Web Travels & Those Remarkables…
Big Champagne is a company that has ballooned since its inception a few years ago as the music billboard authority for an industry beyond album sales. They provide data analysis across social media, news, illegal torrent/file sharing, as well as the ‘traditional’ music-popularity fields- itunes, radio, spotify, etc.
BigChampagne’s NetVibes page then is a great tool to get a quick glimpse of all the music related news in the industry, with the ability to click through any headline and read about it etc. One of their tabs is dedicated to Bob Lefsetz, a blogger self-proclaimed “First in Music Analysis”.. another ‘outside the box’ thinker, he provides a lot of great insight and motivating talk (and heavily opinionated rants) on his blog.
A more recent post of his, We Are All Weird, describes some interesting points about the new era of the music industry, based on Seth Godin‘s recent interview on his own web-company website Squidoo. This 25 minute audio interview is a really interesting insight into how the business world is moving, or dividing from mass-produced, generic, and heavily-marketed products, to a focus on niche markets- embracing that people are embracing their individuality, and that because of the internet, forced-marketing no longer works and can even hinder a product. Instead, innovators are conceiving ‘remarkable’ products that sell themselves by word-of-mouth, which occurs when something, or a facet of it, is ‘remarkable’… ‘worthy of remark’.
But is ‘remarkable’ necessarily a positive characteristic of a product? I think there is a constant interplay between remarkability due to true innovation, or quality, and something being remarkable in the same way we tell all of our friends about the horrific clown-car pile-up, whether we know that to be what we were experiencing or not… I’m sure there’s a line there somewhere…