessman Barry Nalebuff is about business opportunity in the habitual turning of things on their head and improvement of our experiences by asking, “Why not?”. It’s an excellent 55:55 minute thought lab on business that whizzes by.

In line with Barry’s previous book and talk is his website www.whynot.net an online thought lab on “How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small” where people enter and explore business and product ideas and share feedback. Game changer take-aways and talk highlights include:

Add coffee to milk, not milk to coffee:
Dunkin donuts saved countless pieces of plastic and labor hours by simply adding coffee to milk—therefore requiring no stirring or stirrers—vs. the opposite

Modify educational transcripts to be like those of Indiana University (IU):
IU transcripts dis-incentivise grade inflation by including not just the student’s grade, but

• the total distribution of grades received by all students of the class
• the total distribution of grades granted by the particular professor in that course for all sections
• the average grade granted by department
• the average GPA of other students in class in their other courses
• the percentage of students in the class who were majors

Employ a formal devil’s advocate committee for internal projects:
This creates a shoot-em-up that enriches ultimate internal project valuation—even potentially eliminating some projects

Motorized lollipop spinner is right answer to wrong question—becomes P&G electric toothbrush motor

Offer insurance policy against losing money on a home:
(already implemented in Syracuse, NY)
When you know there’s insurance against losing money in home, you’re more likely to buy
Housing market responds well to reduced risk

Offer a maternity MBA:
Reduce friction costs for women wishing to have a baby and earn MBAs w/ onsite child care and longer MBA plans

We must be the change we seek in the world

Master P: what top MBA programs don’t know and can’t teach

Master P

Today Seth Godin wrote a blog post on branding called The platform vs. the eyeballs. Framed as possibly “the most subtle yet important shift that marketers face as they deal with the reality of new media“, namely, that “Marketers aren’t renters [of eyeballs], now they own [platforms]“, the post was fine except for being 15 years late.

This isn’t a derisive comment on Seth—it’s not even a comment on him. The bigger story is about where ideas and ingenuity actually reside vs. where we go looking for them.

Godin’s points, well taken, weren’t new.  Rapper and entrepreneur Master P exploited them nearly twenty years ago while building his own empire. He’s 40. But by 29 he had a Forbes estimated net worth of $361 million. With this and a 1998 #10 ranking on a Forbes listing of the highest paid entertainers, Godin’s concepts of branding and nurturing a platform strategically using technology vs. fleetingly renting eyeballs, were exactly what Master P was doing from the start of his career—except he lacked an online networking platform because the eyeballs (or eardrums) weren’t plugged in as they are currently. And while very successful he was hardly singular in innovating platform marketing: other creative people like Spike Lee assumed alternative approaches to marketing that erected a platform vs. influencing one audience one time.

anecdote–the “No Limo Story”:

I once awaited actress Jane Fonda’s arrival for a meeting with my then superior,  U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher. From his suite I watched panoramically for her limo.  It never came. I turned around to an opening door and she walked in.  This movie star and former wife of a billionaire had driven herself in a bland Toyota, had parked in the visitor’s lot where no other visitors of her profile had ever parked and had walked to our offices. We can miss things that come packaged counter to expectation. And packages can be places, institutions, people, socioeconomic class—everything.

Any top American business program and certainly the ones with purported marketing expertise whose marketing faculty collectively have no mastery of the Hip-Hop industry’s innovations in marketing, are obsolete.

Master P

What’s great about America is that it has enough critical masses of diversity such that it can avail itself of multiple labs. It can nurture  whole micro-cultures that create intelligence and mores potentially transferable and scalable to the larger heterogeneous economy. I say top MBA programs can’t teach Master P’s brand of marketing because they source from places that systematically skirt these microcultures—are branded to do so. But value is there. Big value.

Coca-Cola Freestyle

I recently encountered the new Coca-Cola Freestyle fountain machine which dispenses more than 100 different drinks. Described as the first software-driven fountain dispenser from the Coca-Cola Company and  developed in collaboration with the Bsquare company, the machine employs highly concentrated flavor cartridges and proprietary micro-dosing technology that deliver any of hundreds of drinks on demand. It works by LCD touchscreen beginning with a parent beverage and driving down to any one of hundreds of drink options. It had a clean and simple touch screen with little bottle-cap-like icons indicating drink choices.

I remember the announcement of these new machines from Coca-Cola that would feature hundreds of drink options but lacked physical conceptualization of it.  So now I see. It features a broad range of beverages not previously sold in the U.S. and includes sparkling and still branded drinks like water, juices, and teas.

This is what brands do. They differentiate. They give consumers choices, innovate and lead.

Worth noting is how many products—for example, some soap brands—are not universally available across retailers. Multiple visits to disparate retailers with highly similar inventory are required. By contrast, Coca-Cola’s new machine offers more than one hundred different products at the end of a fingertip. Retailers can’t display that density and selection of product on one shelf, or likely even aisle.

From Bsquare:

“The Coca-Cola Freestyle dispenser uses proprietary PurePour Technology™ to make dozens of branded beverages fresh to order, in the same amount of space as the current eight-valve machine.“

Here’s an official tour of Coca-Cola freestyle from Bsquare.

Several advantages of the machine are well apparent:

• Hundreds of drink options means selling all along the tail of drink tastes–more options = more sales.
• I’d think that as different beverage preferences develop and are identified through the machine’s software, that tailored availability of those beverages in retail stores could follow.
• Maintenance and replenishment schedules appear efficiently facilitated by remote network communications with the machine’s software.
• Space utilization/efficiency for proprietors by freeing up whatever backroom or cabinet space from separate  CO2 gas cannisters and sweetener.
• It’s empowering to the customer to have that many options literally at your fingertips.  Brands that empower are embraced.

Where I was, children ran up to the machine and started “driving”, as if they said, “That magic box has drinks inside.  Let’s get some.”  <<touch screen, touch screen, touch screen>>.  They never paused.  They knew it was for them.  It was interesting how unamazed they were, acting as though it should be expected to have this many drink options.  Adults stood around amazed and in my case, secretly wanting to see the inside of the machine.

I think it’s a swift forward step.  In an instant I now look differently at not only conventional fountain machines, but—unfairly—at businesses still using them.