Experience

Learning From The Music Industries Failures And Recent Flailings To Stay Alive

Garth Beyer

I’m guilty.

Being a millennial, I have to accept a sliver of the blame for the continuous downfall of the music industry. However, going into the world of journalism, print media, and digital PR, I hope to apply what I learned from the downfall of the music industry so that other media industries can adapt and overcome.

I am not applying what I have learned to specifically save any piece of a media industry. No. I am aiming to create a new business model for them to adapt and prosper with. I’ve understood a few factors that I think other media industries can learn from the music industry to help them progress through the 21st century.

The first is that there is a lack of great music which often gets confused with “commercial.” You can find great music all day every day, there is evidently a surplus. That’s because so many musicians try to be great in the commercial sense. When really, when a musician releases music that is remarkable, worth talking about and passing to a friend, then you have great music. Other media industries need to realize what it is that gets talked about. Is it the products they create for the mass, the commercial, the revenue?  Or is it the products they create for the passionate individual, the human inquirer, and the loud mouth?

A second factor involves looking at how musicians are making their money, not how the music industry is making money. Most musicians make little to nothing from selling CD’s, selling their work on iTunes, or any other form of technological distribution. They make their money from playing at venues, going on tour, collaborating with other musicians to play at a huge festival, and asking for direct donations from fans (most recently utilizing Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sources which I call devotedfanfunding). They don’t sell music anymore, they sell an experience. Once other media industries realize that producing content isn’t what will get them to survive, we may see them pick up and push forward, refusing to meet the same demise of the music industry.

The last variable is built from the previous experience concept. Other media industries must focus either on an individual or small group of like-minded individuals, tribes. You can no longer market to the mass; it’s proven ineffective, especially in the music industry. Think about all the music that is out there, presented to billions of people, yet the music industry is still crumbling. The factions of the music industry that are prospering are those groups which have faithful fans. People come together to connect with other fans, synchronously sing the lyrics, and exchange what next event of the musicians they will be going to. It’s the tribes that are keeping the music industry alive, shifting, and possibly raising it back on its feet.

Other media industries need to realize these paramount shifts, these core variables if they wish to keep their industry going.

You Can’t Go Through Life Thinking

Garth Beyer

that the one occupation you want is the only one you can ever have.

Nearly every day I walk down E Gilman Street and am mesmerized by the view of the city between two apartment complexes. It’s something I know not a single architect, when designing any brick of Madison had thought of. Who would care that someone walking down a street could see a piece of the Capitol and nine other buildings, all beautiful architecture, between two apartment complexes? I’m fascinated by it. Every time I see it I think how I want to be an architect; that I can design – really, truly, passionately design. I catch myself thinking that if I were to restart my life, architecture and free style dancing would be my two passions I would build my life from.

Of course I mentally slap myself right after thinking that I can’t do those things during my life, this life. Despite my ambitions to become a well-known published author, Pulitzer prize recipient for my journalism, and world-renowned PR specialist and creator of the worlds best PR agency, there are still plenty of years in my life to study architecture and dance and to become really good at it.

We all get stuck with this preconception that the career we have is the one we have for life. There is no turning back, it’s too late to become great at anything else. We also think that to become great in one thing involves focusing on it, and only it, all our lives, and maybe, just maybe we will die a professional and be remembered for what we did.

Let me tell you how it is. If you want to be a professional, you must have experience, and experience comes from doing, not from reading a book. When you first start off down the road of your passion, you read books, then you take actions. Why do we not think that while we are taking actions, we cannot also be reading books on something else?

You can’t argue that it’s damn near impossible to study marketing, study skateboarding, study a second language, and study family sustainability and expect to be a professional in every area in a year. You can, however, study skateboarding then when you are finished researching and reading up on it, start doing it and gaining experience instead of studying about it. Then, you start to study a second language. Once you are done studying the second language, you keep skateboarding, you start using the second language (gaining experience) and then you begin studying your next interest.

We can do a lot in one day but we can’t study a lot in one day.

I’ll be a pretty good architect someday, a great freestyle dancer too.

What else will you be?

 

Stay Positive & Dream Big

Garth E. Beyer

A few days after writing this post I was walking home from the café and found someone standing off the sidewalk in the spot with the best view of Madison. She was taking a picture of this view, my favorite. I told her how remarkable it was that she was capturing the view and we both agreed it was a breathtaking sight and close to the best in all of Madison. I’ll have to snap a pic for you next time around.

“It’s Too Hard To Learn”

Garth Beyer

In school you learn through memorization. In life you learn through experience.

In both though, life and school, everyone finds themselves muttering from time to time that “it’s just too hard to learn,” and so you don’t pursue it.

Everyone – even myself, who is advocating something important here – forgets that learning is about making mistakes, being wrong, asking stupid questions, and getting a “D”.

There is only one exception to this rule: when you say “it’s too hard to learn,” you are wrong and you learn nothing from it.

 

Let’s grow, learn, and progress in life together and someday we can laugh at the irony of being such a success from so many failures.

 

Stay Positive & Cheers To Those Who Will Go Straight For Attempting The Impossible

Garth E. Beyer

Why We Read: A Pyramid of Life (Information)

Garth Beyer

One reads to argue; grammatically, mechanically, ideologically. If we can’t argue in one or more of these ways, we pick one piece of a whole that we deem incomplete.

The description and detail does not fulfill our expectations. Not that we had them to begin with, but since we can’t argue one of the three ways posed above, we must find some flaw. Thus, we raise our expectations for information until we can deliver that flaw ourselves.

In other words, in order to argue one thing, we must collect one or more others writings that connect with our own thoughts of why the original piece of work is inadequate.

Simplified: We dig in our minds, as well as research, until we can one-up the concept we are arguing.

I read an article on Brain Pickings today that shared parts of Vannevar Bush’s essay’s. Maria Popova, whom I adore but must argue with, stated the following in response to one of the essay’s excerpts. In addition, she had provided this visual.

“To that end, I often think about the architecture of knowledge as a pyramid of sorts — at the base of it, there is all the information available to us; from it, we can generate some form of insight, which we then consolidate into knowledge; at our most optimal, at the top of the pyramid, we’re then able to glean from that knowledge some sort of wisdom about the world, and our place in it, and what matters in it and why.”

I love pyramids, more specifically though, I love BIG pyramids. Pyramids that contain everything available, everything manageable, everything attainable to make it as large and strong as Goliath. Of course, without the idea that a small pebble or a tap of the foot on it would knock it down.

If you haven’t gathered what I’m pointing out here, it is that this pyramid is incomplete. It’s missing a vital piece of human development and understanding. It’s missing, action. See for yourself.

By action, I clearly mean experience.  You can gather all the information possible, develop as much insight as you can, acquire any related knowledge on that subject from others, but you still won’t have wisdom. Simply because wisdom can only be shared through remarkable stories, and remarkable stories only come from experience.

I have added to this pyramid, I have argued against Bush and Popova, and I have strengthened an understanding of such a broad concept. Why we read, then, comes down to the need for progression, the creation of informational dynamics, and the simple fact that there is always room for improvement.

 

Stay Positive & What Do You Have Too Add

Garth E. Beyer

Ignore A Pool Of Your Customers

Garth Beyer

No! Wait! Don’t do that! You’ll lose your business unless you accommodate their desires!

NOT

When you ignore your customers, you make their experience a memory they want to share. Take for instance every single local or hotel pool.

I have been in a myriad of pools in my lifetime, all of which were cold. I can’t recall one pool that was room temperature or warm, it was always chilly to where you need to keep moving to counter the freezing temperature. I’m positive that plenty of people have complained to hotel services and management that the pools should be warmer or at least more bearable. Why have they all refused our demands? Because a cold pool makes it an experience, a wickedly fun one.

Don’t tell me that after you touch your toes in the water and realize that the water is freezing – of course it is! – that you don’t lie to your friend or parent saying that the water is warm and to jump right in. For some psychological reason, the cold water feels even more cold when you jump in thinking it’s warm. What a laugh you get! Okay, okay, back on topic.

What would happen if every hotel pool raised its temperatures and made it a manageable temperature: no shivers, no rushing for a towel once you exit, no need to keep swimming just to prevent yourself from freezing. Sure, it may be a bit more relaxing, but it surely wouldn’t be fun. Imagine it. “Hey, jump in the water first, its warm!” – the person jumps in – “Yes, it is.” What a memorable experience! (sarcasm)

As it is with hotel swimming pools, every business needs something that creates a buzz, an experience, something that people talk about, remember, but also complains about. What does this mean to you? People complain a lot more than they talk about a positive experience and if you can give them something to complain about that goes right along with a positive experience, you have something truly remarkable, truly worth talking about; it’s about adding the complaint to their pool of experience.

 

Stay Positive & I Flat Out Thought This Was Awesome: Fake Swimming Pool

Garth E. Beyer

Life Is Short

Garth Beyer

If time flies when you’re having fun and having fun is all you do, life is short.

If you’re a person that is having tragedies in your life and think life is short. You have another thing coming: one longgg life of living with those tragedies.

Which statement do you hear more people respond with “life is short”? I feel that I hear a lot more people say life is short in response to tragedies: A close friend dies from driving drunk, a grandparent falls and gets amnesia, you get heartbroken by the one you loved for years. Those are logical reasons to note that life is short.

Then you have those who use “life is short” as an excuse. An excuse to not do well in school, an excuse to be reckless, to risk their lives without realizing they are risking putting their tragedy on someone else’s mind, as explained in the paragraph above. Though they may not say it aloud, an underlying factor of why people do “stupid” things is that life is short.

And it is. It should be. Life NEEDS to be short. Scroll back up and read the first contention of this post.

There’s a variable that very few realize about time flying when you’re having fun. Think about this for a moment, remember a time that you said “time flies when you have fun” in response to an experience you had. In that experience, was time going fast? Or were you lost in it? It’s more than likely time didn’t even exist during that experience, in your mind, it was going to last forever. It’s not until the experience is over do you state that time flew.

Did it really though? Or is it just a perception. Yes this is getting deep, but bear with me, there’s a point.

You can have two people that live to be 78 years old. One lived every single day having as much positive fun as possible but ended the day with saying how short life is. The other lived every single day, averagely, blindly, safely, and at her deathbed, she had realized how short life is.

Did either have a short life? Yes and no. They both lived to by 78 years old which is a fair amount of years to live, not short at all. But only one person really lived those years. Only one person made the absolute most out of every day, that made time fly, and at the end of each day wished they had more time to continue doing the fun things they did, that thought life is short, when realistically it wasn’t shorter than anyone else’s.

Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. You can live each day and think that 24 hours is really short or you can go through life and once on your deathbed, wish you would have lived every set of 24 hours more.

 

Stay Positive & A Short Life Lived Is Better Than A Short Life Lost

Garth E. Beyer

Once You Leave

Garth Beyer

Once you leave your cubicle, your apartment, your comfort zone, your box, you expose yourself. You risk at all levels. Most people stay in their zone because of that risk, because of their fear. Nothing can throw you out of wack if you stay put in your structure. The interesting revelation is this:

Once you leave your cubicle, your apartment, your comfort zone, your box, you expose yourself. But what you expose yourself to is never what you think and worry about. Once you leave your zone, everything that you dreamed of, craved, and desired in your zone, comes to you.

Want to find love? How can you do that when you stay in your room all day? Forget it. Anyway, love will find you….once you leave your room.

Want to see something truly beautiful? Even more beautiful than what you can Google on the internet or see out your window? You have to leave your space.

Want to laugh unexpectedly? Once you leave your box, something will happen that makes you crack up.

Just getting out of the place you confine yourself to, that you are comfortable with, is all it takes to get what you want. You don’t have to go after it, you don’t have to jump 50 hurdles to get it, all you need to do is get out!

Go to the park. Find a place to see the sunset. Walk to the grocery store. Don’t worry about how you dress, what you carry, or if you wear any shoes. Just leave.

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This post was inspired by the experience I just had. I’ve been in my apartment all day (got off work early) and wasn’t planning on leaving it. I was comfortable, I was safe with my books, my notepads, sticky notes, pens and laptop. I was content, even happy with the breeze and the sound of the water (how could I not be?). Then I decided to do something off Michelle Welsch’s Manual For Daily Adventure. I got up, grabbed a favorite book (Keri Smith’s How To Be An Explorer Of The World) and went to the park. The following things are what I got to experience because I left my apartment.

  • See a runner giving it her all.
  • Laugh and shake my head after watching two black basketball players almost get in a fight and one repeating to the other “you’re not gangsta!”
  • Three girls checking me out.
  • Laugh at a women on the phone only talking about getting drunk, hammered, plastered. Quote: “We will get drunk Sunday, that’s what labor day is for”
  • Pinpointed where an odd noise I kept hearing was coming from to a woman practicing opera.
  • Felt soft grass.
  • Got to observe more things, people, animals, sounds, sights, etc., than I would have in my apartment.
  • On my way back, had a good conversation with the three girls. If they didn’t smoke, I would have asked one for her number. Oh well.
  • Got to feel the ground. (Went barefoot)

That list sure beats the hell out of a list of what I would have experienced if I stayed in my apartment. The same goes for your cubicle at work, your comfort zone at school, your chair in the meeting room, your spot on the bus, your way you walk to work, your seat in class, and any “square” that you feel comfortable in.

 

Stay Positive & Experience Life

Garth E. Beyer