New post! It’s been a while, but I’ve been busy working on my new “album”, Cloud Computing, that will hopefully be out by the end of the week. But I wrote a short post here regarding current trends in music/arts that seemed related to the project.

I have “album” in quotes mostly because the project evolved into something more than I originally conceived of, thanks to the entrepreneurial ideas I’ve been applying into the music-making process as of the late. Legal issues prohibit me from disclosing too many details (i.e. it’s not ready yet) but I’ve conceived the project as more of a business model rather than an object that’s meant to be owned. Things will become clearer once it’s released, but imagine a musical album that’s based on the Freemium model, with the album itself functioning as the “premium service”.

If you’re confused and have no idea what I’m talking about, it’s probably because there’s no previous examples to reference at this point — it seems that I’ve stumbled upon something new this time around…not “new” in that “old” kind of way or reinventing the wheel (which I’ve done lots of times before) but this time it seems to be new for reals. If any of this peaks your curiosity, sign up for my mailing list or subscribe to my RSS feed and you’ll be the first to find out!

As things started to progress, the project itself took a major turn away from how record labels normally operate. Rather than creating music as a “product” (albums, merchandise, brands), the result turned into more of a “service” that I offered to audiences as something that they would “use” as a matter of routine. So instead of thinking of an album purchase as a transfer of ownership from the label to the listener (which is a false premise in the digital age anyway) the audience is actually paying for the “experience” of listening to the recording. The difference is subtle, but streaming music services like Spotify and Pandora have already executed on this idea and have done remarkably well for themselves. From a content production standpoint (i.e. musicians), however, this approach has not been attempted as of yet.

In order to give some contrast to this idea, the opposite of this approach is the notion of the “art object” — art that exists for its own sake, where the medium is the message and is considered valuable in itself. If you’re living in Los Angeles, you’ve probably heard of that big-ass rock that they’ve hauled into the Los Angeles County Museum as of the late — the formal name for the artwork is called Levitated Mass, a conceptual sculpture piece, aka “big-ass rock”. Society itself has largely moved past the point of questioning whether something like this “is art or not”, since most people would at least be willing to give the piece that label. But the controversy now lies in the implicit message and motivations that the rock itself is conveying to its audiences.

In a lot ways, the rock symbolizes what large institutions have come to represent at this point in time: big, immobile, inflexible, inefficient (so big), and a distinct lack of attention paid to craftmanship since the rock itself can be considered to be a type of found object. It’s a big old stubborn rock that won’t move or budge even in the face of change or innovation, staying the same no matter what happens, and Levitating Mass acts as a big advertisement for this type of ideology. Similar things can be said about most sound objects and sound installation pieces to a certain extent — regardless if it uses technology or not, people enjoy these works because it’s stable, grounded, and resistant to change.

In the commercial sector, this mentality can be seen in the hyped idea of musicians wanting to “make it” with record sales, since that’s what they’re most familiar with as consumers. People are allured by the idea that all they have to do is make a song with “hit-like” qualities and that the rest will take care of it itself. Like the rock piece, it’s the idea that all you need is an object with distinctive qualities in order to “make it happen”, so to speak.

The reality, however, is that most musicians tend to make most of their income from a myriad of streams — performances, royalties, licensing, sponsorships, etc. — all of which require constant renewals, updates, and negotiations in order to stay afloat. (And of course, practice.) So with that awareness having become more commonplace, the trend seems to be moving in favor of conceptualizing music as a service, rather than it being a product-oriented industry. It’s not what you’ve created yesterday, but what you’re capable of creating tomorrow that gives value, in other words.

OK, back to work!

Related posts:

1. Applying Lean Startup Principals to Music (Pt.1 – Minimum Viable Product)

(¶/♪) Ryan Tanaka - Scholarship, Music, Entrepreneurship

Finally got my reports from soundout.com — I highly recommend it for musicians looking to get feedback on their works-in-progress from the general public since they’ve made the process of market testing easy and painless. (Except for the actual feedback part, which there’s nothing anybody can do about, sorry.) 10 feedbacks for free, or for 30 bucks you can get 80 people to listen to your music and give you commentary, which is well worth the price.

Because the website was largely geared toward a pop/rock audience, it seems like most of the reviewers were looking for a “song with lyrics” in them, which put my stuff in a somewhat awkward place. (Not that this ever discourages me, even when it probably should.) But did I find out that there were a few people who appreciated it for what it was supposed to be — an ambient track largely designed for background listening. I put my tracks in the “experimental” section since it didn’t have a section that was specific to ambient styles and basically hoped for the best. I think for the next couple of ones I’ll try to put the submissions in the “soundtrack” genre since that seems to be more appropriate…but I did get some pretty useful insights from these reports nonetheless.

Here’s a sample of what these reports look like.

OK, so some people didn’t like it. Some people thought it was boring, and a lot of the 16-24 age-range reviewers weren’t too shy about letting me know about that fact.

There was one guy in particular (a male between 35-44) who thought I was a hack and my only trick was to “play some notes on the piano over and over”. To be fair, he does have a point — that’s all I’m really doing when it comes down to it. (lol) But it’s interesting how mad some people get when they listen to music that they don’t like — I guess the medium in general just has that power to provoke that kind of emotional response.

On the “consensus vs. divided opinion” measurement, I was waaaay on the divided side of the scale, which meant that my chances at mass-market appeal was zero to nonexistent. Bummer. But I did get a few very nice responses, such as this one:

I thought that the piano track was really out of this world, unlike anything I can ever recall hearing. The song was evocative, transportive, and immersive, and really captivated me from the opening bars. This song was ineffable in its sublimity, and really created a sonic dreamscape on the walls of my imagination. The song had a reverberant resonance and an exhilarating sonority to it that really made the hairs on my arms stand up.

I marveled at the originality of the sound, and the majestic, symphonic aesthetic that the song created. I had a hard time placing any one particular instrument, with the possible exception of the piano playing which was clearly the work of a true virtuoso. The musicianship was just astonishing on this track, and I think it really takes a true craftsman to create an instrumental piece of music as lush as this one.

This was definitely a deviation for the norm for a rock and roll enthusiast like myself, but it was a most welcome one. While this kind of music might not be for everyone, those with more cultured, refined, and eclectic tastes will be mightily impressed by what they hear here. It was quite a trip, and I thank the band for taking me on it.

-Female Reviewer, Age 25-34

She and a few others on the reviewers list were the ones that really “got” what I was trying to do, and it made me happy to see that there were people like them out there. You can’t please everyone, but strong responses from a small group of people tend to easily make up for comments that were largely negative or indifferent — which was, honestly speaking, the vast majority of them.

Out of 80 comments total, there was about 3-5 very positive comments, 10-15 people who liked it as a generic background, 10-15 people who really hated it, while the rest were largely indifferent or not really sure what to have made of it. From the things I’ve learned from entrepreneurs and “Lean Startup” principals, the next step would be to focus really strongly on those 3-5 and try to establish a strong connection with them.

3-5 people might not seem like a lot, but thinking of it another way, that’s about 5% of the people out there. And 5% of the general population is still a lot of people, especially during a time where music consumption is on the rise. People aren’t listening to less music just because the traditional record industry is dying — they’re listening to it more but finding new avenues to get it from. The task of connecting to audience members, however, is now in the hands of the artists themselves — hence why it’s necessary for artists to function as entrepreneurs if they’re going to survive in today’s musical climate. That was my reason, anyway, for getting involved in this stuff to begin with.

The two things I was most worried with the tracks were: 1) people would complain about the production values since I spent so little time on it, and 2) they would’ve thought that my music was too agitating or “busy” for something that’s supposed to be an “ambient” track. To my surprise, neither concerns turned out to be true. And for those who did voice their complaints in those areas, it was clear that they were looking for a “song with lyrics” in them so they would’ve been a lost cause anyway.

It looks like an Oreo, but it's actually a microphone. But that's all there was.

The interesting thing about the quote above is that she thought that there was a whole “band” was playing, even though it was just me playing on the piano. A couple of others gave extensive commentary on what the “synths”, “horns”, “bells”, and “effects” were doing in relation to the piano, regardless if they liked or disliked the piece. I mean, I did add a lot of reverb to this particular track but the only instrument there is the piano, so what they’re hearing is mostly hallucinatory. This effect is pretty similar to what musical minimalism does as a style…I did push the process a step further than normal, but the techniques in themselves aren’t anything new.

So that’s the “trip” aspect of the music that the listener above was talking about, since it’s made to take audience members to another place and time, at least temporarily. It’s geared towards people who’re looking for something different or a change of pace from the other kinds of musics that they normally listen to. I kind of suspected this before, but this report solidified a lot of what I was thinking already, which was that my market would be a very niche one, if it even existed to begin with. It’s a good thing that I never really had any interest in being a rock star, otherwise I probably would’ve been disappointed by what was said in the feedback that I’ve gotten so far.

Noone suspected that all of my recordings were improvised and done in one unedited and uncut take. The real “experience” of it is the live performance, where they can hear all of these sounds in an unmediated state, which would hopefully be a nice contrast to the disappointments many fans face when they find out that their favorite band doesn’t sound as good in person than they do on recordings. Even recalling past experiences, the strongest responses I’ve gotten from people were from doing things live — the trouble has always been finding a venue or a community that would be willing to take the risk of putting something unusual in their line-up. But if I can prove that the market exists, then I would at least have the means of justifying it to others.

Fortunately I had a few people said that they would “totally buy this album” so I’m going to finish it up as soon as possible in order to find out if they actually mean it. I have 114 minutes of music already, and the plan is to make 35 minutes more of it in order to max out Tunecore’s album length limit. I know to most people’s ears it kind of sounds like the same piano sounds banging away for a really long time, but if they like it, they’ll get 2-1/2 hours of it for the low low price of $20 bucks, which I think is pretty reasonable. And it’ll be the only one of its kind out there, at least for now.

This project felt like an eternity in the making but I have to remind myself that I only started this in late-March, doing it part-time in between other random things, like working odd-jobs, eating burritos, and earning a Ph.D at a university. Most of the hours I spent doing this were done in a frenzy, fueled by a lot of caffeine…but the work-to-product ratio is still relatively small at this point. In business speak, that means higher margins and low overhead costs, which may prove to be useful in the long run.

I need to get the album out ASAP!

Related posts:

1. Applying Lean Startup Principals to Music (Pt.4 – Customer Development)
2. Applying Lean Startup Principals in Music (Pt.5 – Pivoting)
3. Applying Lean Startup Principals to Music (Pt.1 – Minimum Viable Product)
4. Applying Lean Startup Principals to Music (Pt.2 – Vanity Metrics, Validated Learning)

(¶/♪) Ryan Tanaka - Scholarship, Music, Entrepreneurship

Tiago Daniel / Foter

New post! It’s crunch time so I won’t be able to write a well-researched article this week, but I’m in the midst of writing a new paper regarding ethics in the age of online piracy so that should be up in a little while. It turns out that there was a way to combine my research interests with what I’ve been doing in entrepreneurial land — good times!

I’ve been networking like crazy as of the late, so I thought I’d just write down a few paragraphs about pitching. It’s something that I learned how to do only after I started getting into the business side of things, and I gotta say, it’s actually a lot harder than it looks. Pitching does, however, get easier over time if you keep doing it — the trick is to choose 1 or 2 things that’s most important to you and talk about it with the right person who might be interested in what you’re doing.

Pitch Your Idea (How To)

When doing these things there’s always the risk of selling yourself too strong or not strong enough. Some people are blessed with the gift of lacking in self-awareness (like me), but most people seem to have an inherent fear of presenting themselves to the public because they’re afraid that they’ll cross that line of what’s “social acceptable”. But there is actually an easy way to get it just right without coming across as being “fake” — the trick is to tell people about your work as if it were a personal story.

Knowing what you’re talking about does help (a lot) but in many cases it’s more important to speak about your work with a lot of belief and passion. And you can use your personal experiences as a springboard to bolster your authenticity and enthusiasm, assuming that you actually believe in what you’re doing. (If you can’t muster the latter out of yourself, it’s probably time to find another line of work, imo.)

As an example, here’s my “story”, tailored towards the entrepreneurs I’ve been meeting as of the late:

Hi I’m Ryan, etc.

I got interested in entrepreneurship when I had the idea to turn our group’s (OK Music’s) improvised performances into a service or business — we do something similar to what improv comedy groups do, but with musicians. Our performances are interactive in the sense that we take “theme” ideas from audience members and make original music and content right in front of them.

After realizing how difficult it was to execute this idea, though, I started attending entrepreneurial meetings in order to get some direction for our group’s activities. OK Music is on hold for now, at least until I feel like I’ve sharpened my business skills enough to the point where we could start landing some good gigs.

Lately I’ve been using my solo projects (in piano/composition) as a testing ground for applying “Lean” and other types of entrepreneurial principals into the music-making process. I’m currently looking to work with people in the music industry and music startup community in order to promote myself and my projects, since our success is based on having a recognizable presence in the city of LA. If I can make things work with my own stuff, I think that’ll give me what I’ll need in order to make the group successful.

(Give them card, link, CD, whatever.)

So it’s as easy as that. I’m selling what I’m doing without having to make anything up, and it’s pretty clear what I’m looking for in every meeting. Tell people of your struggles, and your successes — try to make people care about you as a person and as an artist. Of course in the real world the pitch probably won’t read exactly like the above, but it does help to write what you want to say down a few times so that you’ll have something to fall back on during conversation.

The person you’re pitching to will then either be into what you’re doing…or maybe not. Don’t get offended if they’re not that into what you’re doing, because it’s never a personal thing unless you make it out to be that way. (This is a flaw of human nature that you have to get over, unfortunately.) Being clear is important because that can help you and the other person come to a quick decision on whether or not you have something to offer each other. But don’t discount people just because they might not be able to help you personally. They might actually know someone who could, after all.

Consider yourself an artist rather than a businessperson? Well, the interesting thing is that as I’ve started to practice how to pitch my business ideas, my ability to talk about my music also started to improve. Even if you’re working in academia, non-profits, or artist collectives and so on, these skills can easily be carried over into those realms. If you’re interested in getting a promotion, acquiring grants, capturing doners/clients, presenting project ideas to panelists, looking to collaborate with outside artists, etc. they all involve the act of pitching something to someone else out there. So if you improve on one area of yourself, it will start to have a positive effect on others all around.

If you feel like you might need additional help, Toastmasters International is a great organization to join if you want to work on your public speaking/presentation skills in a positive, mutually supportive environment. Some people swear by it, and it’s fairly common to hear people say that their time with the organization literally had life-changing impacts on their lives and careers. I was a member with them for about a year — my doctorate program started conflicting with their schedule so I had to take a break, but I would definitely go back if I had more time.

Just for the record, I’m not the greatest pitcher-of-ideas out there because I’m naturally introverted and would honestly rather be at my piano/computer writing and producing music. But what you want to do is get to at least an “OK” level so that people actually know what you’re talking about and what you want to do. You can then let your enthusiasm do the rest of the work.

One advice I got early on in the process was that I should wait on hiring a marketer or PR person until I’ve learned how to properly pitch my idea myself. And I think that advice turned out to be very much true — there’s a lot of things you learn by just doing it yourself, and I really do think the ideas I have in my head are now in a better place because of that. Not to mention I just saved myself a ton of money in the future because I now know what a good promotional campaign really looks like.

Know what you’re doing first, then the money will follow, as they say.

Related posts:

1. Selling the Idea of Flexibility

(¶/♪) Ryan Tanaka - Scholarship, Music, Entrepreneurship

I thought I might talk about strategic “pivoting” in this article since I’m currently in the midst of going through one in my own works. It’s been a pretty wild ride so far!

“Pivoting” is a term that’s commonly seen and used in the startup community in order to describe what businesses go through when they make major revisions in their business models: Twitter started as a podcasting service, YouTube an online video dating service, PayPal an “sending money through palm pilots” service — all of which are indications that companies often have to go a “learning” phase before they finally discover their model of success. And the process of switching from one model to the next is called a “pivot”, at least in the Lean Startup way of doing things. In the music world, a “pivot” could be analogous to situations where an artist decides to change their style or genre that they’re working with in order to stay relevant to the public’s interest.

Madonna and Lady Gaga are probably the two most prominent examples where the idea of the “pivot” can be seen in action in the music industry at this point in time. The two figures change their styles regularly and often enough that the idea of change in itself has become part of their brand identity. They’re interesting characters to watch, mostly because their popularity indicates a shift in what people look for in their celebrities in this day and age. In a lot of ways their style could be reflecting the nature of today’s high-paced, rapid-changing society, and they’ve managed to figure out a way how to reflect this in their music and personas.

It’s becoming more and more necessary for musicians to talk about these types of issues, mostly because they now have access to so many influences and styles that the amount of choices out there can often be overwhelming. This is especially true if the musician happens to be good, because being able to “play in every genre” is seen as a desirable trait for most professional-level musicians looking to score their next gig. But after a certain point it becomes necessary to get your name out there and establish an identity that has a story of its own. Out of the hundreds of thousands of things out there, which one do you choose?

About a month ago I did a presentation at USC on the topic of applying lean startup principals to the process of music making and music marketing. In short, I wrote 5 different tracks based on a chord progression that people seemed to have liked (all in different styles) in order to test for my music’s market viability.

Not surprisingly, my Angry Birds Remix track (shown to the right) seems to have been the most successful in terms of generating the most traffic, probably riding off some of the popularity and brand recognition of the original game. Even with no marketing efforts made on my part, it picked up a couple hundred hits in a few weeks and some random “likes” by random people here and there, and has been quietly racking up traffic all on its own. This goes to show that branding can be a very powerful force — something that I think a lot of musicians have a tendency to underestimate.

Even if the numbers are small, there’s something thrilling about watching something grow on its own, even if it just happens to be a bits on a computer screen. But as most entrepreneurs know, “hits” are a poor indication of something’s value, and can be considered a form of a vanity metric. That, combined with what my gut has been nagging at me, has lead me to believe that the project is probably going to fail in long run, at least as a business enterprise.

For one, when you base your success off of another company’s brand, there’s the danger that should the game lose its popularity (something that happens all the time) the music will fall off the charts along with it. It doesn’t even require Rovio to go out of business in order for this to happen — they could simply decide that they want to focus their efforts on developing a different game and that would be that.

To be fair, some people can earn a respectable living moving from style to style, song to song, genre to genre. (Weird Al Yankovic comes to mind.) But I’ve never been particularly good at keeping up with pop culture trends in this way because it’s not where my strengths and interests lie. And to be perfectly honest, I used the Angry Birds theme only because it was massively popular, not necessarily because I was in love with the product itself. So during the last few months I’ve been re-evaluating my priorities, strengths, and possible directions I could use for my next project.

It’s only been a short while and the numbers are still very small, so some say my decision to “pivot” might be a bit premature. There still might be some potential in the 4 other tracks and I could market test all of them even further if I really wanted to. But they all have similar issues of the music sounding like something someone else could probably write — even if the quality wasn’t quite as high, for most people’s purposes they could probably do it for pretty cheap and no-one would be the wiser.

The biggest red flag, however, was the responses that I’ve gotten from doing market testing on radio and online DJ sites. It blends fairly well in the intended genre-type (ambient, chill) but none of them got a very strong/impassioned response from anybody as of yet. Thankfully nobody hated it, but nobody really said they loved it, either. (I did these testings from an anonymous name in order to get an impartial opinion.) So it’s time to put it on the shelf, at least for now, I think.

It’s not that I think that the album is bad or that there isn’t anything original about it, but for this project I wanted to set the bar much higher than I have in the past. And for that, I would need to focus on what my greatest asset was, and focus solely on executing on those ideas. For a musician, what does that mean, though?

Finding Your “Sound” is Your Barrier to Entry

Every artist goes through a phase of finding their “voice” or “sound” in their works, which I’ve found to be very similar to what entrepreneurs do when they’re trying to “discover” their business model. Both paths involve a very long and grueling process of trials, tribulations, practice, and self-discovery that allows them to “get” to where they need to go, whatever that might mean to them. Because of the immense amount of work and dedication that’s involved, most people never reach the point where they have “it” under their belt, and those that do never feel like it ever reaches perfection. A few rare talents have “it” naturally but often lose the opportunity to allow for its development, while others prematurely decide to push what they have into the world, before “it” is ready. Needless to say, the failure rate is very high in these fields and timing often plays a very big part in whether or not something becomes a success.

What is “it”? It’s not possible to define “it” in specific terms, but everyone knows what it is when they hear it — “it” is the musician’s “sound” that gives their music a unique flavor that you can’t get anywhere else. Some believe “it” is something people are born with, while others believe that it can be acquired through hard work, practice, and perseverance. I tend to gravitate towards the latter point of view, mostly because in my experience people who continue the process of experimentation, discovery, and getting honest feedback (most important) eventually find something that allows them to stand apart from the rest of the world. Not necessarily because there’s anything particularly interesting about them in themselves, but because they took the time, effort, and mindfulness to create something that they hope would better the lives of themselves and their intended audiences.

Some claim that you can get the "it factor" from observing people on how they do it. But "it" requires more than just an imitation of mannerisms.

Just because it can be acquired, however, doesn’t make the trait any less rare. People willing to make the sacrifices necessary in order to develop their talent is an uncommon trait, and they have to be lucky enough to have (or be smart enough to look for) a support system that allows for their talents to reach its full potential. The road is a difficult one, but the good news is that a unique “sound” can be achieved by almost anyone regardless of background, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, politics or personality type, as long as the right tools and mindsets are in place. Artists and entrepreneurs are always interesting people to hang out with, mostly because they’re the exceptions to the rule that every segment of society has to offer.

On a number of occasions, a few entrepreneurs asked me the question, “well, what happens if a larger company decides to rip off your idea and do it themselves?” The implication here is that once you achieve success, a bigger company is likely to copy your idea and attempt to push your product out of the market using their superior infrastructure. This is a difficult, but fair, question that investors often ask entrepreneurs to think about before pursuing their project any further, particularly if their idea is a good one. An entrepreneur needs to have the means and methods of protecting themselves, or there’s a good chance that they could simply get crushed by their competition once they reach a certain level of success.

As a way to mitigate this risk, investors typically ask entrepreneurs if their idea has any “proprietary” value. Here’s where intellectual property rights becomes an important factor in the equation — if a company can protect themselves through the use of patents, trademarks, or copyrights in order to give themselves a head start, they can earn their success more comfortably, with less competition. A similar effect can be achieved when the idea itself is extremely difficult to replicate or reverse-engineer because of its own ingenuity and/or complexity. This is typically labelled as a product’s “barrier of entry” — the higher the barrier, the more advantageous the situation becomes for both its founders and investors.

Musicians can learn a lot from this idea, especially if they want to work with record companies or are looking to get signed by a major label. What gives an artist “proprietary” value? It’s their “sound”, their “it”. If what they do cannot be replicated anywhere else, then this makes them more desirable in the eyes of producers who’re looking for ways to differentiate themselves from what the rest of the market is doing.

A musician who makes a name for themselves using a dog whistle during their performances will always be in perpetual danger of being replaced because no court would allow them to copyright the act of “using a dog whistle” in itself. Unlike product-based ventures where they’re sometimes allowed to a patent a “process”, musicians don’t have the luxury of monopolizing a novelty, gimmick, style, or approach to their works because their outputs are copyrighted at its end stages, usually in the form of recordings or written scores/lyrics. So the dog-whistle musician is most likely to just give up on their instrument after they start bumping into larger markets because they have no means of competing against the bigger players in the game.

That is, unless they’ve managed to get so good at the dog whistle that they were able to create a unique sound from it that noone else in the world could do. In which case their “it” factor once again becomes re-established, giving them a fighting chance for survival. This is the main reason why your teachers will tell you to shut up and go back to practicing — it’s not what you have that matters, but what you do with it that will end up helping you in the long run. Gimmicks and novelties always have a short shelf-life, and for good reason.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about what was my “it”, my “sound” — I’ve been lucky enough to have had experiences where people have told me that there was something unique about the kinds of musics that I made, so this has always kept my motivation going, even during times of difficulty. Up until now, however, I never bothered trying to pin-point what that was, mostly because I’ve always been interested in a lot of different things and was prone to distracting myself towards other activities. But now it was time to get down to the specifics.

Pivoting Comes From Inspiration

It’s pretty appropriate that Steve Blank’s latest post was on the topic of epiphanies, because I think it’s safe to say that I had one after finally completing my first “Lean”-based compositional approach. Epiphanies are things that I’ve actually seen and experienced a lot during my lifetime, mostly because I’m around a lot of people who have the creative impulse. Some epiphanies have greater urgency than others, but they all force you to do one thing: take a different direction than what you’re currently doing right now.

Steve Blank speaks of the epiphany as it’s usually depicted in the movies: a sudden flash of inspiration that crystalizes an idea or direction in the mind of an individual. In my case — maybe because I’m a pretty laid back guy and all — the light was more like a slow fade-in that came over me over the course of a couple of days while I tried to figure out what I needed to do in the near future. It might have been my left-brained, skeptical mind of the scholar/researcher that’s slowed the process down, maybe.

I mentally compiled a list of all of the music that I’ve made so far and narrowed them down based on desirable qualities that make for a good entrepreneurial venture. I liked doing them all and honestly had no preference of one or the other, but I figured that since there’s only a limited hours in the day I might as well pick the ones that were more likely to make me successful. So it had to be something that 1) I was good at that no-one else could do, 2) provoked the strongest response from audience members, and 3) was economical to a certain degree. After mulling over it for a little while, it eventually became clear that I should be focusing my efforts toward my piano improvisations at this point in time.

I’ve always been dabbling on the piano since I was a kid, making up songs and pieces on the fly whenever I could. I’ve always had kind of a short attention span and never really enjoyed practicing and playing music that someone else wrote, so I would do these improvisations in between my daily practice routines as a way for me to relieve some stress. It was really the only place where I could sit still for hours and be happy, while allowing me to collect my thoughts on the things that were going on elsewhere in my life. After I left my school’s performance program I stopped practicing my instrument for the most part, but continued to develop my methods and techniques in the improvisatory arts.

At this point it’s gone way beyond liking it — the sense of focus and concentration that improvisation has given me has helped out in other areas of my life, proving me with some very tangible benefits. (I wouldn’t have been able to get into my current doctoral program without it, for example.) And it’s become more or less a mission to share these ideas to the world, since I really do think that it can help people figure out ways to navigate through today’s society, which is increasingly becoming more complex and unpredictable.

Some improvisations can be serene and spacious (like Pt.8 above) or fast, dense, and complex (like Pt.5 below), but they do have one thing in common: these tracks are extremely introspective but nonetheless are very “busy” in its content. In retrospect, most of the “wowed” responses I was able to get from my music were from these performances (especially when live) among people who had similar qualities to that of my sounds — introverted, thoughtful, but nonetheless productive, and direct. I’m hoping that they’ll be able to somewhat see themselves in the kinds of music that I make, seeing the piano as a metaphor for computers and other types of mechanical devices. We’re both sitting in front of a keyboard all day, after all — mine just happens to make sounds, rather than words.

So this fits all of the criteria of what makes for a good entrepreneurial idea. It’s something that only I can do right now, since it’s not anything that you can learn in any music program at this point in time. It had the strongest response from audience members, at least within certain niches. And it’s economical because these tracks can be produced in real-time, with little to no rehearsal preparation. (I’m going to max out TuneCore’s album length limit of 150 minutes in order to prove this point.) Live performances will require only a piano and minimal micing with reverb effects, which can be done in any venue with standard equipment you can get just about anywhere.

Since it’s technically an “ambient” work, I know that my stuff will never reach the top 40 charts or receive wide, mass-market appeal. But I can see it being used for background music for tech-related products/advertisements, video games, or for websites, all of which have fairly respectable income streams. It can also be marketed to people who need some ambiance that sounds “modern” but nonetheless still manages to retain that feel of an acoustic instrument.

The goal right now is to finish up the 2 1/2-hour album and sell it through online distribution — it sounds crazy on the surface but I have a consistent enough method now that I could probably get it out in under a month while still retaining most of its quality. And a methodological consistency will lead to a consistency in sound, which will be useful for establishing an identity for its brand. It’s something that someone could hit play and let it run for a few hours while they focus their attention doing other things.

The genre will be called “Post-Minimal Ambient” music, which combines my classical and avant-garde backgrounds with the styles of Ambient and Chillout musics which I happen to enjoy the most in the electronic music medium. Postminimalism is a term that was coined by Kyle Gann, in order to explain the direction that modern classical musics were moving towards after the (public) successes of composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. The style is an attempt by classical musicians to branch out into the mass market, which employs the use of electronic music techniques and styles into the formal traditions that have developed under the classical canon. It’s also descriptive of the style in the sense that the music attempts to create ambiance “beyond” what is just minimal. There’s always something there to pay attention to, but only if the listener chooses to do so. People who are more into it will start noticing the details that exist inside of the washes of sound, so it can work on two different levels if need be.

It’s somewhat strange that all of these ideas came to me in such a short amount of time, considering that I didn’t have to invent or do anything new to come to this realization. All I did was frame what I was already doing in a different way (using the lean method), and all of the pieces started falling into place. This doesn’t guarantee that the project will be successful, but it’s something that I could see myself putting 100% into since I’m probably going to be doing it for the rest of my life anyway. And if it can be made to work, then I’ll finally have an idea worth pursuing as a musician and entrepreneur.

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(¶/♪) Ryan Tanaka - Scholarship, Music, Entrepreneurship

A follow-up from my last post on Entrepreneurship Education, Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley: Entrepreneurship – Taught or Born?

Now that entrepreneurial ideas are gradually making its way into the classrooms, I can’t help but notice that there’s a lot of similarities between what’s happening there and what has been going on in the music world for quite a while now. Everyday, the culture of the tech sector is becoming more and more similar to the art world in the sense that it’s beginning to develop a particularly strong interest in youth and youth culture. Some VCs won’t bother investing in anyone who’s older than 30, because they’re seen as being “too old” to innovate and/or keep up with the rapidly changing pace of working in a startup company.

Age is very much a consideration when producers decide on what performers to cultivate and support for their projects. Justified or not, ageism is the unspoken game that many artists have to play in order to get ahead in their careers, where younger talents are usually seen as being better because of their youthful idealism and longer “shelf life”. Experience — ? What good is that? We’re trying to create something new here!

A while ago (in ye olde days of 2010) I remember being both embarrassed and inspired after seeing an article about Susan Levine, a 13-year girl who was starting her own business through crowdfunding and finding out that she was actually way ahead of me in terms of putting together and executing a business idea. I was starting to run into difficulties in my own projects and things were starting to stall, but she kept things going with what seemed to be just pure, unbridled inspiration.

Back then entrepreneurship wasn’t quite as popular of an idea as it is now, so seeing those types of articles were somewhat of an anomaly. Nowadays, though, these stories have become fairly common, and we’re now seeing the rise of the “entrepreneurial prodigy” in the midst of our culture. There’s even a buzzword that they made up: the kidtrepreneur. (ugh)

Because entrepreneurship can be said to be a form of art, there’s something magical and mystical about people, especially young kids, who can do the things that we can’t with seemingly great ease. It also gives us a sense of hope that our culture is still capable of producing brilliant minds and that the future will be bright for the rest of us once these kids grow up to be great men and women. Prodigies are then put on pedestals, given media attention, constant praise, and the responsibility to epitomize what makes our culture so great: They are the product and result of society’s obsession with its own future.

One teacher of mine, however, likened child prodigies with that of a talking horse: Deep down you’re not really interested in what it has to say; you’re just there to be amazed that it’s “actually doing it”. And after watching the initial spectacle of a 9-13 year old starting their own company (or playing a Beethoven concerto), most people don’t know what happens to them afterwards. Fortunately, some prodigies will actually continue to pursue their craft after they get older and achieve success, while others might eventually find something else to do with their lives but talk about their experiences in the arts with great fondness.

Talking horse or child prodigy? You decide. (hint: Talking horse.)

There’s a third type of prodigy that noone likes to talk about, however: those that are “normalized” after they reach adulthood. In many cases the accomplishments of a prodigious child is amazing only because they’re “too young” to be doing it — once adulthood is reached, its novelty begins to fade and the public’s attention shifts its focus toward the next crop of talent. For many, the passion that they had for the medium died a long time ago (or was never there to begin with), since many of them picked up their “interest” only as a way to please their family or peers. And during those moments where nobody is watching, they might find it difficult to find their motivation to continue their pursuits.

In cases where this type of thing goes on for too long, some develop a cynical, bitter attitude towards people and humanity in general, putting up a front of pleasantries while secretly loathing the audience in the back of their minds. (Having highly talented people in influential positions who have a distaste for the human race should be a cause for concern, I think.) Many of them develop unhealthy drug habits, self-destructive behaviors, or in some cases taking their own life. Of the lucky ones who managed to escape those types of fates, many of them found the experience of doing art so painful that they sell (or in some cases destroy) their instrument, never to touch it again.

Prodigies are only possible in environments where there’s a strong — often irrational — idolization of a profession, combined with an educational system that allows for its methodologies to be acquired through a formal process. The world of music has had both for a while now, while entrepreneurship, neither, until very recently. As pitching contests and business idea competitions start to become a common occurrence, it’s important for people not to lose sight of the end goal of the process: the creation of a sustainable, long-lasting business model. And more importantly, a leader who actually cares about the company itself.

In recent years the value of winning a music competition has become lessened due to the fact that it has become decoupled from the idea of earning a career. If the goal of entrepreneurial education is to create a bridge to success, then it needs to ensure that its paths actually lead somewhere, and that people are made aware that they’re on it to begin with. These are problems that arise naturally as more people become interested in a certain practice — in order to avoid repeating the mistakes of Hollywood and the music world, the startup community will need to keep a close eye on how its treating the next generation of talent.

What Makes a Good Entrepreneur?

When I was young, I remember hearing a talk by Yo-Yo-Ma that left a particularly big impression on me. While in school, he apparently had a teacher who told him to stop playing his instrument and experience life outside of the practice room. So for a few years he didn’t touch his cello and instead found himself pursuing other interests and activities unrelated to music. And when he finally “came back” to what he was doing originally, he said that it had made all of the difference in the world.

There’s something in Yo-Yo-Ma’s playing that’s different from your average child prodigy — call it “expression”, “character”, “musicality”, if you will — but what’s there is an intentionality that can’t be faked. From observing his performances and career, it’s obvious that he’s passionate about what he does for a living and there’s nothing about him that seems to hint otherwise. And that, in itself, has made him successful both as a professional and as a person.

Below I made a list of personality traits that I compiled from hearing people talk about what makes a “good” entrepreneur. Surprisingly, many of these are the exact same lines used to describe what makes a “good” artist as well.

- Honest with themselves, and others.
- Prefers action over talking.
- Enjoys reflecting on past events.
- Strong work ethic, ability to be extremely focused.
- High tolerance for embarrassing themselves, making mistakes in public.
- Takes initiative for getting feedback, never takes criticism personally.
- Immune to discouragement.
- A compulsive, almost irrational tendency towards optimistic outcomes.
- Realistic in their short-term goals, objectives.
- Enjoys creating order out of chaos, and visa versa.
- Extremely high tolerance to uncertainty, risk.
- Likes working with people.
- Likes working alone.
- Truth seeking, while seeking to change it.
- Likes doing a lot of different things, learning about a wide variety of subjects.
- Strong passion for their craft and ideas.

You might notice that there’s nothing about money or fame mentioned here. There’s nothing wrong with wanting either, although everyone agrees: they’re not what makes or breaks an artist. (Money follows passion, as it is said in both lines of work.) I’d say that the first few on the list are probably the most important since it’s those traits that allow people to get better at whatever they’re doing. Success normally requires all, or at least most of these traits listed above because that’s what creative jobs usually entail. Without them, I think it would be very difficult to function as an effective founder, artist, or even as an intrapreneur.

You might also notice that lot of these ideas might seem self-contradictory and somewhat schizophrenic, at least on the surface. But before you spend thousands of dollars medicating or sending your child to therapy, it might be good to consider the possibility that they might either be an entrepreneur or an artist. Although I do suspect that a lot of parents would rather think of their child as being crazy rather than dealing with the fact that their kid might turn out to be “one of those” people.

For parents who are overly supportive, the danger of compiling a list like this is that some will mistakenly believe that these traits can be “acquired” through an educational system or mentor. Not so — formal training can give the means and methods, but can’t implant intentionality or creativity into someone’s personality. The recent upsurge in interest in entrepreneurial ideas was the direct result of the global economic crisis and massive job losses of 08′-09′, not because there happened to be more classes being taught in those areas. Necessity is the mother of invention, but necessity comes from the world, not from school.

Hence, Yo-Yo-Ma made the right choice in deciding to take a break from his instrument; some people have too much creativity and not enough technique, but he probably had the opposite problem where his technique was perfect but at the time didn’t have any idea why he was playing his instrument. In order to understand what that meant, however, it was necessary for him to “get out of the building” and interact with real people. He was lucky for having a particularly wise teacher who managed to see what the “real” problem was with his playing style, and probably wouldn’t have gotten to where he was now without his advice.

When you get down to it, both music and startup companies “express” the same thing — the beliefs and values of its creator. And anyone who thinks that turning a creative idea into a tangible reality is a good career decision is bound to be a little bit crazy. But there’s nothing worse than watching something “force” themselves into this craziness, as if carefully studying the list above and developing mannerisms around them would make it more real. Entrepreneurship is something that you either like or don’t, and it’s usually recommended that you find another line of work if you’re not into it all the way. (It’ll probably pay better, be more stable, less stressful.)

If all of this sounds bizarre to you, it’s likely that you haven’t seen what happens when you try to create an inter-generational (i.e. educational) system out of the creative process. The culture of the “prodigious child” is a byproduct of the combining of these two worlds, and its results are often very mixed. I don’t have a scientific study on hand, but personally I haven’t seen any evidence that prodigies have a higher chance at long-term success than those with average to above-average talent. In the end, hard-work, reliability, and dedication always wins out over unfocused brillance — and these types of successes can be achieved even if you’re not necessarily the “best” person in the room.

Related posts:

1. Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley: Entrepreneurship – Taught or Born?
2. Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley – Fake it ’til You Make it
3. Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley – Online Piracy: Stealing is Just a Word

(¶/♪) Ryan Tanaka - Scholarship, Music, Entrepreneurship

So I just sent out my first album of music to TuneCore since I started applying Lean Startup ideas into my process of composition. TuneCore does a very good job simplifying and streamlining the distribution process in digital-music-land, so it won’t be too long before the tracks starts to show up on iTunes, Amazon, and Spotify for streaming and downloading. (I’d recommend them for anyone wanting to get their stuff out there.)

It’s been an interesting experience doing things in this way because it forced me to do things oppositely of how I normally approached my projects. I’ve been making sure to document everything that I’ve done so far since I know I’m one of the first to try this out as a musical enterprise — definitely the first to get it in writing, at least. Here a few factoids that some might find interesting:

I used ideas from Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Ephiphany, Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, and Brant Cooper/Patrick Vlaskovits’ The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development for this project.

Time/Budget in a Typical Compositional Process
Music-Making: Avg. time to complete a work for most composers is about 2-3 months.
Rehearsals: About one 1-hour session, 2 or 3 if you’re lucky. Performer and rehearsal space fees.
Performances: Space rental and negotiation fees. Performer fees.
Recordings: Recording engineer fees for recording and post-production editing.
Distribution/Marketing: Varies, thousands -> millions depending on popularity of the act using PR and marketing firms.

- – -

Time/Budget Using Lean Methods (So Far)
Music-Making: ~2 days per track, roughly 10-11 days total.
Rehearsals: None.
Performances: None.
Recordings: Uses default settings on music software — minimal mixing or “tweaking”.
Distribution/Marketing: Tunecore, Social Media. (Under $50 total.)

The slideshow at the top of the page is the presentation that I gave at the University of Southern California a few weeks ago. You can view it for more details about what I did exactly, but the gist of it is that I’m now seeking feedback on my music before I go through the hassle of putting together a live performance. The chart above might not seem like a big deal for a lot of artists working in the electronic medium, but the idea of creating a minimum viable product doesn’t come easy when you have to consider the involvement of live performers. So I think I’m doing pretty well so far, considering the circumstances.

From the composer’s or songwriter’s perspective, this basically means that the musician should make a MIDI or mock-up rendition of their work and send it out to the public immediately after it reaches a point of “viability”. This is now possible because advances in music technologies have made it much easier to make higher-quality mock-ups, while people’s ears are more attuned to sounds made by electronic devices now than ever before. All of the pieces in the album that I made are playable by live performers if necessary, but the idea here is to resist the urge to get it performed until there are some pretty solid signs that the necessity actually exists.

I’ve also tried to avoid the traps of obsessive perfection that musicians sometimes fall into — e.g. editing and re-editing a bar of music over and over until it becomes “just right”. It turns out that there’s no such thing as “just right”, and if it ever seems that way it’s usually in ways that nobody else cares about. So for this project, my new motto became “good enough, get it out!”

Customer Development for Music

What exactly is customer development and how would a musician go about applying its ideas and principals into their work? Well, in the big picture that’s for everyone to figure out, since this stuff is in new territory and there aren’t any rules to be made or broken at this point in time. But I took a few ideas from the sources above and tried to model my strategy around what entrepreneurs have done in relation to their (ad)ventures.

The Four Steps of Customer Development, courtesy of An Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development. (The red text added by me.)

Currently I’m in the Customer Discovery/Customer Validation stages (steps 1 and 2), in search of a repeatable, “scalable” model. In a nutshell, this basically means that I’m not going to be finding performers for my works until it shows some signs that it could potentially draw an audience. Traditionally, the 3rd and 4th steps of the Customer Development model would come right after the music has been made, pushing the feedback process all the way at the end.

The top-down, late-feedback approach is the Waterfall Model that corporations and large institutions typically use to guide their business practices. People have become fairly skeptical of the Waterfall in recent years because it has a history of producing a lot of bad products, as well as a mentality that allows for companies to fall out of touch with its client and customer base. To be fair, in known, matured, and stable market environments this approach is can sometimes work. But the economic environment of the 21st century has proven itself to be a different beast altogether, throwing many of its ideas into disarray.

Similar to startup companies, given that most aspiring musicians are starting small and are “searching” for their potential audience/customer-base, it seems more apt to use theories from the world of entrepreneurship, rather than deriving its methods from the Waterfall Model. Lean Startup methodologies move the feedback process much earlier in the process in an attempt to increase the odds of a product launch being a successful one, which is an idea that I think can be very powerful for shaping the artistic process in the digital age. If a product fails, it fails early, way before composers/producers/songwriters end up spending thousands of dollars (and hours of their lives) on something that might not get anywhere. Money or fame doesn’t always have to be the end goal, but the methodology can be very useful for allowing the artist to shape and validate their career and artistic goals.

Sounds crazy? Well, it turns out that there already exists models that closely resembles this approach. While doing some research on my Angry Birds remix track, I found this video of the theme being played live by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The original composer (Ari Pulkkinen) created the original theme “virtually” as a soundtrack to a video game, but as the game became more popular, it eventually became “viable” enough for hundreds of people to get involved with the process. In a lot of ways, the careers of video game composers could serve as an early hint for how the repertoire might be shaped in the upcoming years of classical music practices.

So when will my project get to step 3 in chart? Maybe soon, maybe later, maybe never…only time will tell. Throughout my life I’ve been blessed with countless opportunities to make music with world-class musicians, most of which didn’t involve money in any way whatsoever. Many of these endeavors were done as academic/research pursuits or for the sheer love of the craft, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But for this project the goals are defined very clearly: it’s necessary for at least one of my tracks to gain some traction before I can justify having it performed by real people.

In other news, in order to compare and contrast my results with my older habits, I wrote a string quartet and am having it performed and am having it recorded this weekend. The space and performers are already paid for (more expensive and time consuming, obviously), and I think it’ll serve as a good compare/contrast model for how the two methodologies work. And maybe a better sense on what I’m better at doing.

Either way, answers are en route. Stay tuned for more details!

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(¶/♪) Ryan Tanaka - Scholarship, Music, Entrepreneurship

Martin Valigursky (on The Next Web) recently posted an article called Entrepreneurs are Born, which has been spurring some heated discussions around the issue of entrepreneurial education, a practice that has become more and more popular in recent years. As the title might imply, Valigursky’s opinion is that entrepreneurs are simply born to be entrepreneurs, and that the personality traits required for people to serve as founders of a company are things that cannot be taught in the classroom.

But entrepreneurship is not just about understanding business plans and inventory management. It’s a level of madness that drives people to seemingly impossible heights, dictating that laws of nature and practicality can be broken. Almost every successful entrepreneur will tell you how they’ve had a drive to build and create since they were a kid [...]

Research supports the notion that entrepreneurship is innate.

-Martin Valigursky, Entrepreneurs are Born

These discussions remind me a lot about conversations I’ve had with musicians about the nature and practice of musical creativity. Like entrepreneur-ed, the value of music education has always been under suspicion by practically everyone — by composers, performers, administrators, politicians, parents, kids, the media, the general public, and so on. Having no real dominant and vocal “support groups” outside of itself, sometimes it’s a wonder how it even exists to begin with! But despite the cuts that have been made, music-ed is still the most reliable means for musicians to earn a living due to its steady support from both the public and private sectors, and will continue to be so for quite some time. I think there’s a widely acknowledged, but largely unspoken, importance that underlies these practices, because people see it as an investment towards a better tomorrow.

Seemed like a good idea...at the time, anyway.

Entrepreneurial “innateness” is essentially the assertion that entrepreneurs are genius types that are somehow separated (or elevated) from the rest of society. This conception of the genius-as-visionary has fueled Western society since the days of Kant, and shows no signs of stopping any time soon. If entrepreneurship is indeed an art and not a skill, then I suspect that the discussion regarding these issues in entrepreneurship will come to closely resemble ones done in the art world, particularly in the areas of music and music composition. (e.g. “composer as a genius”)

Because I tend to see the world as a malleable one, I usually have trouble buying into arguments that assert that certain subjects are inherently innate and are not subject to change. Even in the “hard” sciences such as physics where “constants” are used to drive the research process (laws, properties, elements), our conceptual understandings of them are always under revision. During Aristotle’s time, science believed that the world consisted of five “elements” — Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Aether. Since then, we’ve managed to break down these ideas into greater specifics — atoms, molecules, electricity, energy, and so on — giving humanity greater power to understand and harness these phenomena.

For a long time, people considered atoms to be the lowest common denominator (i.e. The Periodic Table) — that is, until nuclear and quantum physics came along and showed that these “elements” could be broken down further and rearranged in its own way if so desired. With that comes the realization that there’s nothing permanent or innate about the world that we live in, and if there is in fact a “fundamentality” to all of it we’re not even remotely close to knowing what that is or what that might look like.

At any given point, everything we know as of yet could suddenly be wrong. Everything could change. Even in the world of science. If even physics can’t achieve perfect consistency, how can the assertion be made that there’s anything “innate” about the process of entrepreneurship and creativity in general?

The poster boy for musical "genius", W.A. Mozart.

I do believe that creativity “can be taught” to people to a certain extent, given the right motivations and available resources. The catch is the latter part of the sentence, where there’s no real way for educators to bestow the creative impulse onto their students no matter how good of a teacher they might be. I’ve seen assignments and projects that “forced” students into coming up with new ideas on the fly, but if they’re not enjoying themselves while doing it then they’re not likely to pursue it any further after the class is done. After having failed to inspire a number of people to get interested in the acts of composition or improvisation, my perspective has somewhat moved closer to Valigursky’s one — while some people are eager to get into the loop of things as quickly as possible, others simply aren’t “meant” to take on the work and responsibilities that come with generating, building, and executing a creative idea.

The “predisposition” toward creative endeavors, however, has largely to do with what’s happening around the student, which includes their upbringing, the people they spend their time with, and what they believe to be important in life. When these conditions change, so does their motivations and interests, which can cause people to become more, or sometimes less, creative. It is not a coincidence, for example, that the interest in entrepreneurship has risen at the same time the economy was in a downturn, and these developments have helped to “produce” people who’re more likely to become practitioners of the activity. So personalities are malleable and people can change, but the motivations of doing so are created outside — not inside — of the classroom. School can be a life-changing experience for many, but the institution’s relationship with the student is never so intimate that it can shape their morals and values for them in such a short amount of time.

What the teacher needs to do, for the most part, is to let go of the idea that they have any control over what the students will do in the long run. Thinking back on my own experiences, the best teachers that I had were the ones who did this for me and the are among those I remember and respect the most.

Potential Benefits of Entrepreneurship Education

By its nature, creativity tends to resist categorization, since its primary intent is to create something new and unforeseen. The “college dropout” stories of Jobs, Gates, and Zuckerberg may strike a chord with a lot of artists out there, many of whom are similarly self-taught and have tended not to fit into the academic system very well» . It seems counter-intuitive, then, to expect creativity and innovation to come out of the classroom, where its primary purpose is to turn intellectual energy into a formal process.

NFTE: Currently one of the largest Entrepreneurship Educational organizations.

But in a lot of ways, that’s what entrepreneurship really is about — turning far-fetched, non-existent, unrealistic ideas into practical, tangible, real products — something, for a lack of a better word, with more form. As with the art world, there’s a misconception floating around in the startup community that entrepreneurs are people who “break all of the rules” in order to do things “strictly in their own way”. Artists excel because they’re good at manipulating existing rules in order to achieve creative ends, not because they’re ignoring them or being contrarian for its own sake. In the real world, breaking all of the rules is likely to destroy relationships, get you sued, or in worse-case scenarios, land you in jail. So it’s not always a matter of just letting the artist “do whatever they want”. As the old saying goes, in order to break the rules you have to learn them first.

As theoretical frameworks in entrepreneurship begin to mature (Agile, Lean, etc.), the classroom will become more and more an attractive place to learn what these “rules” are, giving the student the opportunity to apply these ideas in settings where the negative effects of failure is minimal. If you’re indeed doing something that’s potentially disruptive, then you’ll know exactly why and how, instead of guessing or leaving things up to chance. Due to their extensive knowledge of their respective fields, academia excels at finding opportunities that are “new”, because they’re trained to have a library-level knowledge of what’s already been done before and are expected to contribute something original to the knowledge pool of humanity. In this way, research and entrepreneurship are things that can be said to be mutually beneficial, if there are interests that are in alignment.

The interesting thing about the “successful drop-out” stories is that they’re always the exception to the rule. And if you think about it carefully enough, even the exceptions were, at least for a little while, enrolled in a college system at one point in time because they had to be there first in order to drop out of it. While many of them would say that they were never particularly fond of schooling, you won’t find too many people expressing regret that they had the opportunity to be there. After all, most of them ended up finding their co-founders and partners during school, while even the ones who dropped out have said that they only did so because there was a tangible opportunity already waiting for them at their doorstep.

The Ivory Tower

When you’re in the midst of all of the action, it can sometimes be hard to get an objective, unbiased point of view. That’s why society has spent millions and billions of dollars erecting “ivory towers” to function as look-out points for scholars to observe and document the social, economic, and cultural changes that are happening around the world. It’s likely that the now-successful founders “saw” something during their stay at school — an opportunity that was to be taken advantage of immediately that couldn’t wait until they had the degree. But it would be hard to imagine them getting to where they were, had they not been there to begin with.

The "Ivory Tower". If only reality were as awesome as it is depicted here.

Another potential benefit, though seldom talked about for obvious reasons, is the student finding out that entrepreneurship is not what they want to do. After taking a class, some people realize that founding a company is not for them and they decide that they’re more suited at being employees of startups or larger, more established companies. In the music world, people report similar experiences after having taken classes in composition or improvisation, where they quickly find out whether or not they have a knack for it. But in the end, everyone gains a greater appreciation, and perhaps a little more empathy, in knowing what goes into the process itself.

The more I learn about entrepreneurship, the more I find out that I seem to fit the description of what makes for a good founder — I like the uncertainty that’s inherent in the creative process, like working with my own ideas, and I tend to thrive in environments where there exists a certain amount of chaos and unforeseen-ness. (Which is why I’m an improviser, not a traditional performer.) I also seem to have an unnaturally high tolerance for mistakes, rejection, blunt honesty, and outside apathy — and for the most part, am blissfully unaware of what it means to be discouraged. But I realize now that not everyone is like this, and the things I enjoy is not necessarily what others will want as part of their own life. As a teacher, however, I can at least clarify and illuminate the mechanics of what “works” — or at least, what has worked for me in my musical experiences. The more honest the better, because you don’t want to yank people’s chains by making promises that you can’t keep.

Academia isn’t the “real world”, so to speak, but it does certain things very well and can be made to serve the interests of aspiring entrepreneurs. Or entrepreneurs soon not-to-be. In either case, something is to be gained in the process, even (or especially if) the students decide not to pursue it later. In my experience sitting in these classes, teachers have always been upfront about the fact that many of people will decide, in the end, that it’s not for them. What they focus on are the processes and methods that have lead to successful examples, and the work that’s necessary in order to get there. When the path is made clear, the students can then decide for themselves whether or not that’s what they want.

There’s always a choice, after all.

Next Post: Potential Dangers/Pitfalls in Entrepreneurial-Ed

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(¶/♪) Ryan Tanaka - Scholarship, Music, Entrepreneurship

I’ve found that entrepreneurs are great people to have candid talks with — they’re honest, direct, won’t mislead or BS you, even in cases where it might be easier to do so.  In my experience, most artists and engineers are also similarly “direct”, but they have their own means of conveying this honesty, which is usually done through their work.  The two groups tend to “express” different things (emotions/meaning/purpose vs. function/structure/syntax) but the desire to clarify and organize their ideas into something outside of their own head tends to be very similar.  And these outputs, regardless if its a song or a mobile app, tells us something about the world that we live in — a metaphorical truth of sorts, if you will.

The desire to see their ideas “realized” is something that most people harbor to a certain degree, but some people take this a step further by making it part of their profession and livelihoods.  This phenomenon is more commonly known as the “creative impulse”, which is a trait that’s shared among all three groups.  (Entrepreneurs, artists, engineers.)

Master of Self-Promo: Snoop Dogg.

Since entrepreneurship is now becoming more and more a common path for people to take, there’s a lot of talk going on about the means and methods of “selling yourself” to the public.  For artists, the importance of doing so is relatively obvious since much of their work involves putting themselves in the public spotlight.   But these issues also become important for engineers and entrepreneurs as well, especially if they have ambitions of starting their own company or being involved in projects that require innovations and creative direction.  When you pitch to investors, customers, producers, audience members, share holders, or to the public, what are you going to say?  How do you plan on representing yourself, especially if you’re just starting out?

“Fake it ’til you make it!” was probably the most common advice that I got from almost all of the seasoned entrepreneurs that I’ve talked to so far.  For most artists and engineers, however, this mantra tends to initially illicit a negative response, and I was no exception.  For one, creative people have a tendency to be introverts, so self-promotion is something that doesn’t come naturally to most of them to begin with.  But even if you can get over that there’s also an ideological block as well: If they’re doing good work why should they have to learn to be “fake”?  We’ve all had some negative experiences dealing with posers or over-sellers that might have turned us off, or have been disappointed by advertisements that never quite lived up to their promise.  

Does this mean, then, that success can only be achieved by becoming “one of those” people?

Some people take this cynical point of view to heart (think Bernie Madoff) and earn a certain amount of success.  These examples are, however, exceptions to the rule. And the rewards that come from these endeavors are also temporary, because a house built on cynicism always collapses on itself over time when it becomes consumed by its own pessimism and deception. (Think Bernie Madoff).  Sustainable business practices are based on trust and fairness, which are the only means of getting people to come back willingly in the long term.

The recent collapse of the banking system is another good example of what happens when trust becomes broken — the financial institutions involved were large enough to weather the impact of the mistakes that they’ve made, but in the process ended up tarnishing the reputation of their profession for decades to come.  If banking establishments were startup companies, they would have been put out of business a long, long time ago.

In light of all of this, it might seem like a contradiction, then, for entrepreneurs to advise the “fake it ’til you make it” line to beginners and upstarts, where transparency is most needed.  But this adage isn’t meant to be literal, nor it is an endorsement for entrepreneurs to outright lie — it’s a phrase used to give inspiration to those looking to try something new or different in their lives. For people who have the “creative impulse”, this desire for newness is constant and unending, because change is something that’s inherent to the process of creativity in itself.

If you can’t get experience without a job and can’t get a job without experience, where do you start?  You start by “faking” it — do it a few times, give yourself the title, sell it to people, then follow up based on the promises that you’ve made.  Independent artists and startup companies have to create their reputation from the ground up, which requires them to “stretch” the truth a little bit before they can get into the loop of things.  But as long as the claims made are followed up with action, no-one ends up noticing, and nobody is made into a liar. The real difficulty lies in maintaining a level of consistency in what you’re saying vs. what you’re doing.

I attended a lecture on branding strategies once where Hollywood icon “Mr. T” was used as an example of this concept done well.  You can’t go to school or get “certified” in what he does as a career, which is, simply to be Mr. T.  His identity is so strong because he never strays from character and people remember him because they know exactly what he stands for and what he represents.  But his image — the gold chains, tattered jeans, funky hair styles — would be nothing more than fashion if he didn’t have the discipline and sense of responsibility to follow-up on it.  The lecturer explained that Mr. T “made a promise to the world, and everyday, when he gets up in the morning until he goes to bed, he follows through on that promise”.  He has been doing this since he was pioneering the body-guarding industry, all the way up until he became an A-list movie star and beyond, where he now seems to be making a comeback again.

A similar thing could be said about Chuck Norris, who’s now also enjoying a similar benefit of having become an internet celebrity. To some extent, they might have been lucky that the world shifted in their favor, but it’s not by accident that these people are now thriving in the new market.

All of the examples mentioned above (Snoop Dogg, Mr. T, Chuck Norris) can all be considered identities that are more or less “authentic”. Whether you agree or not with what they’re doing is one thing, but you at least know what they stand for, what they’re good at, and what they can do for you. And should the need arise, they’ll be the first person that people call when they need something done in their “style”. Though its probably not necessary for most people to take things as far as they do, startups and musicians can learn a lot about branding strategies by closely observing what Hollywood celebrities have managed to accomplish in their own careers.

Regardless if you love or hate her, everyone knows who she is.

The real challenge is, however, being able to come through on the promises that you’ve made as a company/band/artist to the rest of the world and being consistent. Lady Gaga “reinventing” herself after every week might seem erratic, but it’s done in such a way that you always know that it's her» behind all of the glitz. So it’s not a dichotomy between “being fake” and “being yourself”, but one of consistency and the ability to follow up on your word. If not, trust will erode and audiences will start losing the positive correlations that they’ve begun to associate with your product/service.

Most of this takes a lot of sustained effort, so unless you have your heart into it all the way, it’s very difficult to maintain the momentum and motivation needed to do this day in and day out. How do the celebrities do it? If you look at the biographies of the people mentioned above, you’ll see that the vast majority of them have some kind of background or history that caused them to take interest in the things that they do now. So in a lot of ways, their “characters” are really just extensions of their personality and they’re relaying a message that they already live by. If being yourself becomes your job, then your job won’t seem like work anymore.

Entrepreneurs and engineers usually have different types of goals that they want to accomplish, but the desire to “find themselves” in this way I’ve found to be very similar to what artists do in their own line of work. Many people try to create branding strategies through imitation or consultation, and/or create personas based on what they think is “interesting” to people. But in the long run, these efforts always fail, because it’s inauthentic. The solution is not to contrive a persona, but to find something interesting about yourself and tie it to what you do as a professional. (And everyone has at least a few of those, if they look hard enough.) If you believe in it enough, no-one will perceive you as being “fake”, even if you’re in unfamiliar territory.

So the “fake it ’til you make it” line I’ve come to see as less of a directive but but more of a challenge — was I willing to stick my neck out into the general public and make promises that I may or may not be able to deliver? I think that the initial resistance I had to the idea had more to do with wanting to avoid the responsibility and work that came with it, more than anything. But so far it seems to be working — no overnight success stories yet, but I’m able to at least see small, incremental changes toward what seems like a positive direction.

How do you interpret the “fake it til’ you make it” phrase yourself? I’ve found that everyone has different ideas about what this is supposed to mean.

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(¶/♪) Ryan Tanaka - Scholarship, Music, Entrepreneurship

Since it seems to be my most popular topic right now, I moved all of my musicology/entrepreneurship posts into its own “music entrepreneurship” category. You can check out the full list in the Archives by Category page.

Hollywood vs Silicon Valley

Online Piracy: Since hearing that incubators and accelerators were coming into Los Angeles with the intention of getting into the media and entertainment industries, I’ve been keeping a close eye out for startup companies that had founders who had backgrounds in music or art who were looking into taking advantage of these upcoming trends.  Never say never, but it seems unlikely that anyone is going to be able to upstage the big players in content distribution any time soon (YouTube, SoundCloud, Pandora, Grooveshark, etc.) so I’ve focused most of my research in the areas of content creation. People who are interested in this angle are largely in the minority right now, but I expect these numbers will grow in upcoming years because it plays into the strengths and talents that the city has to offer.

Los Angeles at Night

Startup companies that combines the technical skills of the engineer with the creativity of an artist will have a very high likelihood of producing something groundbreaking or revolutionary — at least, that’s what investors seem to be banking on when they look at LA as the next possible “Silicon Valley”. In a lot of ways this city is the ideal place to do this because of its highly creative and educated population base.  There’s a lot of talent to choose from, and a lot of them are currently looking for work. LA also houses Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Jet Propulsion Lab, as well as being the home of the entertainment capital of the world, Hollywood, which are monuments of the ingenuity and perseverance of its people.

During the next few years there will be literally hundreds of startup companies forming as a result of millions of dollars currently being poured into the LA ecosystem, which will create a lot of opportunities, as well as challenges, for both artists and engineers alike. Some people jokingly characterize the recent SOPA/PIPA protests as a “nerds vs. hippies” issue — maybe there’s some truth behind that to a certain extent, but it would be a mistake to think that these turn of events happened by accident or came about as a result of one isolated incident. The tensions between Silicon Valley and Hollywood have been brewing for years, and now that they’re starting to encroach on each other’s turf things are likely to heat up even further.

The two industries need each other more than ever now, but if animosities between them continue to rise, this could impede progress in areas related to media/entertainment related entrepreneurial practices.  Being a former-engineer-turned-musician, I have some experiences traversing between the two fields, as well as some experience working with programmers in my previous positions of employment.  So I’d like to dedicate the next couple of entries to the means and methods of arriving at fruitful middle-grounds between each discipline: consider it a pre-emptive diplomacy in regards to issues that are likely to surface in the upcoming years ahead.

Nerds vs Hippies: Don’t Tread On Me — Issues of Online Piracy

The most pressing topic between the two camps right now is regarding online piracy issues, which has become highly public as of the late.  The issue has now been framed as a “Hollywood vs Silicon Valley” thing in many media sources at this point.

National Public Radio (NPR) recently did a radio broadcast on the differences that Silicon Valley and Hollywood have regarding online piracy, which unfortunately came to highlight how wide the gaps between the two cultures have become in recent years.  On one hand, you have tech people like Tim O’Reilly arguing the point that piracy has been a good thing for him and that people who “stole” his product were more likely to pay for it in the long run. On the other side, you had a testimonial by Harvard law-school-graduate-turned-indie-filmmaker Tim Chey, who said that the people at The Pirate Bay “made him cry” when they wouldn’t take his movie off of their site.  (Even though he asked nicely!) As is, putting these two people in the same room and telling them to come up with something innovative would inevitably lead to a disastrous outcome.

Slogan from a recent anti-piracy campaign put out by the media industry, which can be found on most modern DVDs. (Click on picture to jump to the video.)

In NPR’s portrayal of the issue, it would seem that everyone has already resigned to the idea that piracy is something that’s beyond our control and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.  In reality, however, you won’t find too many people in either sector who think backing down is the answer — in recent years both sides have escalated their attempts at dealing with the problem, using the tactics they know best: technology and culture.

For over a decade now, Hollywood has framed online piracy as a moral issue, attempting to appeal to people’s sense of duty and personal responsibility in order to get them to willingly stop.  In recent years the effectiveness of this campaign has come into question, as DVD and record sales continue to shrink despite their best efforts at reaching out to the public.  Having lost its patience, Hollywood now wants to do it “old world” style — find the perpetrators who wronged filmmakers like Chey and bring them to justice through the rule of law.  SOPA and PIPA were in many ways this mentality turned into legislation.

Though its efforts tend to be less publicized, Silicon Valley is no stranger to dealing with pirates either.  Almost every day, high profile websites are under attack by hackers who’re looking to take advantage of loop-holes and vulnerabilities that exist on their security systems.  The Valley takes a fundamentally different approach from Hollywood, however — their work tends to focus on structural changes that lead to “permanent” solutions.  If hackers manage to figure out a way how to break something on someone’s computer, for example, programmers will simply write that possibility out of the code.  In a similar vein, their solution to content piracy tends to be a systematic one: if you make it considerably easier for people to acquire content legally, the incentive to download illegal content will greatly diminish.  Having acquired a lot of experience dealing with online threats, programmers had come to see themselves as experts in dealing with computer-related security, and was more than a little miffed when Hollywood tried to pass legislation in those areas without their input.

Wikipedia’s “SOPA Blackout” page, which was launched on Jan 24, 2012.

If online piracy was something that happened in real life, Hollywood would be the cop investigating the crime scene, while Silicon Valley would be the person that installed the security system in your house.  The former wants to bring justice into the world, while the latter wants to ensure that the crime never happens to begin with. Which makes you feel safer? More importantly, which is more effective?

The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but they do appeal to different sides of people’s minds.  And Hollywood and Silicon Valley right now are vying for your support, trying to convince you of their point of view. The fact that TV stations have been cranking out season after season of detective shows is not a coincidence, and neither is the fact that the most popular video games out there tend to emphasize strategy and adaptation as important values for the player to have in order to “win” the game. There is a cultural war going on between the two industries at this point, and we’re all caught in the middle of it.

Stealing is Just a Word: Age is Not the Issue

As with many emotionally-charged issues, there is often a tendency to vilify opposing viewpoints through one-dimensional caricatures — on one hand, the media industry is currently run by corrupt/incompetent fat-cats who’re desperately trying to hold onto power, while Silicon Valley are the enablers of the amoral and self-centered youth culture whose entitlement complex leads them to believe that everything should be immediate and free. The media tends to focus on these cultural differences, often painting the divergences between the two as a generational problem. (Makes for a good story: Gen X, Gen Y, Millennials, etc.) When the internet first came to life during the 90s, many people in Hollywood thought it would just be a passing fad — it was something that kids would do when they’re young, but eventually abandon it after they got older.

Equal Access = Communism

Given that the tech industry was still a fairly new thing at the time, this type of speculation might have, at one point, made a lot of sense. But things obviously didn’t turn out that way — even as people in the tech industry start to earn a grey hair or two, the two sectors still continue to remain polarized in regard to political and economic issues. Why? It’s because the issue of online piracy never had anything to do with age or maturity to begin with. The disagreements are philosophical and ideological, rather than something that fixes itself over time. Efforts at reconciliation will have to focus primarily on these subjects, because if the problem is framed as a generational one there’s not much chance that anyone would be able to find any common ground.

In a nutshell, the disagreement between Hollywood and Silicon Valley arose out of two different takes on one simple question: In digital space, what does “stealing” really mean?

In NPR’s coverage of the issue, Gavin Polone argues that “a movie or a television show or a song or a book is actually someone’s property.”  This assertion echos the rhetoric that anti-piracy campaigns (like the video above) have traditionally used in order to make it’s point: that downloading music and movies online is akin to stealing a car, a purse, or TV from someone else.  Thus Hollywood feels that people should be subject to the same types of criminal prosecutions that would normally be applied in other areas of life.

Critics of this approach argue that this methodology would effectively label millions and millions of Americans as being a “criminal”, giving the industry free-reign to prosecute almost anyone and everyone they see fit.  The industry claims that they’ll only be persecuting “obviously guilty” parties, but given the relatively unfavorable opinion that people tend to have of the media in general, many seem unwilling to give them this benefit of the doubt.

Even if (the now very unpopular) organizations such as Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) could somehow re-establish their credibility, many have questioned whether or not anti-piracy laws would have any lasting effect to begin with.  Opponents cite historical trends and examples pointing in the direction that these types of legislations tend to do more harm than good because banning an every-day activity (like jaywalking) is impossible to enforce, which raises people’s sense of paranoia without solving the actual problem.

These points/counter-points are, however, usually done from a political standpoint.  The real crux of the issue lies in the content itself, where the act of “stealing” actually takes place.  In the real world, taking someone’s car without their permission would deprive them of the opportunity to use their property any further, thus the act gets labelled as a crime.  In the digital world, however, downloading a movie or a song simply results in an additional copy for the end-user, and nothing is technically “lost” by either parties.  From the tech industry’s point of view, this constitutes a win-win scenario for both the producer and the consumer, so many of them are left wondering why would anybody go out of their way to criminalize such a “wonderful” thing.

If you know what this means, you're probably guilty.

There is a good reason for this, however.  Consciously or sub-consciously, Hollywood has known about esteem dilution, i.e. the more popular something becomes, the quicker it loses its value due to its widespread abundance.

This is a phenomenon that has existed since the beginning of the mass produced market, dating all the way back to the printing press.  Unlike the food, commodities, and manufacturing industries, businesses that rely on intellectual property tend to be less bounded by limitations of physical resources.  The price of duplicating a book or CD/DVD is very cheap — digital downloads on the internet even cheaper, to the point where the costs of doing so have now become almost negligible.

This process might seem like a positive thing on the surface, but it has a fatal flaw: when a product’s supply has the potential to overwhelmingly exceed its demand, it devalues itself through its own abundance.  In the world of classical economics, the theoretical possibility that a film/song could be duplicated endlessly (i.e. infinite supply) automatically creates the implication that any given idea-based product is, or at least eventually will be, worth almost nothing. And the idea that anything and everything the industry creates from this point on will be pirated into oblivion has a tendency to keep many producers and artists awake at night as they think about their future in the long term.

Hollywood has traditionally dealt with the problem by releasing its content gradually and in stages — films get released in theaters first, then onto records after it loses its hype, then eventually onto TV and other types of free broadcasts when sales from the previous efforts start to dwindle.  This ritual is one that most of us are familiar with, and at one point was the norm because the model had been proven to work for the industry for a very long time. The internet, however, crippled Hollywood’s ability to control their supply chain in these ways, since customers now have the power to duplicate content from the comfort of their own homes. In the new world, the “artificial scarcity” model can no longer said to be a viable one.

Online Piracy Solutions

Google has recently been hiring people from Hollywood in order to learn from their expertise working in the content production business — something that Silicon Valley has largely steered away from until fairly recently. Tech companies have historically been very good at creating platforms for people to share their content (social media, networking systems, databases) but currently lack the experience and methodologies of how art is actually made. Hollywood, on the other hand, could probably stand to benefit from the expertise that the Valley has developed around online security and web-based business practices in order to stay competitive in the upcoming years.

IBM Cloud Computing Picture

I think that in the long run, the two sides are probably going to find that they have more in common than they’d like to admit — both work in highly competitive markets, require constant innovation in order to stay ahead of the curve, and as recent happenings have shown, are both heavily invested in issues of intellectual property rights. Their efforts are currently directed at different types of products which leads to different types of mentalities, but from a pragmatic standpoint there’s actually no reason why these two forces can’t be made to work together.

Right now there’s a sense of incongruity that can be felt between the content that we view and the devices that we use to get them, because neither sides are taking full advantage of the potential that each medium has to offer. We can theoretically get “everything” now because of the internet and its distribution channels, but judging by what you might see on comment sections on any given website, people still don’t seem to be happy with what’s available to them. Many still harbor respect for Hollywood’s ability to produce high-quality content, but a lot of them share the tech industry’s frustrations when it comes to how it’s being distributed. Los Angeles-based startups now have the greatest opportunity to dive into these gaps that are currently waiting to be filled. (With awesomeness.)

While the concepts presented above might sound very abstract, these issues are guaranteed to surface when decisions have to made regarding a project’s overall goal. In order to avoid getting caught off guard, all angles must be considered — distribution, marketing, technical — and last but not least, your plan on how you’ll be interacting with your customer base. Regardless which approach you decide to take, being aware of these philosophical vantage points should allow you to better understand where you are, where people are “coming from”, and where things need to go.

Currently there is a trend in both industries for people to move towards a more “service” oriented approach, since these methodologies tend to be more resistant to piracy and unauthorized duplication. For musicians this simply means putting a greater emphasis on “live performance” experiences, since that’s something that can be said to be irreplaceable. Sure, someone might sneak in their phone and upload it on YouTube the next day, but it’s never going to be quite the same as actually being there.

Software companies, on the other hand, have been moving towards “cloud-based” software and subscription-based revenue streams in order to stay afloat. Google is the prime example of this done well — they offer most of their services for free, then acquire their income through advertising revenues. In many respects, this is no different than how income is earned on TV and radio. Whether on the TV or online, it’s all about giving people a pleasurable “experience” (for free) while earning their paycheck through business sponsorships. It’s no wonder that a lot of programmers consider themselves to be performance artists, when asked about in private.

Graph: Time Spent Watching TV

Like many performance artworks, service-based approaches have no definite end-points, and run on the idea that the process is continual and evolving. The upside to this development is that it places a greater emphasis on the person creating the product, rather than the product itself. So artists and programmers who manage to prove themselves in their fields (or online) are more likely to gain recognition for future and upcoming projects. I once had a conversation with my brother (who’s a programmer) about whether or not he was worried about people stealing his code when he releases it into the public. Without hesitation, he said no — since there’s no way that any one software can serve everyone’s needs, there will always be a demand for programmers who can tailor their software toward specific ends. Even while working on his current projects, he’s already thinking about what to do next.

Likewise, there will always be a need and demand for new music, no matter how far things progress. In a world where things are constantly changing, music helps us acquire meaning, purpose, and sense of calm that comes out of having an explanation of what’s happening around us. As change becomes faster, the public will demand more music in order to keep up with society’s pace. Recent studies seem to reflect that this is in fact true. The entertainment industry may currently be in turmoil, but the possibilities for the future are now greater than it has ever been before. And the focus will be on the people making the product, rather than on the object itself.

Some might say that if you don’t “do it yourself” there’s no way for these groups to understand each other, but personally I don’t think there’s a necessity for artists to learn how to program or for programmers to become “artists” in the traditional sense of the word. Many software companies were founded by people whos primary work was not to write lines of code. But they knew enough about the subject — or at least spent enough time listening to the needs of their partners — in order to make decisions that worked from both vantage points. This is a skill that’s likely to come in handy in a lot of different areas of work, especially if you’re living in the LA area.

Follow me on twitter! Thx.

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(¶/♪) Ryan Tanaka - Scholarship, Music, Entrepreneurship

Pain Points: Now that a considerable amount of investment money is coming into the Los Angeles ecosystem, there’s been a lot of talk about how these changes might come to effect the music and entertainment industries in the years to come. Judging by the critical stance that the tech industry tends to take of traditional media practices, it seems pretty clear that a lot of investors are currently seeking to create platforms that will directly compete against the long-time arts and entertainment incumbent: Hollywood.

Pasadena, CA-based incubator IdeaLab and Los Angeles-based accelerator Amplify. Photo Courtesy of Inc.com, article written by Christina Desmarias

The SOPA/PIPA (Stop Online Piracy Act/Protect IP Act) debacle in many ways can be said to be part of an ongoing effort by the industry to maintain their monopoly on cultural production, but it’s fairly clear by now that the recording industry, at least in its traditional forms, is gradually dying away. The influx of investment and startup talent coming into Los Angeles will likely be very disruptive, turning traditional media practices on its head — even with all of the changes that technology has already made on the music world, what we’ve seen so far is likely to be only the tip of the iceburg.

For most musicians, these developments should work mostly to their advantage: more competition between business entities usually lead to more competitive hiring rates, since it drives up demand for talent who can contribute to ongoing and up-and-coming projects. In the information age, innovation and creativity are highly sought after traits — art and entrepreneurship have conceptually been thought of as two separate things, but there’s enough parallels and common interests between the two mindsets to make a successful merge between the two something very plausible. Not only is it plausible, but it’s now becoming a very tangible and realistic path to take.

But these changes are not likely to come easy. In a recent blog post, Compromise vs. Problem Solving, entrepreneur and investor Brad Feld writes:

My brain is an engineers brain. I’m focused on learning and solving problems. Over the past few years I’ve been completely baffled by my experience interacting with politicians and their staffers. When I present a solution to a problem (e.g. the Startup Visa) I immediately watch a negotiation begin to ensue. Three years later, even non-controversial, obviously beneficial things like Startup Visa are still stuck in a discussion. [...]

This generated a breakthrough insight for me. I’ve been increasingly frustrated with politics and public policy discussions that I’ve been part of. It’s because I’m in a problem solving mode. While some of the folks I’m interacting with are also in this mode (which causes me to stay engaged), many are in a compromise mode. They don’t care whether or not we actually solve the root cause problem – they just have an agenda that they want to get into the mix legislatively and are negotiating for it with the goal of reaching a compromise.

Even if you’re unfamiliar with the issues surrounding the Startup Visa, Feld’s remark epitomizes a lot of what the entrepreneurial mindset is about: problem-solving, “actionable” ideas, usefulness, and value-creation. The art world, on the other hand, moved away from these utilitarian values in the latter half the the 20th century in favor of a “purer” aesthetic philosophy. (e.g. art for art’s sake, personal expression, etc.) While this a gross oversimplification of the issue, there’s enough of a gap between the two streams right now that it might pose some problems for future art and entertainment related ventures if it’s not addressed early on in the process.

From the website of

The good news is that these gaps are just that: gaps. In the upcoming years more musicians will be learning and trying their hand at entrepreneurial methods, while founders in the entertainment/media sector will be having to work much more intimately with artists than they have in the past. There might be some bad blood between Silicon Valley and Hollywood at the moment, but in startup ventures there are plenty of opportunities to make new connections with a fresh and forward-looking mindset.

In a lot of ways, investors are looking to bring in the culture of entrepreneurship — something that served Silicon Valley so well during the last couple of decades — into Los Angeles at this point in time. Cultural clashes seem inevitable, but is likely to be a good thing for the city in the long run. The art and entertainment industries are currently in dire need of innovation, while the tech industry stands a lot to gain from learning about how culture works and how it’s created. It may be useful now to start a dialogue between the two, and maybe arrive at some sort of compromise in how things get done. Either way, a little more clarity probably couldn’t hurt.

I’m lucky in that I was able to work on creative projects with engineers in the past, and my brother also happens to be a very proficient programmer. A lot of the ideas and suggestions below comes out of my experiences working with him and others with music-related projects, so hopefully some of this information might be of some use to others.

Musical Pain Points

When coming up with product ideas, entrepreneurs train themselves to identify “pain points” in customers (i.e. real problems that people face in day to day life), then attempt to come up with innovative solutions to remedy them. These problems can range from minor annoyances (social media improvements, better cell-phone messaging) to serious concerns (security, health), and can be found in virtually every part of society. The natural inclination of the entrepreneur would be to come up with a utilitarian solution (bigger, faster, cheaper, more efficient, etc.) and “prove” to investors and customers that it can be made to work. When these assumptions are proven in front of an audience, this creates a “need” for people to have it, which naturally leads to the creation of paying customers. This method has a long track record of working very well in certain areas of business and is very appropriate for some types of startup companies.

Music, however, cannot be treated in the same way. Orchestras don’t necessarily fair better than solo acts, faster musics aren’t always better than slower ones, and initial pricing usually has no correlation to how well a piece of music is going to fair in the long run. Technology-based media companies (YouTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, etc.) have managed to revolutionize how content is received by the general public, but most of them have stopped shy of actually producing content in themselves.

From

It’s possible to measure the efficiency of media websites by its user-numbers, delivery time, revenue/expenses, and so on. These numbers have the kind of specificity that engineers like to see, which may partly explain why a lot of effort has been put in those types of ventures in the last couple of years. But an honest look at the situation would say that these companies are largely in the business of content delivery and distribution, rather than production. In Los Angeles there’s an unique opportunity for startup companies to get involved in both, utilizing the talent that already exists here in the city.

What are the “pain points” in creating music, however? Can music be said to be “solving a problem” in some way that makes people “need” them?

Unlike say, food, shelter, or water, though, none of us technically “need” music in order to survive. Yet in the entire history of humanity there has never been a culture or society that didn’t have an active musical community in some shape or form. Somewhere within this phenomenon lies the answer to what musical “needs” are, and I think that these are the types of questions that the startup community will be asking themselves when they start to get their hands dirty in the messy process of content creation.

As a starting point, we can look at a few common places where music can be found:

Community Events Private Events Business Use Concerts Recordings Psychology Education Research/Experimental

Religious, Corporate, Interest-Based, Community-Based, Political Weddings, Birthdays, etc. Background Music, Commercials, Presentations, etc. Bars, Auditoriums, Concert Halls, Cafes, etc. Soundtracks (Film/TV, Video Games), CDs/MP3s/Vinyl Music Therapy, Music “Healing” Procedures Instrumental Lessons, Music Appreciation Universities/Colleges, Government Institutions

Most working musicians will at least have had some experiences working within most, if not all of these mediums in some way or another. Professional freelancers have the ability to curb their personal tastes when needed, if the gig requires them to play something that they have no personal connection with. But startup projects require more than hired guns — the artist needs to believe in the project itself in order for their talents to reach its full potential. Incidentally, this level of vigor are how “great performances” are created: there’s something unmistakable and unforgettable when action and ideas are in perfect alignment, and this type of intensity will often overshadow any technical errors that can be found in its execution.

For startup companies interested in breaking into the industry, everything on the list above constitute viable options toward the creation of innovative business models. Probably due to the glamorization that Hollywood portrays of its lifestyle, however, there’s a tendency for a lot of people to focus only on giving concerts and making recordings. But they’re by no means the only way to do it. Alternative models often have opportunities to stand out that may not be possible in already saturated markets, and in many cases may prove to be more fruitful in the long run.

On a personal level, I’d like to see people pay more attention to these other options, especially in the areas of research and education where there exists a strong community of people who’re highly passionate about their work. Expanding the market into areas outside of the recording industry can help make musicianship a more viable and realistic career path for many.

Digging Deeper Into Content Creation, Customer Development

The chart above is a list of possible business models that revolve around the idea of music. But so far we haven’t even touched on the idea of content creation, because that would involve coming up with an explanation of the origins of creativity and what makes us enjoy the things that we do. These are issues that have been debated since the beginning of time and many, many, things have been written about it by scholars, philosophers, and scientists throughout the ages. All of them have been more or less inconclusive, or tentative, at best.

This is an example of what "research music" looks like. This used to be my main area of focus.

This is the Pandora’s Box that nobody in the tech industry has wanted to touch so far, because by its nature the issue a very difficult subject to talk about. And the utilitarian mind of the engineer often has trouble understanding or applying ideas that come from these discussions because a lot of it will initially seem counter-intuitive or contradictory. Sites like Google and YouTube manage to avoid the box by passing on the responsibility of content creation to others — either Hollywood, advertising agencies, or the users themselves. I’m assuming, though, that at least a few music startups that originate in Los Angeles will probably want to get into the business of content creation. These projects will have a higher chance of creating something groundbreaking, precisely because its more difficult and will be attempted less often.

Music startups in LA will have its unique challenges because it involves reconciling three cultures that have in recent history moved in opposite directions from one another: content production, content distribution, and the ideas of the individual artists themselves. Content will vary wildly from group to group depending on how it’s organized and the people who are involved with the process. Founders will also have to come up with answers to age-old philosophical questions that are more or less unanswerable, like “why does humanity continue to make music?” or “what does music tell us about the world and ourselves?”. If the last few sentences inspire rather than discourage you, you’re probably an entrepreneurial-type (or a just a plain-ol’ crazy person) that might be up for the challenge. You won’t find “the” answer to these questions, but the answers you come up with will end up defining what you, your company, and your brand is about, so they’re questions worth giving some serious thought.

Going back to the idea of “pain points”, people instinctively know is that life can sometimes be difficult, and that music is one medium we use in order to “cope” with various situations. It’s one of the main reasons why music is here to stay, even if it has never been considered an “essential” good. Here are a couple of examples that I’ve heard from customers regarding how music has “helped” them in some way:

- It helps them get through the day, e.g. work.
- Inspired them to do something or stand up for something that they believed in.
- It helped them get through “tough times” – personal, professional or otherwise.
- Introduced them to people and places that they otherwise wouldn’t have found out on their own.
- Made them feel connected or a part of something greater than themselves.
- Stimulated their creativity, giving them additional insights into their own line of work.
- Seems to keep kids busy or off the streets.

As it stands now, translating musical language into plain English is a highly specialized skill that only a handful of people (musicologists, music critics) receive formal training for. Most customers probably aren’t going give too many details beyond these generic descriptions because they’re not likely to have too much experience describing their musical preferences like the former professions do. Music also tends to be a very personal thing, so they may also be reluctant to reveal too much to you on initial contact. Because of this, it’s necessary for entrepreneurs to familiarize themselves with their customer base and figure out how to earn their trust. (As it is done in any other line of business.)

This is what my music looks like now: simpler, easier to play, easier to understand. This piece will get performed some time later this year.

Even with their trust earned, the subject is still a very difficult topic to talk about, so there are plenty of opportunities for things to go awry during the customer development process. If these discussions aren’t framed in the right way the entrepreneur is unlikely to get the level of specificity that they need in order to better guide their experimentations. I’ve seen really bizarre questionnaires that ask people things like “does this artwork make you feel happy/angry/sad?” or “on a scale of 1 to 10, how ‘emotional’ does this make you feel?” and so on, even though they don’t really reveal anything useful about the product or the effects that it has on its users.

On the other hand, when asked for what kind of music they would like to see made, most people will probably give you something like “good”, “catchy”, “cool/rad” — none of which are particularly helpful for the musician during the creative process. When musicians talk to people who don’t have any musical training, the conversation often resembles two people from different planets trying to have a meaningful dialogue with one another, and a lot of the content that you might see out there are a result of these awkward conversations. If the music sounds awkward or forced, there’s a good chance that the conversations people were having behind the scenes were like that as well.

So it’s largely up to the entrepreneur to figure out what people are trying to “get at”, using their knowledge of music theory/history/culture/science/psychology at their disposal. Here’s where customer development strategies can come in handy: observe what they do, not what they say. If you’re paying attention to people’s reactions, it’s usually pretty obvious whether or not they’re excited about something or not. But it may take more than one try…maybe a couple, or maybe 50. This method usually tends to yield better results than simply having people fill out survey forms.

Digging even deeper, most artworks can be said to fall in between the spectrum of two main categories: escapism and realism.

Nyan Cat, for instance, is an example of an escapist work. Nobody really knows why its there, why it exists, or where it came from, but they enjoy it precisely because it lets them think of something outside of their day-to-day existence. People are often surprised by the amount of cheery and happy songs that come out difficult situations (economic depressions, times of war) but these works are made precisely because it provides a contrast to the things that are actually happening around them.

On the other hand, the recent What People Think I Do/What I Really Do meme is an example of an art form strongly rooted in the idea of realism. People look at them, identify with what’s going on, and enjoy them because it says something about themselves or the world. The common phrase you’ll hear around these pictures are: “so true”.

So true.

In truth, all artworks contain a little bit of both so they’re not mutually exclusive, even though they are contradictory. (This part of the issue is where a lot of engineers have trouble wrapping their head around, since they’re trained to eliminate and remove contradictions in their work.) The violence that can be found in a lot of video games, for example, is not “real”, but can be said to be a reflection and commentary on the happenings and events around the globe through the use of representation and metaphor. Escapism allows for a temporary getaway from the happenings of the world, while realism allows people to “free” themselves from the truth by directly confronting what’s there. (The truth will “set you free”, so to speak.) The reason why these games are so popular isn’t by accident — it provides for a powerful experience because it has the ability to appeal to both sides of the spectrum at the same time.

Talented artists have the ability to pull off either or both at the same time, but in most cases will come to prefer one direction over another. (I tend to be more adept at the “realism” approach since as a scholar, I’m trained to pursue “truths”. ) Audiences, too, will usually have a preference in regard what they want their music to “do” for them. Keeping this in mind can improve your chances at building a cohesive team, or finding clients/customers that might be interested in your line of work. There’s no magic formula to how these things work, but understanding creative ideas in these terms can help to narrow a project’s focus in order to move things forward.

In essence, if it’s left up in the air the customer is likely to expect this from you: everything. Entrepreneurs should be prepared to sharply define what they do so that they can avoid misplaced expectations and actually deliver on their promises. You don’t have to promise that you can solve all of your client’s problems — maybe just a few.

Anyone have any other ideas? I can only scratch surfaces in one blog post, but there’s enough interest/responses in this topic, I’ll write more. Let’s keep the discussion going!

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(¶/♪) Ryan Tanaka - Scholarship, Music, Entrepreneurship