"Sweet Dream" Music Business Tip O'da Day

by Angela K. Durden
Technology inventor protecting creator's copyrights. Business writer, novelist, songwriter, and Citizen Journalist.


Always remember and never forget —

Travel the world and the seven seas.
Everybody is looking for something.
Some of them want to use you.
Some of them want be used by you.
Some of them want to abuse you.
Some of them want to be abused.

Being an industry disruptor is not as sexy as it sounds

by Angela K. Durden
Technology inventor protecting creator's copyrights. Business writer, novelist, songwriter, and Citizen Journalist.

[This article was first released on Durden's blog on 8/14/17 at the link included at the end of this excerpt which is being published at ROTW on this Day of Labor celebrations since Durden works very, very hard.]

Being an industry disruptor is not as sexy as it sounds even if headlines everywhere infer otherwise. Forbes, The Guardian, Equities.com, and others talk about the disruption of industries from two points of view.

From the disrupted: “Oh, s**t! We’re f***ed! What do we do?” 

From the disruptor: “Here we come. Watch out, World. Early investors who managed to hang on are so gonna wanna kiss our feet.” 

In all these instances, disrupted and disruptor are sexy because of having big bucks and making even bigger promises, teams of under-30-somethings roller blading from one fancy office to another as they read their quarterly stock option reports, and planned IPOs or looming layoffs making them beg for government bailout. 

(Note the cover to the left: I’m surprised the art director didn’t throw on a cowboy hat and snake skin cowboy boots and have him twirl a lasso the graphic designer would have made out of greenbacks.)

But I’d like to tell you about being an industry disruptor from another POV that so rarely gets covered and is not so sexy:

When seeking funding for my new technology company, I was told on more than one occasion by people who know what it means, “You are an industry disruptor, Angela.” The first time I was surprised as I didn’t think of myself as that. I was simply trying to efficiently get around or remove roadblocks to my participation in the global business called the Music Industry.

Rich Karlgaard "celebrating innovation and growth"

To help get eyes on my solution, and thinking he might like to celebrate this innovation, I several times wrote personal letters about this journey, sent in real envelopes, to Rich Karlgaard of Forbes. I got absolutely no response whatsoever from the guy who says “I celebrate innovation and growth.” I didn’t even get the typical polite letter from an underling acknowledging receipt of my letters. Not one impersonal reply that hey, Rich is a busy, busy man. 

Steve Forbes

I wrote Steve Forbes years ago asking him to blurb my book on resumés and he had his people reply with a quote from him that he couldn’t do it because I was pretty much a nobody. The letter even seemed as if it was signed by Mr. Forbes himself. See how it works, Rich? Steve had manners.

What I need is a sexy little jet.

I stopped writing Karlgaard when it became clear his idea of a sexy disruptor celebrating innovation and growth did not include companies protecting the rights and data of content creators. Now, if I had a sexy little jet that goes fast and turns loopdeloops in such a manner that his whiskey-laced latté would not spill, then yeah, he’d talk to me. But

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE

Soundcloud CEO swears they aren't shuttering their doors. What else could he say?

by Angela K. Durden
The first domino to fall is never the only one. As the founder of MyDigitalCatalog.com and a songwriter who wants to place her music, I stay abreast of the business and ahead of the curve of where the music business is heading. On May 19, 2017, I wrote this article on Linkedin entitled "2017: The Year the Music Business Died." In that article I said:

The Bigs and The Majors have lost track of the money, y'all.Making the distribution system so complicated that the creators of the music cannot figure how they are getting screwed, The Bigs and The Majors ended up outsmarting themselves. Yes, while giving the old "eff you" to the creators, they ending up effing themselves. The more they lost control, the tighter they squeezed. We know this from the consolidations in the business making all but a very few of these companies publicly traded [and] who had better meet quarterly stockholder performance expectations — or else.

And in this January 29, 2017 article entitled "Music Streaming Services Conundrum" wherein I said:

On the other hand, as streamers’ dance the light fandango, their balance sheets turn a whiter shade of pale.

As a company who thought they would try streaming, Soundcloud soon found themselves in trouble when a UK performing rights society sued them.

Soundcloud, one of The Bigs, and other of The Bigs and The Majors, have been and still are playing fast and loose with creators' digital assets, and it is biting them in the butt. Archive Team, a group of volunteer rogue code monkeys, has already started downloading Soundcloud's customers' digital assets, that is, several petabytes their music. Since it cost a lot of money to archive these, Archive Team would not be doing that if they thought there was no danger of the files being lost.

In any case, of course Soundcloud's CEO swears the company won't fold. What else would he say as he desperately attempts to unload the company on unsuspecting buyers? A yard sale this is not. It's a conflagration in the making and lots of people have already been burned.

Financial Times reported Soundcloud is running out of cash. And Soundcloud has closed locations and held massive layoffs.

Most notably to be hurt are the creatives who have been using the service.

If Hitler was in the music business these days...

by Angela K. Durden