Pomplamoose, "The Future of Music", Interview at Hypebot

This is the best interview I've read all year.

Jacke Conte of Pomplamoose, a band heralded as "The Future of Music" breaks down their entire business model with Hypebot.

I'm not going to give you all the highlights, this is too good an article to ignore.

Jack Conte: Yeah. The thing that I think you should learn from Pomplamoose is not about YouTube. It's not about social media. It's not about music. It's about iterations. It's about trying a million things until something works. That's all we did. We tried a million things and something finally worked, and we were sick and tired. I literally went on three tours where I played – I mean, there were shows where I played where the bartender left. There was literally nobody in the room that I was playing for, and I was not a successful thing. It was a total flop, failure, but we just kept trying and trying and trying, a million different things, and that's what I hope everybody takes away is.

...In fact Derek Sivers, who started the company CD Baby, wrote a book and he put little episodes of the book on YouTube, and one of the episodes is called "If It's Not a Hit, Switch, " and basically his idea is try something. Is it a hit? Are people flocking to it? Are people running to your idea? Do you have value? Are you adding value to the world? Do people really want it? No? Switch, something else. Iterate. Iterate. Iterate a thousand times until you have a hit, and then you've got something. So I love that idea – if it's not a hit, switch.

Jacke brings up one of my recent talking points:

We are not one of those bands that believes that you need to post on your Facebook page every day to engage your fans. I've gone to a lot of these social media conventions and I always just kind of throw up a little bit in my mouth when people are like, "You have to post on Facebook every day, and if you don't post on Facebook every day, then there's no point in posting on Facebook at all." And that's just a giant load of steaming bullshit because when we post on Facebook after not posting on Facebook for two weeks or three weeks, and we post a picture, it's awesome. People are into it. They're excited because we have a new, cool picture, and if we were posting every single day, we'd just dilute the effectiveness of our posts. I think at some point people are going to get really sick of all of the crap in their Facebook feed.

People want to be updated when you have new content. That's really what we've found is people want to know about something when there's something to freakin' know about. If there's not something to know about, don't force it, you know? People want new content. They want to hear a new song. They want to see an awesome picture of you guys backstage, you know, stuff, things that add joy to your life.

Another great point:

You have to think that you're not a genius. You have to think that, "Well, I just worked really hard and I kept working on this song until it sounded good, and I spent hours and hours and hours tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until I really liked it." If you think you're a genius, then you're just going to fucking barf onto a piece of paper and call it art and put it out on the Internet, and then it won't be very good any more.

Go read the rest.

You Must Play Politics

To my ears, "I don't play politics" translates to one of the following:
   1) I'm not good with people and I will burn bridges.
   2) I deal with stress poorly and I will cause drama.
   3) I'm very good at politics and I play dirty.

"I don't play politics" is a red-flag statement for me.

Unless you're interacting solely with your instrument or DAW, you're dealing with politics.

Politics is the art of accomplishing your goals while keeping the most allies possible. This is a flexible statement for a reason.

Humans are composed of moods, feelings, hunches and many other idiosyncracies that color every single interaction. If you're alive, bias is inevitible.

It's never just about your raw skill. In fact, according to MIT researcher Thomas Malone, it's the groups' intrapersonal skills that determine their collective talent, not the "average" of their talent levels. This is why so many supergroups end up as a disappointment.

Imagine you're a highly regarded promoter with bands approaching you every second of every day. Would you rather give a leg up to the band you hung out with after a couple shows, or "Band #1093703"? Whether you believe this is wrong or right, this is how the world functions.

Public relations is simply politics on a wider scale.

Your political skills will play a large part in your eventual success or failure in business dealings.

Pay attention to your relationships with others.

The Art of Public Relations #2

Barbara's sweet digs

In 2003, Barbara Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman for $50 Million to get him to remove this publicly available photo of her house from a collection of 12,000 photos of California coastline. Unfortunately for her, this lawsuit caused a spark of interest in the photo. Prior to the lawsuit the image has only seen 6 views, 2 of which were from Streisand's lawyers. As soon as information about the lawsuit came to light, more than 420,000 people went to view the image.

Sometimes trying to aggressively hide or remove information from the public eye will make the info more public than it ever would have been. When dealing with the internet, it's wise not to attempt to use hardball tactics to try and make a point. The internet thrives on controversy, so getting riled up tend to feed more backlash and further undermine your position. When Wikileaks was under attack in December 2010, supporters used this as a battlecry to create countless mirrors of Wikileaks so that it would be nigh impossible to truly remove the information.

In a hilarious turn of events, this phenomenon is now called the Streisand Effect.

Owch.

Trying to be surreptitious is a risky move that, should you be caught, will magnify the negativity surrounding the incident you wish to conceal. Be honest and straightforward in your response to bad PR, then guide the narrative to a better position: "I'm glad you brought up the topic of inequality, let me talk about my new benefits program to help disadvantaged teenage musicians record their first album."

The Art of Public Relations

Remember when I talked about how a nerd hero was able to manage his response to a humiliating article so well that he got hundreds of offers for dates?

Today we're going to look at an ineffective response to bad PR and how we could improve things.Let's look at another bad response and how we could make things better.

Last week an executive director for Goldman Sachs wrote a public resignation letter in the New York Times describing how the company only cares about taking money from clients. Needless to say this was some bad news for a investment-services firm like Goldman. The company lost $2.2 BILLION in market value because of this letter.

Goldman's response was weak:

While I expect you find the words you read today foreign from your own day-to-day experiences, we wanted to remind you what we, as a firm – individually and collectively – think about Goldman Sachs and our client-driven culture.

First, 85 per cent of the firm responded to our recent People Survey, which provides the most detailed and comprehensive review to determine how our people feel about Goldman Sachs and the work they do.

And, what do our people think about how we interact with our clients? Across the firm at all levels, 89 per cent of you said that that the firm provides exceptional service to them. For the group of nearly 12,000 vice presidents, of which the author of today’s commentary was, that number was similarly high. 

Anyone who feels otherwise has available to him or her a mechanism for anonymously expressing their concerns. We are not aware that the writer of the opinion piece expressed misgivings through this avenue, however, if an individual expresses issues, we examine them carefully and we will be doing so in this case.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how effective would you rate this communcation?

Notice that this People Survey only asks employees about how client-centered they are. Do you think current employees would have any incentive to bad talk their current employer? How persuasive is this message considering its source?

Let's pretend we're the chefs at Goldman Sachs and we want to make a tastier PR sandwich.
For bread, we ask 1,000 of our clients to answer a survey about how satisfied they are with their advisor, not the company. People respond much more positively about individuals than faceless organizations, so this will nudge us towards a more favorable response. This bread gives us a good foundation of data that we'll lay the more important ingredients upon.

I'm feeling like black forest ham, so add some of that to our sandwich. Get a few op-ed pieces written by individual clients telling a heart-felt story about how Goldman Sachs has helped put their kids through college, saved them from financial ruin, saved a basket of cute kittens from a tree etc.

Add some caramelized red onions and lettuce for crunch. Take some of the better stories from clients and record them in a short video explaining how Goldman has helped them through life.

Delicious.

Add some avocados. No metaphor for this one, avocados are just delicious.

  
What should we use for secret sauce?

Back in 2011, Fox News was accused of hacking into people's phones so they could get news before anyone else. Shady indeed, but their effective use of the principles of Tai Chi softened the PR blowback.

Tai Chi's philosophy (the self-defense kind, not the retirement home kind)  "emphasizes yielding and "sticking" to an incoming attack rather than attempting to meet it with opposing force". The concepts of "Fox" and 'Hacking" are tied together in the public's mind. This is the force of a punch. Instead of trying to resist the connection and get hit, Fox merely adjusted the direction of this punch by rebranding the "Fox-Hacking" connection that people already had made. Whenever Fox mentioned the event, they described how "hacking happens to everyone" from Citi to the Pentagon instead of emphasizing that Fox was the hacker, not the victim. Politicans have been using pivots like these since time began, pay attention to the next debate you watch for some good ones. (Note: I'm not condoning the phone hacking. I'm just talking about public relations techniques.)

For Goldman's secret sauce, we would ensure that every communication talks about the company's client-focus and any program/policies they do to make sure they have happy clients. Something along the lines of "I'm glad this brings to light the important issue of all the work we regularly do for our clients. Sometimes we get so immersed in the details that we don't fully communicate the value we create. Let's talk about how we've served our clients in the past..." Follow that up with a blend of additional client stories and data about the money you've made for your client. Mix thoroughly and apply liberally over sandwich. Slice sandwich diagonally and serve.

Now wasn't that much tastier than the bland response we initially recieved?

Your Fans Have Your Back

There's a fantastic happening making the rounds among nerd-ish websites today. A writer for Gawker went on a date with world champion Magic: The Gathering player Jon Finkel, and she called him a loser.

Fans of Magic: The Gathering, a delightfully addictive collectible card game, rained down hellfire and righteous fury upon the unsuspecting writer.

But this wasn't a PR disaster at all.

We can learn a couple things from this ordeal:

1) Fan/Nerd-Baiting builds buzz and strengthens fan's devotion.

As this article in Forbes points out, it's a possibility that she knew this would happen.

Gizmodo’s readership is hugely male, and hugely tech savvy and therefore mostly “nerdy” in the traditional sense. To post something trashing a “geeky” activity like Magic the Gathering would be the equivalent of their video game blog Kotaku writing a post trashing professional eSports. Oh wait, they did that too.

... as of the time I’m writing this, that article has 529,280 views.

She probably benefited quite nice from the number of hits generated by the article, but the real story is about fans of Magic and Jon.

This is the same as rapper feuds. Being a fan of music, Magic, or nachos is a part of our identity. When someone talks smack about your band, it's an affront to your taste. You gotta back up your people. (In group bias)

And as fan's come to the defense of their favorite artist, both devoted and casual fans begin to see the vast numbers of people who are dedicated to the artist. Current fans connect and bond, prospective fans look into the artist to see what all the hullabaloo is about. Remember how everyone came to Michael Jackson's defense when he went to trial for some seriously nasty allegations?

Nearly one BILLION people watched his funeral service.

Social Proof. Learn about its power.

A beef could be good by drawing out your committed fans.

2) How you respond to a crisis determines the outcome.


When word of this broke, Jon Finkel took it like champ and created an IAMA on Reddit to control the message. (IAMA stands for I Am A _____, Ask Me Anything! It's popular format on Reddit where the famous and not-so-famous can talk directly with fans.)

In the thread he responded, coming across like a normal, chill dude. No lashing out at fans, just an average guy with some cool stories to tell.

In a heated argument, the person who remains calm and collected is in control.

Considering he had an article written about how crappy a date he was, I'd say Jon came out on top:

The topic of "controlling the message" is a big 'un. Expect more on this later.



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