No One Said It Was Easy
One of the smartest, most strategic guys I met in my time at Yahoo! was a guy named Ian Rogers.
Ian was (is) an unassuming leader, never accepting how what is should remain what’s next. Yahoo! Music had just bought his company, Mediacode, and I was on the integration/next phase team. We all were to take his audience and technology, integrate it into our existing Music and CDN infrastructure, and create a new player (the former Yahoo! Music Engine). Ian’s foresight into user behavior drove the project and motivated a lot of people, elevating him to the role of VP/GM of Yahoo! Music by 2007. Now, he’s the CEO of Topspin Media, a company bringing tools to artists to distribute their own music.
Why do I bring his story up?
Ian is a champion of music. Not the music business — music. His statement about the declining “business”? To paraphrase, “I don’t care. I’m not fixing the CD business, I’m moving the actual music forward.”
I see some differences from his situation to that of the publishing industry, but I see a lot of parallels too. In that light, I share his latest blog post from a keynote he gave in Seattle.
It’s worth a read when you have a free moment.
P.S. Another learning from my audio/video delivery days at Yahoo! = it’s not easy generating revenue from general, user video content. Publishing 2.0 makes the same assumption based on Hulu numbers.
All this change is the fun of being in what I continue to call our generation’s “industrial revolution.” If you don’t love chaos, you may want to re-think the internet biz…