Empowering creative talent in next generation media

I have been talking about next generation media for the past 2 posts. I want to conclude by saying how we can leverage on these important changes to empower creative talent (i.e. the musicians, the photographers, the artists, the authors etc). In this, I want to draw reference to a powerful article on Nine Inch Nails (hat tip to Ethan Bauley) that has illuminated how media will evolve but also raised some important issues.


Value capture for creative talent is still a challenge: he sold 250,000 numbered copies of the CD. The album is also available on iTunes for $9.90.

Most of the innovations we have seen and discussed on the Web are on the value creation side. This is important because without value creation, there is no basis for growth. However, at some point, we need to talk about value capture as well. Even Google needs to capture some (not all!) of the value it has created. However, this is very elusive for next generation media.

NIN has innovated for its fans and as a result, has successful created lots of new value. However, in the value capture side, the innovations are far less impressive. The article mentions CD and iTune sales, as well as concerts. All these are traditional ways of capturing value. How we invent new ways of doing so? One possibility is to rethink the ecosystem of creative talent and their fans.


Fans are critical value enablers: users could tag items on Flickr and YouTube and have them pop up on NIN.com, where other users will find them neatly ordered and ready for viewing

Fans are your natural viral distributors but they can go beyond that. It is time to think about how to elevate your community to truly power the businesses of creative talent. We need to go further than allowing fans to share, to remix stuff, to moderate community etc. We need to create new organisation models that allow the most passion fans to be part of the creative talent's business ecosystem.

Each creative talent and all their assets, be it music, books, images etc are markets whereby fans can innovate on. Think about software marketplaces like App Store but apply it to creative talents. How do you design insitiutional rules that allow any fan to be a manager, a promoter, a merchandiser, a radio station etc and profit from your talent and creative outputs?

It is only by recognising that value capture needs to be done at the ecosystem level than can we reimagine new business models for creative talent in next generation media. This is just a thought. I look forward to hearing your comments and views.

Posted in: idea generation