I went to see Kristin Hersh play a gig at the intimate and rather hot Cellar at South Hill Park, Bracknell on Saturday night. It was a great gig with Kristin offering a charming, quirky and very human outlook on the world. Her music remains exceptionally engaging and her guitar work is exceptional.
But what’s this got to do with IT? Well, not much on the surface, but dig a little deeper and here is an artist who is using IT to challenge the workings of the music business. Kristin enjoyed huge success in the ’90s as the leader of Throwing Muses and her solo career has been pretty successful so she’s probably not hard up but about a year ago she took the brave step of cancelling her contracts with the major labels. She now earns her living by playing live gigs, selling merchandise and, this is the interesting bit, creating music that she publishes to the internet for fans to enjoy, modify and re-post. Fans pay a fixed quarterly fee to access the site and to have the rights to modify Kristin’s original compositions. They can then post their alternative versions and this in turn can inspire Kristin to take a song in another direction.
The more I think about this the more ‘right’ it feels. Rather than serving up highly controlled and essentially finished pieces that fans either love or hate and which can take years to appear, Kristin can work with fans to hone her music, find new avenues of inspiration and give fans an outlet for their own creativity. It’s almost like having a patron only this way you can have thousands or millions of them.
Why should this be of interest to our customers? Well, it seems to me that everyone in business must at least try to move in this general direction. We’re all used to providing our customers with pretty fixed ‘products’ that we may have taken some time to develop. Many of us have become more solution oriented and can flex our offerings to some degree but most companies have still to embrace the internet to the point where it provides an almost transparent conduit between organisations that enables collaboration on ‘products’ and provides customers with ways to hone those products and perhaps pay for them in new and novel ways.
If you’d like to see how Kristin’s done it you can find out more here:
http://www.kristinhersh.com/strange-angels-2/
Tags: internet, Kristin Hersh, music, solutions
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