Media Bands vs. Media Brands

Hav­ing looked at the kind of con­tent busi­nesses that exist and the dif­fer­ent ways they are financed, I will now go into more details on the way the con­tent is gen­er­ated, in this final entry about the three dimen­sions of media.

Media Bands

For most of media his­tory, the cre­ation of a full media pack­age has had to involve many pro­fes­sional peo­ple. Whether it was a book (or other forms of printed con­tent), a record­ing (or other forms of audio con­tent) or a movie (or other forms of video con­tent), the pro­duc­tion of media goods have tra­di­tion­ally involved mul­ti­ple peo­ple, start­ing with the basic cre­ator, con­tin­u­ing with his or her edi­tors, and end­ing with the pack­agers who put fin­ish­ing ancil­lary touches to the product.

Over the years, many such struc­tures crys­tal­lized, pro­vid­ing gain­ful employ­ment to all those involved in the con­tent cre­ation chain. This por­tion of media cre­ation was then fol­lowed by a sup­ply chain sur­round­ing the com­plete pack­ag­ing, mar­ket­ing, sales, and dis­tri­b­u­tion (and not always in that order) of media pieces.

In the early 1990s, with the rise of the Inter­net and devel­op­ment of web based media, many out­fits started emu­lat­ing the tra­di­tional mod­els sur­round­ing media cre­ation, focus­ing only on the fact that dis­tri­b­u­tion costs were lower than they were for tra­di­tional media. So peo­ple talked about online mag­a­zines, online TV shows, etc… attempt­ing to repli­cate the old busi­ness tem­plates on this new world.

In each case, an inter­est­ing phe­nom­e­non devel­oped: the pack­aged out­put became the brands that were known, with the vast major­ity of the peo­ple who cre­ated that media brand being largely unknown. For exam­ple, a pub­li­ca­tion like Time mag­a­zine or Busi­ness Week would be rec­og­nized as a pop­u­lar media brand but few of the peo­ple who wrote, edited, and gen­er­ally pack­aged it were as well known. With the rise of tele­vi­sion and movies, some sub-brands started emerg­ing, with actors and direc­tors get­ting more rec­og­nized and becom­ing more impor­tant as brands that the stu­dios or chan­nels that were car­ry­ing their lat­est offer­ings. As such, indi­vid­ual tal­ent started get­ting some level of recog­ni­tion, and it became pos­si­ble to build brands around an an individual.

With the rise of the web and the low­er­ing in the cost of media pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion, whether it is for printed media (blogs), video (YouTube), or audio (MySpace, LastFM, Pan­dora), it became pos­si­ble to estab­lish vir­tual teams that quickly banded for an indi­vid­ual effort and dis­banded once that effort was com­pleted. So indi­vid­u­als started get­ting more noticed, with cer­tain blogs being single-man or single-woman oper­a­tions and build­ing new brands around that per­son (in this con­text, TNL.net qual­i­fies as my own per­sonal brand but could be con­sid­ered as a sub-brand of Tris­tan Louis, which is spread across a wider audience).

Media Brands

Mean­while, cer­tain forms of media brands emerged organ­i­cally because of the input of thou­sands or mil­lions of indi­vid­u­als who con­tributed their effort for free. Think, for exam­ple, of the mostly anony­mous con­trib­u­tors that wrote and edited most of wikipedia. I would call this cat­e­gory of peo­ple bands. The name on top (Wikipedia) can con­tinue to exist with or with­out the cur­rent con­trib­u­tors as new con­trib­u­tors can come in to replace the ones who have left.

In a way, the peo­ple who have not estab­lished them­selves as indi­vid­ual brands run the risk of being forced in an out from under other brands. A writer for Bloomberg today can eas­ily be a writer for Busi­ness Week or For­tune tomor­row (this is pre­cisely why Bloomberg became a con­tent cre­ation pow­er­house by sur­prise as no one paid atten­tion to who was cre­at­ing the content).

Chal­lenges

Depend­ing on the side you are on, new issues are about to arise. On the media band side, the con­test for sup­ply and demand is going to get worth. Non-internet media brands are gen­er­ally packed with tens or hun­dreds of peo­ple pro­duc­ing a very glossy, very pro­fes­sional pack­age most of the time. By con­trast, inter­net media is pro­duced in an unfin­ished form, updat­ing sto­ries as they go along with feed­back from other sources as well as from the peo­ple who read or view the con­tent. In the bat­tle between indi­vid­ual con­trib­u­tors, an equi­lib­rium even­tu­ally arises, sort­ing the truth out thanks to the bal­ance of input from dif­fer­ent par­ties. This means that the process of edit­ing is no longer in the hands of edi­tors but it becomes a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort from every­one touch­ing the media prod­uct at hand.

On the other side of the spec­trum, the media brands now have to com­pete with a larger set of brands. As dis­tri­b­u­tion costs move close to zero and the estab­lished struc­ture of media cre­ation can be replaced by a par­tic­i­pa­tory model where the brand is mainly involved in the busi­ness of curat­ing input from its consumer/producer, the rise of indi­vid­ual cura­tors as indi­vid­ual brands is reshap­ing the com­pet­i­tive land­scape. When a sin­gle indi­vid­ual can reach hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple on a reg­u­lar basis merely by writ­ing and shar­ing in pub­lic, the eco­nom­ics of brand star­dom start falling apart.

With con­tent cre­ation and con­tent cura­tion now get­ting so close to each other that they will soon embrace and form a new model of media, cre­ated in a much cheaper fash­ion, in part­ner­ship between the media ini­tia­tor and his/her audience-communicators, tra­di­tional media orga­ni­za­tions will have to get focused on cre­at­ing media that is not only to be con­sumed but that can­not exist with­out active par­tic­i­pa­tion from its consumers/creators.

Shows like “America’s Idol” or “Britain’s Got Tal­ent” are start­ing to present this media band approach, while wikipedia has already demon­strated it works in new gath­er­ing and efforts around user-generated con­tent in jour­nal­ism, whether it is of an enter­tain­ment nature (eg. Gawker) or inves­tiga­tive one (eg. the undo­ing of George Allen or the Wal­ter Reade Hos­pi­tal scan­dals being cov­ered by blog­gers until main­stream kicked in).

And now, I will turn it to you, my media band, to help me build on this scaf­fold­ing of a concept.