Gyro Gearloose gets it and gets out!
(source: Twents Techniek Museum Heim)

Now that the dust in the music industry seems to slowly settle and some interesting new business models take their first steps toward maturity it seems to be a good moment to have a closer look on recent developments in the exciting world of music. We’ve seen the success of services like last.FM and Spotify, mayor acts experimenting with free downloads and some exciting grassroots initiatives, but over all we see an industry that still hasn’t found its way. Can a cross-media approach provide some answers to this confused industry?

Last week the faculty of communication and journalism organized a staff trip to see the movie ‘the social network’ in Pathé Rembrandt Utrecht. The movie focuses on the creation of Facebook, a popular social network site (for those who lived in a cave the last seven years).
At first I was reluctant to go to the movie at all assuming it was a mere movie about sex, drugs and rock and roll with a Silicone Valley touch. I was wrong… It was techno-music. The faculty asked me to participate in a panel discussion about social media and social networks afterwards so I had to go. Forming a panel could and should be a movie on itself but eventually a panel was formed. With little expectation I entered the movie theater.

‘Museumkompas’ is a research proposal submitted for a RAAK grant (www.innovatie-alliantie.nl) that will start in the spring of 2011 and will run for two years. The project will be implemented by the Crossmedialab in collaboration with several museums, Erfgoed Nederland, DEN, and an expert agency in the field of information management in the public sector (BMC).

With the vast growth of the internet the world is getting smaller. We all connect, share and contribute to this new glory of mankind, and if the guru’s are right we’re entering a new era. Life as we know it is changing so fast, look the other way a few seconds and you may have missed it. In this new world order new values are emphasised; openness, transparency, co-operation, sharing are key to be successful in a global economy. It’s a wonderful development, too bad there is just one little thing wrong:

The internet is not growing, its shrinking.

One reason for the interest in social media is that people expect to make money on it. Some investors paid serious money for popular social media sites. However sites like Twitter or MySpace are now having difficulty finding funding respectively have been down valued from their original buying prices. After watching a rerun episode of South Park, I concluded that most social media business strategies could be compared to the Underpants Gnomes business strategies.

No I am not talking about a new cartoon series or a new Flickr community but about something I picked up today at the conference ‘Business Model Innovation Cultural Heritage’ at the Hermitage in Amsterdam (not a terrible bad place to spend a afternoon by the way). The term ‘de dikke man’ refers to the added value one must seek in developing new innovative services. Eppo van Nispen of DOK, keynote speaker at the conference, used it. He demonstrated what he meant by this by showing a video clip of an audition of a Michael Jackson imitator on one of the many ‘nobody’s got talent’ shows aired nowadays. Nothing special so far, but halfway through the act a ‘fat guy’ joins him and they start dancing together. The crowd goes wild.

Two months ago I started my graduate research for CrossmediaLab on business models. My main focus will be the STOF-method as it was developed in the Freeband program. In March 2008 a book was published concerning the STOF method: “Mobile Service Innovation and Business Models”, which is more or less my reference source for the coming months.