Will Hollywood get it?
I went to the Death Star a couple of days ago.
That’s what some call Creative Artists Agency’s building, which is this ridiculously intimidating behemoth of architecture in Century City. If you’ve never heard of CAA, you probably don’t read Variety. They represent Brad Pitt, David Beckham, Justin Timberlake, Lebron James, George Clooney, and, uhh, New Kids on the Block, among others.
But I wasn’t there for my pretty face. Rather, Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, was speaking and I went with my friend Ryan to attend.
Here was Mason, speaking in the agency’s theater to an assortment of Hollywood types whose entire wealth and success comes from monopolized intellectual property, asking the question, “Do we fight pirates, or do we learn from them?”
Obviously, he was promoting the latter, convincingly presenting a case that pirates—those on the periphery, that buck the status quo—are innovators in a remix generation. Compete with them, he stressed. Sell the thing that pirates cannot; the experience, the convenience.
But Ryan and I were pretty skeptical that anyone would really take the advice to heart. After all, these were the same people that encourage lawsuits and DRM, the ones that majored in Take-Down Notification in college.
One guy, during the question and answer session, even asked if innovation and strategic competition with pirates would simply make them go away, kill the remix revolution. You know, after Mason had previously explained that Hollywood was founded by piracy (see: William Fox) and had been around for hundreds of years. Some sounded genuinely scared of technology.
I previously wrote about Dr. Horrible, Joss Whedon’s latest foray into writing and directing. As a brief summary, Whedon (UPDATE: who is actually represented by CAA. Seriously, what the hell?) is currently releasing the videos in three acts for free, a sequence every couple of days, and then will take down the videos after they have all aired. He’s also made them available for download on iTunes and the video is currently the store’s No. 1 video download. Here is someone firmly ingrained in the Hollywood culture, though he has historically been pretty anti-establishment with it, innovating from within. Just giving it away for free, paired with a simultaneously release of download. And you know what? People are BUYING something they can readily stream, taking a souvenir (more on that) of their experience to keep.
Mason offers his book online for free, but it still is selling well internationally. Seth Godin was one of the first to try this method, offering Unleashing the Ideavirus for free. His advice is similar to Mason’s:
If your product is digital, it’s awfully hard to charge a lot for it. But a souvenir; the t-shirt, the hardcopy book, the autograph, the live concert, the seminar, is priceless, and you can charge accordingly.
The thing is, Godin is approaching it from a marketing standpoint exclusively. But it’d be idiotic to forget Regis McKenna’s seminal “Marketing is Everything“. Your product has to be something the consumer wants.
Hollywood isn’t producing moving pictures or CDs. We don’t give a shit about that kind of stuff. It’s an idea of not selling the shiny little plastic disc, but the music or movie—IDEAS—hidden on them.
I’m excited to see what type of ideas that the music, film, video game, content-creating industries create in the future. I think it’ll look radically different in the next five years. Mason’s seminar had the perfect audience at the Death Star to realize that.
Let’s just hope that they listened to Mason and decide to stop suing their fans.
(A very similar talk given by Mason is given here.)
Filed under: souvenirs | Leave a Comment
Tags: creative artist agency, dr. horrible, hollywood, ideavirus, joss whedon, matt mason, piracy, seth godin, souvenirs, the pirate's dilemma, work
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