Artists having to act like start ups in order to get their music out there.

Anyone who pledges gets a download of our new album. The download will be available very soon... pledgemusic.com/thecandlethiev…

— The Candle Thieves (@candlethieves) February 22, 2012

Hadn't heard of these guys before but looks like they are getting a lot right about the way they are approaching the business. Besides, the video reminds me of the Mitchell & Webb sketches about Mad Bears...

(HT to @Rosmack)

Image from gapingvoid.com

I sense a number of threads coming together this year around content strategy, user experience and marketing. I am not sure what's driving all of this sudden collaboration; it's been pretty clear to me for a while that there was little sense in holding onto the old divisions. Maybe it's just I'm paying attention for a change...

Thread #1: "Old" marketing

"Old" marketing relied on budgets. You want to get your message across, you try to speak to the biggest, most relevant audience possible. Size matters. You hammer that message home in all media you can afford. Maybe do a bit of targeting here and there. Don't go crazy though. There's agency lunches to attend and wotnot.

The worrying part is that *this marketing still works*. As a result, I do wonder if old school marketers hide under their desks saying to themselves, "has the Internet gone away yet?"

Either that, or they're worrying about social media. 

Thread #2: Next Big Thing frenzy

First it was all about online marketing. Online marketing was different because it involved the Internet. Just give all that stuff to an agency and let them sort it out. Phew, narrow escape! 

Then it was analytics. Install a few lines of Javascript on your website, and you'll find out what's wrong with it. Oh, wait... You did that and it didn't work? Hmm.

Then it was "usability". Do a couple of user tests with random people in the hallway and they will tell you all the answers you need. Box ticked? Oh, OK, nothing out of that either? Right.

Now, if you've not got a "social media strategy" then clearly you're leaving £££s on the table. Have you even looked at your Klout score recently? Sheesh!

And haven't you done ANYTHING about Content Strategy? Blimey, how 1990s! Haven't you read about the Braintraffic Quadrant or the Day Two Problem?

Over the past 15 or so years I have watched the buzzwords come and go. Today more than ever I'm positive about the situation: we are getting to a point where people are beyond the buzzwords. And I think it's people at the top who are driving this train of thought.

Thread #3: Look beyond the divisions, we're transforming business (finally)

It's been a long time since the magazine Business 2.0 stopped publishing. But as I noted a while back, the web is starting to properly transform businesses, for better or for worse. This is when it gets interesting. Suddenly the conversation shifts from having to justify each minor project to actually driving the bigger ones. The ones where you get to work out what skills you need, pick the team, and how to make it all hang together. 

UX people no longer need to fight with Content Strategists or Project Managers, because you call the shots. Indeed you most likely can't afford to have all those skills at once so you need to find people that can spin many plates, not just one.

Doing this has made me re-assess my own position on these things. And I've come to the conclusion that this is all about customers, or more broadly, people. Nothing new there. However I have also come to the conclusion that the web, in it's infinite capability to break things down into smaller and smaller niches of people is making businesses think more about individuals, rather than groups or segments.

And that in turn is breaking down the silos within companies. Functions need proper overall orchestration if they are going to appear to offer a seamless service to a customer. There's no value in chucking things over the fence to the next team. Departments need to collaborate effectively.

That's hard work if you're tied to your functional area. But good news if you like to get stuck in and make a difference.

Finally I've come to the conclusion that all this good work fundamentally belongs to Marketing. If you read the textbooks and go back to basics, this is where that special "watching and listening to people --> creating things --> make people's lives better" sauce comes from. 

Now, after all those years cringing about that awkward moment when you know you're going to have to have the "form follows function" conversation with a client from hell, I'm coming out of the closet.

My name is DJ, and I work in Marketing.

The publications in question would ritually abuse each other in search of a distinct identity and some sense of exerting thought leadership over the audience. Admittedly a lot of this was unnecessarily unhealthy.

In the era of the web, the power of self-publishing tools (aka WordPress, Blogger et al) should have democratised all this rather too comfortable industry-A&R-meets-media-types-for-an-all-afternoon-boozeathon.

So how is it that I'm beginning to notice a select group of people writing reviews on more or less ALL of the handful of websites I look at in search of new music? What do these publications actually stand for when you have one person writing reviews across all of them, often reviews on very similar types and styles of music.

I applaud the select group for managing to sustain a life of audio luxury and promo MP3s. (Much like I applaud the lamentable band of "travel bloggers" getting free holidays to write puff articles. Genius.)

However, with the exception of the aforementioned Boiler Room, I worry that the web is not creating the brands around which those in search of genuinely new and exciting music gather.

When it comes to writing about music, are we still in the grip of the select few?

A while ago I wrote that if you really want to make UX count, then you need to orchestrate the effort. If you’re solely focusing on designing and building a web interface, then you’re not working hard enough. (Sure, in my post that point was couched in a rather convoluted way. But then, this is MY blog and I’ll write in an esoteric manner if I want to… Remember, other, more easily understood content is just a click away!)

Recently I have been motivated to expand on this point about orchestration. First of all I have been doing work that has opened my eyes to this reality. And second, Leisa Reichelt posted on the topic, in a thought-provokingly ranty way, which then also appeared on our company Yammer network. (We’re sooo digital in our company, honest!)

So, let’s explore some thoughts about what I mean by orchestration.

UX isn't without it's company politics

It’s been pretty clear to me throughout my career that it’s OK to forget about org structures and company politics if you’re creating your own brand new spangly product. Hopefully in that set up, most people have a sense of buy-in and commitment to the cause. Things are fresh and new, and you’re covering new ground together. 

However if you’re in a properly established, competitive and commercial operation with any sense of heritage, culture and right-and-proper work ethic, then when you work in an online capacity and particularly in UX, you’re soon going to hit a few barriers.

With travel, and perhaps in a lot of other verticals, the barriers come thick and fast: 

• The technology isn’t there or is too damn expensive/slow for what you want to do 
• The legacy system wasn’t designed to do many things you would take for granted elsewhere, it can’t be changed in one person’s lifetime, and it doesn't play well with other systems
• Sales are down and you need to do something quick and dirty
• The help you need from another part of the company is not forthcoming – they are busy doing OTHER IMPORTANT THINGS that you wouldn’t understand
• You don't have the tools or expertise you need in your team to do good work

Those are all more or less givens in travel.

But one barrier looms larger than any with real customer-focussed change: lack of desire.

Change comes from the top

We are living in an era where most “proper” company CEOs have had to listen to us Internet up-starts for quite some time, yet they didn’t always need to take much notice. They smirked at our trendy specs, our MacBook Pros and endless barrage of indecipherable jargon. They could initially write us off as the Latest Big Thing On The Block. But in possibly the last five years those same people have had to seriously go back over their Michael Porter books and think again.

We are now in an age where it’s not just the dotcoms that are making waves, real businesses and age-old business models are falling by the wayside because of the impact of disruptive technologies and newer, faster ways to upset incumbents and exploit and grow niches to create value. (Hello, Kodak!)

So, CEOs are sitting up and listening. They want to us to paint a picture that they desire. And what are we telling them? Your web interface is too confusing. You don't have enough engaging content. Your social media presence SUCKS.

This is far from being good enough.

Is your CEO "hip to the game"?

If you really want to change things, you need a CEO who "gets it". When I say that, it doesn't mean that she regularly posts mealtime updates to her Twitter and is "friends" with work colleagues on Facebook. It means that she understands how the onrushing consumer requirements for decency, transparency, simplicity and good old fashioned brand engagement is potentially going to ruin everything that she has strived for, and most importantly will ultimately prevent her from raking in her disgustingly whopping bonus at the end of the financial year.

I am perhaps one of the few lucky ones: my CEO is one of those CEOs who gets it.

When you have a CEO like that they will gather together the massed bands of your company to tell them that they all need to get with the program. They will re-organise the business around the activities and people required to transform the current business model into a new one. They will challenge the people that are key to the "old traditional thinking" and make them understand that they need to drive this change, rather than wait for it to happen. Importantly they will re-prioritise investment so that the change is funded and resourced. And they won't take no for an answer.

So once THAT is done, and by no means is this an easy feat - remember these CEO types have numbers to hit and their own lords and masters to satisfy - it's then down to us UXers to take up the baton. This is where I believe orchestration comes in. Are you (wo)man enough?

No "I" in TEAM (oh, but there is a "ME")

It is unlikely that even as a very senior manager with a UX bent that you'll have all the intellectual firepower and resources at your disposal to create change in the entire company. Yet it IS likely that you'll be able to learn what needs to change in order for your website/mobile app/Web 3.0 magical and revolutionary device to do its work properly.

If you can work that out -- and maybe you could do with understanding more of that stuff anyway, it's how your business ticks, remember? -- you'll need allies. You'll need these allies to fight the good fight against the people who say it can't/shouldn't/won't be done. Suggestion: be nice to these godlike people. Buy them donuts/beer/shoes/golf balls/whatever.

Then, for the people who won't budge, you'll maybe need to get a little Medieval on their ass. Read the Art of War by Sun Tzu and that kind of business. Ends justifies the means and all that. I always like to think of that series of Armstrong & Miller sketches. When they frustrate you press your own imaginary intercom button and mutter under your breath: "KILL THEM" as if to your own imaginary band of henchmen.

Momentum ain't nothing without results

Soon enough you'll have some momentum behind what you want to do. But people will remain sceptical unless you can demonstrate delivery, and most of all RESULTS. You can mock Mark Zuckerberg as much as you like, but "done" actually is better than "perfect". (Well unless you're Path and you've just screwed with people's private data I suppose).

"Results" means something is measurably better once you have delivered compared to when you started. What you're measuring better tally pretty closely if not 100% with how your company measures success. A 1,000,000% increase in Facebook fans is not going to impress a CEO facing a £2m hole in his financial year budget forecast.

So, get over your perfectionism for once. If you can't demonstrate extremely quickly that you're doing stuff which supports the company's immediate objectives, it's unlikely Ms CEO will stump up for your game-changing project. Simple as that. If you're extremely clever, though, you'll be able to fend off all those requests to do things that don't actually align with your long term view. For bonus points, use analytics and customer research to demonstrate why these projects don't add value or don't fit with the strategy. (You do have a strategy, right? Well get one; and publish it!) Worst case scenario, moan to your boss. In a nice way. Mainly though, just keep your focus on the bigger picture, which day by day is hopefully becoming clearer.

Make sure you're seeing the whole picture, and not just the nice bits

By this stage you're developing a vision with the CEO and a few other people that unites your view of how the UX should work with how the rest of the company needs to work to deliver the UX. And it's showing everyone around you how you're going knock seven bells out of your competitors and deliver beaucoup de l'argent to the powers-that-be as a result.

However, remember to get a grip on ALL the customer touchpoints, not just the Internet-enabled ones you're down with. Too narrow a view can drive serious challenge from your blindside, cause resentment and leave you fighting a nasty rear-guard action. Yeah, that's right: call centers can be cool, too. 

Short-term, mid-term, long-term - what means more?

Meanwhile, you're also delivering on short-term objectives by channeling the resources under your control into results-driven work, and hopefully this delivery is informing and refining your vision for how things should work when you're "done". (Or at least once you're properly up and running). Plus people in your organisation are starting to recognise what you're doing as "the new way". You're encouraging a new way to think about things and do things differently which is driving some sort of measurable benefit. This drives more momentum. Some will fall by the wayside because they a. don't like it b. think they can do it better or c. have got supposedly more interesting job offers elsewhere. So be it.

Then comes the tension. How do you allocate resources such that you keep your CEO's endless worrying and sleepless nights about the £2m hole at bay, while you develop the vision, strategy, objectives and requirements for your Next Big Thing? (Note: usually these things have no tangible outputs while you apparently waste lots of people's time on endless meetings, supplier lunches, scribbling on whiteboards and unfathomably dull documentation).

Pick your battles

There will come a time when you will have to fight your corner for your decision to ignore short-term issues and keep plugging away on the big goal. Suggestion: bring data. Ask yourself, what do these people care about that they are going to lose out on if their short-term work gets done now. Is it delays? Is it cost? Is it results? Use your data to push their buttons. See if they come round. Maybe they won't straight away but then you'll need to know in your own mind if this battle is one worth fighting, or whether you need to focus on winning the war instead. Also, maybe you'll just have to listen while they teach you the errors of your ways.

Work your power through your people, and keep it real

Having got through a few of these types of humps in the road, you will have a much better understanding of who in your organisation is going to make the transition to a new way of working and who is in your mind is... well, "doomed" isn't the nicest way to put it, but let's face it, it's a dog-eat-dog world out there. And hopefully you'll have lots of smart contacts waiting in the wings ready to come in to your organisation and work wonders in their place.

Then comes another real test. Do you have the confidence, chutzpah and downright BALLS to suggest to your boss and other senior managers that maybe the organisation shouldn't tolerate dullards, stragglers, and one-pace wonders. Once you've got momentum, see what it buys you in terms of toughness and clout in these conversations. Done the right way, it's often surprising how easily it can work your favour. 

Nevertheless, to do this you need to be extremely self-aware. Pride comes before a fall and all that. As people at work always tell me: "nobody likes a smart-arse, DJ". I smile as sweetly as I can, and stop talking. Just for a split second.

Skills for orchestra conductors

Thinking about it though, perhaps this is the main attribute to orchestrate all these aforementioned activities. 'Communication skills' is the simple nomenclature, but I think it's much more than that. Leadership, management, people skills, social skills. I think there's a certain kind of person who can combine left-brain reason and language - to articulate a logical argument - with right-brain creativity - to bring together previously tangential or siloed thoughts into one holistic, creative concept. Yeah, I'd like to think I would fit into that pigeon hole. I'm working on it. 

So, to my inital point, and as a riposte to Leisa's post. Some companies do get UX, and have UX represented at a senior level. That's good, but not enough. The understanding needs to be orchestrated around the business, and the delivery through UX and through the other parts of the business needs to be orchestrated too. There is no one way to do this, no methodology plan or process that can map it out for you, as far as I am aware. (If there is one, tell me QUICK!)

Right now, I think that's because to orchestrate change to deliver UX, you need to focus on the people.

Messy, unpredictable, emotional, irrational people. Amen to that.

The recent news of HMV Group's likely imminent demise struck me as unsurprising a couple of weeks ago when they announced "uncertainties which may cast significant doubt on the group's ability to continue as a going concern in the future."

For me, the only thing surprising about the announcement was that there continued to be "uncertainties".

The music industry's number has been up ever since Mr Jobs announced to top music biz execs that he was about to come and demolish their industry shortly before the iPod launched in 2001. The industry's well-embedded attitude towards it's business was ripe for disruption: greedy executives who had no love for the content they were selling, closed distribution, limited choice of a few highly hyped artists, arrogance towards customers.

In fact, the game was up well before then. An essay entitled The Problem with Music by rock producer Steve Albini written in the 90s calculated that on sales of 250,000 albums, a the fictional record company could receive around $750,000, artists would receive approximately $4,300 - less than they would be paid for stacking shelves in their local supermarket.

Now, 10 years on, look what the music industry has become. Instead of truly embracing the web and the networked opportunities it offered, the music industry tried to close down services that could have been their godsend. The industry's attitude was one stuck in the industrial age, where scarcity equals value. Self-proclaimed futurist and writer Kevin Kelly identified some key differences in the "old" attitude to scarcity in his book "New Rules for the New Economy": 

Ever since Gutenberg made the first commodity – cheaply duplicated words – we have realized that intangible things can easily be copied. This lowers the value per copy. What becomes valuable is the relationships – sparked by the copies – that tangle up in the network itself. The relationships rocket upward in value as the parts increase in number even slightly.  

Even now, the music business is struggling to adapt to the fact that effectively – and especially once the likes of Apple have taken their cut – the price of their core product (recorded music) is £0.00. The real value is in the people who like and buy their product, and the relationships between them. "Social music" is still an unsolved problem that is again going to be solved not by the traditional music business but by technology players like Apple, Spotify and Last.fm (who were acquired by an enlightened CBS corporation a couple of years ago).

Nevertheless, outside of big business I have taken note of a number of interesting strategies attempting to reverse the decline this year.

1. "Real" is valuable

The stock value of the live event experience is increasing. The web has given artists a wider audience and more pressure to put together exciting live events. The price of gig tickets is rising too. I think it's no coincidence that one of my fave acts Orbital have reformed after a series of sold out live festival gigs with a new album supported by a tour with dates at the Royal Albert Hall (£25 a ticket plus booking fee). I imagine they needed the cash.

2. Exclusive physical product is valuable

Clearly one for the fetishists but vinyl is becoming even more exclusively designed and increasingly denoted as the "Collector's Edition" release. Having not bought vinyl for a good few years even I was tempted a few times recently by the Vinyl Factory – see this Massive Attack vs Burial release for example. The eBay market for limited edition exclusive vinyl only collaborations between sought after artists is on fire, too.

3. "Choose your own price" is valuable

Radiohead famously subverted the music industry's norms in 2007 by asking fans to choose their own price for their album In Rainbows. I've seen this being used a lot more by new artists using Bandcamp to distribute their music. If you've not got a deal, even 20p for a track shows a bit of love, it's more than you're likely to get through Spotify streaming AND importantly you'll get an email address to play with and to help pay for a full album or come to shows.

4. "NOW" is valuable

A real revelation to me this year has been boilerroom.tv. In many ways this is what radio is becoming. A website that posts reviews of the lastest tracks, a club night that features the latest DJs and artists, an online TV channel (and hilarious chat room) that shows the event live. Over the past year their nights have been a who's who of current electronic music stars and I note that later today they have Carl Craig and Richie Hawtin live from Berlin. Wow!

Thristian and co appear to be looking to brands and partnerships to monetise their audience. This is interesting because the audience consists largely of hip 20-somethings – a core audience for many FMCG and fashion brands. To be honest I think that's a shame. I think Boiler Room has enough value for it to be a subscription or pay-per-view service - at the right price. Perhaps if they join up with more commercial organisations they will realise that in 2012.