Musicians Are Starting to Embrace Technology...Finally

This week I have been listening to Girl Talk's new album.  Like a growing number of artists, Girl Talk makes his albums available online for free, sometimes allowing downloaders to donate an amount of their choosing to the artist.  This seems like a pretty unsustainable business strategy, but there are a few reasons why I think it works for artists like Girl Talk.

First, the availability of free, online music has led to the decline of CD sales.  As this has happened, musicians have had to increasingly rely on live performances in order to make money.  By allowing downloaders free access to one's music, an artist is simply recognizing that people would be downloading it for free anyway through Torrent and other online services.  Second, many artists like Girl Talk can't legally sell their music commercially.  Because their music consists of mashes and mixes of other artists copyrighted music, sometimes combining acts as disparate as Three-6 Mafia and the Smashing Pumpkins, selling their music would leave them on the less desirable end of countless lawsuits.  Finally, releasing high-quality music for free goes so far in developing listener loyalty that many times fans will go out of their way to pay for concert tickets or give donations out of a sense of gratitude.  This could be seen clearly with Lil' Wayne's release of Tha Carter III.  After several years of releasing countless high-quality mix-tapes free online, Lil' Wayne finally released Tha Carter III, a studio album.  Although anyone who had enjoyed his free releases could have found that album on the internet for free, fans went out in droves and bought the CD.  It seems the reason for this was appreciation for the free work Lil' Wayne had done in the past.

Despite this seemingly strange method of release I think it works for artists like Girl Talk.  His new album can be downloaded here: http://illegal-art.net/allday/

Serendipity and Culture

In vendor selection, I believe that things like corporate culture and attitude are very important.  Doing research about things like culture allows a firm to best take advantage of serendipity.  Serendipity can be incredibly important in business, but leaving success all to fortuitous events is a huge mistake.  The best way to go about things is to put your business in the right place to let luck take its course.

If a company chooses vendors by throwing a dart at a list, then there is a chance that the relationship could be successful.  But if they first go through and screen that list of venders and eliminate half, or two-thirds of the firms that would cause a culture clash, then there is a much greater likelihood that things will end up working out favorably.  At the end of the day, a dart will be determining the relationship, but because the majority of problem candidates will have been eliminated, the decision will end up being judged upon the extent of the relationship's success, and not whether it worked at all.

Outsourcing Core Functions

After our panel discussion for outsourcing, Prof. Schwarz posed the question, "what stops firms from outsourcing core and strategic functions?"  I would contend that it really isn't possible for a company to outsource such things without it altering their core competency itself.  For example, a software development company cannot remain a software development company if they outsource software development.  That kind of outsourcing effectively makes them a different kind of business.


What I wonder is whether the expansion of outsourcing will effectively lead to the introduction of different kinds of businesses.  As economies of scale are being created through networking, I wonder a segment of businesses will develop whose primary focus is the creation of those networks themselves.  This will depend upon whether networking is sufficiently time consuming and expensive to justify outsourcing their networking needs to another firm, and whether a firm can be efficient and effective enough at network creation to use that as its core competency.


In today's world of network-centric working relationships, and the push to outsource as much as possible, it will be interesting to see if businesses end up outsourcing to such an extent that it that they cut out much of the meat of their business. If too many businesses emerge that are essentially just managers of a collection of contracts, they may cost more than the value they create, meaning we could see a swing back in favor of insourcing.