I had a chance to hear Jac Holzman talk about the music industry a couple of days ago. Jac's name didn't ring a bell with me, but once I heard his bio from the person who introduced him, I was blown away. This is a guy who was "present at the creation" of the current music industry and who helped introduce some of the seminal acts in rock music history.
Jac was the founder of Elektra records, a very early indie label (yeah, before Elektra was part of the Warner megalith, it was an indie label). He's the guy who signed and helped produce the Doors. He was also involved with signing and/or producing Judy Collins, Carly Simon, Harry Chapin, and Queen.
One of the points I found very interesting was that a disruptive innovation (my term - not his, he called it a new technology though) had created the opportunity for indie labels like Elektra to start. That piece of high technology innovation? The long-playing (LP) record! That was high tech in the music business circa 1950. But it led directly to the creation of dozens - heck, more like hundreds - of independent record labels. Jac was subsequently directly involved with all of the technology innovations in music over the next forty years or so, including stereo, tape and the ability to leverage it courtesy of the Walkman (your music in your pocket) and car 8-track and cassette players (your music in the car), several generations of recording technology evolution, the compact disc, compression technologies, DVD, cable, the internet, and digital radio.
Jac's talk provided a useful reminder that technology innovation is a process - not an event - and that disruptive innovations come along and reshape most industries on some regular basis. He certainly seemed to feel that the current music industry giants have screwed up leveraging the potential of the internet and that we haven't seen the end of changes to the music business driven by technology innovation. But he also reminded us that in the long run it's still all about the music - all the technology is great but it's only an enabler for the music.
Listening to Winds Of Change from the album Reservation Blues by Eddy 'The Chief' Clearwater
The Ecto blogging tool has this cool feature that lets you capture what song you're listening to at that moment on iTunes. That's where entries at the end of some of my recent posts, like the one immediately above, have come from. Very cool.
this information does not really inform me. maybe it does for other people but i thought this site was about who invented the LP and it's measurements, picture of the inventor etc.
but i'll try another site.
Bye.
Posted by: kimberla | April 22, 2004 at 03:13 AM