Opportunity: Media Companies Losing Control of Their Content
Apr 18th, 2007 by Dan Blank
Fred Wilson illustrates the loss of control that large media companies are experiencing. In his example, he uses the upcoming release of a song from one of his favorite bands, the Arctic Monkeys. An overview of his example:
- Someone, somewhere got a hold of an unreleased song from the album, and blogged about it, posting the track.
- Fred found it via the music aggregator HypeMachine, and blogged about it himself.
- He Googled the track as well, and found that someone in Amsterdam went to an Arctic Monkeys concert and videotaped the unreleased song on their cellphone, and posted to YouTube. (note: there are many others in the crowd doing the same thing.)
- Fred blogs about them again. His blog entries are at the top of a Google search for the song.
He calls this person-to-person marketing. While it illustrates how media companies have less control over their content, it not necessarily a bad thing:
- Marketing is happening without them having to lift a finger.
- If they watch closely, they can learn a lot about what their audience wants. In this case - perhaps they should consider the unreleased track as the next single.
- They themselves can get involved in the conversation - giving fans some freebies to experience, blog about, and post to YouTube.
