Recently I was asked by John Snyder, coordinator of Music Industry Studies at Loyola University New Orleans, to collaborate on the development of a presentation and speech on the evolution of the music industry and copyright to be delivered to students at Loyola’s College of Law. Throughout the course of our discussions and development of the presentation, we synthesized a number of the emerging trends in the industry into what we found to be an interesting new perspective on the metrics of the industry. I have decided to share the ideas we developed in a 4 part series of articles (largely because a hard drive crash has caused me to lose the video of our presentation), the first of which is found here:

New Metrics in the Music Industry – Artificial Inflation (Part 1 of 4)

The Music Industry is often used a case study for the impact that the internet and the digital age are having on a wide variety of industries.

The first to be hit by the immediate and infinite distribution machine and perhaps the most notoriously resistant and unable to adapt to the new demands of the market; hardly a day passes without an article being published on record low album sales and the dire state of the industry as a whole.

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David and I recently had the opportunity to attend Tribecon, the interactive business/tech conference that takes place as part of Voodoo Fest every year.

The conference consists of several ‘sessions’ of 10 minute speeches given by various members of the tech and startup community from all over the country. Since the running theme of Tribecon is online community building, most speakers chose to focus on ways for businesses to leverage social networks to gain traction or on startups that are using online technologies in creative ways.

One of my favorites from this year was NeighborGoods.net, an online community that allows users to share and borrow items which they have in their possession but do not necessarily use all that frequently. For example, while the average power drill only gets used about a total of 6 minutes in its lifetime (according to founder Micki Krimmel’s speech), allowing people who need drills to connect with people who have them (but are almost definitely not actively using them) saves a lot of time and eliminates a ton of waste. More »

I encountered Julien Smith while attending the first annual TribeCon during Voodoo Fest here in New Orleans.  Julien was asked to speak about ideas expressed in his then new book Trust Agentsco-authored by Chris Brogan.

Initially, I had my doubts about his speech, thinking it was simply a rehashed Tribes, yet as Julien further explained the concepts outlined in his book, I became enraptured by his take on our generation’s experience with the birth and rise of the Internet.  Julien appropriately discusses today’s young adults, those ‘most familiar with the digital space’ as digital natives.  Digital natives recognize how the incessant proliferation of the Web creates a previously untouched level of transparency among humanity.  Every individual now has the resources to research just about any topic, group, or theory on their own. Previous gatekeepers such as research labs, private universities, and other bottlenecks’ separation from the rest of society is diminishing rapidly.   Each individual with a laptop and internet access now has the power to change opinions, rules, industries, simply with an idea and the promotional tools available.

For businesses, this means two things: More »

This week we’re covering a particularly interesting book: Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. I should preface this review by asserting now that I am in no way a Dead Head. In fact, I am not very partial to the band’s music at all. In no way is my support for this book an extension of any sort of propensity for the band or its music. When it comes to Garcias I prefer Cherry to Jerry.

That being said, I don’t think that there is anything wrong with being a Dead Head, and as you will see, I have a tremendous respect for the band’s forward-thinking and innovative business models.

Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead was co-authored by marketing experts and admitted Dead Heads: David Meerman Scott (author of New Rules of Marketing & PR) and Brian Halligan (CEO of Hubspot). The two authors have compiled their mutual knowledge of the band’s history with their business knowledge and insight to illustrate a number of business practices implemented by the Grateful Dead that it is now clear were well ahead of their time. Additionally, Scott and Halligan extract the principles and philosophies underlying these practices and broaden them for general purpose use across a variety of business platforms. More »

This week, I have the pleasure of reviewing a book that I’ve been looking forward to reading for quite some time: Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Gary’s work, he is the raging ball of charisma that hosts Wine Library TV, an online video blog about his consuming passion – wine. Gary built his parents’ local discount liquor store into a multi-million dollar/year business by harnessing his incredible passion and enthusiasm and channeling it through a medium that suited it: one of the first video blogs.

Through his efforts, Gary has built upon this passion to create a career that involves television appearances, keynote speaking invitations, business consulting, and a myriad of other outlets and opportunities.

The best part (and the premise of Crush It!) is that he managed to accomplish all of this while doing exactly what he loves (and his argument is that it is exclusively because he was doing what he loved that it was possible in the first place). More »

From 5ft below sea level to the Mile High City of Denver.

courtesy of joesephfotos.com

I’m just getting back to the heat of August in New Orleans, a reminder that the summer of Louisiana and Colorado are VERY different.

My most recent festival work took me to Denver, CO for the Mile High Music Festival.  Mile High is in its 3rd year as a festival and takes place on the Colorado Rapids 917 acre soccer complex, where the festival grounds cover 14 of the soccer fields.  Festival attendance is generally around 35,000 – 40,000 people, although last year’s attendance was lower than expected causing AEG to bring in well known festival favorites such as Dave Matthews and Jack Johnson.

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Sorry for our absence, here at RabbitHole we have been making some big changes.  We have some exciting news that we will be announcing over the next few weeks, so stay tuned….

While reading Trust Agents on my way to Denver I began thinking about customer interactions with large corporations.  So many of these corporations spend their money on high profile executives to come in and make strong and drastic changes to either increase profit, market share, public perception, etc….what too often these companies lack is individuals such as John.

John is what Seth Godin calls a “linchpin.” He is invaluable to the company.  John is a flight attendant for Frontier Airlines.  During the course of my 2 hour and 20 min flight to Denver from New Orleans, John managed to personally connect to just about every person on the 120 person plane.  John created a tasteful and personal relationship for Frontier airlines to their customers.

Not only did John remember just about every passenger name in the first 5 rows but 1 hour into the flight grandparents were telling John to go say hi to their grandchildren at the back of the plane.

As I waited to get the video footage, each passenger shook John’s hand and often gave him compliments such as “great to have you,”  “thank you SO much,” as well as, “you are the single BEST airline attendant I have ever seen.”

John does for Frontier Airlines what no manager, no corporate program, no incentive, no advertisement could do. He establishes, connects, and fosters relationships with every passenger in such a sincere manner, that every person who was on that plane couldn’t help but think “maybe I should keep flying Frontier.”

As always, we look forward to your thoughts, comments, and questions. Stay tuned for updates from Mile High Music Fest!

Cheers,

- David

david@rabbitholeconsulting.com

Our friend Greg Rhoades recently wrote a post for neworleans.com detailing a disturbing recent push by the New Orleans Police Department to enforce an outdated curfew law that effectively prohibits the fundamentally New Orleanian tradition of street performance. Below is an excerpt from the post:

This week I’ll be doing a double feature covering epsisodes 8 and 9 of Treme, while focusing primarily upon the former.

Episode 8 takes us into Mardi Gras day, the venerable holiday of head-splitting hangovers imbued with an overall sense of shame at the debauchery of the past week all while maintaining the sense of being a last hurrah before the Lenten period of repentance. Relatively little happens plot-wise in this episode although the writers take the opportunity to pack it full of traditional Mardi Gras references that at their best are relevant and informative and at worst sound a little tired. More »

I’m just arriving back from Bonnaroo, which wrapped up its ninth annual weekend festival.  The roughly 80,000-person music festival is held in June every year in Manchester, TN, conveniently located an hour from my house in Nashville.

Aerial from 2006

This year’s Bonnaroo is certainly one to go down in the books, seeing as the festival started with heavy rains and thunderstorms, turned to blistering heat,
and ended with perfect weather for Dave Matthew’s closing set.

With the initial rains, golf carts, cars, trucks, and even tours buses were stuck in mud on entering the festival site, but luckily due to the extreme heat More »