Music and Digital Industries
fog. He never imagined The Archers). Radio, as a raw technology, only became useful when creative people came along and found an audience- centric use for it. They were British, by the way. Their thinking was not based on technology,
it, used it as a means to a more interesting end.
it merely exploited This, intriguingly, is
the mindset of a writer or musician. When Keith Richards changed his tunings to create the sound he wanted, he wasn’t obsessed by the technology of his guitar, he was interested in the sound, the result, what it would do for his audience.
as we have here in Gateshead - of all places! - with Amazing, we need the economic firepower behind it to reach a big enough audience. Fortunately, it begins to look as if the Sand Hill Road folks have sussed that great ideas can be found outside Northern California - look at Kleiner’s recent deal with Berlin- based SoundCloud, and their investments in Shazam.
The technology was
merely a foundation for something more original.
Ah yes, British creativity. As Bob Lefsetz said, here in the UK we’re good at the genuinely original. We invented the Beatles, the BBC and the Worldwide Web, after all. Our box is smaller and less pressured, and we have nothing to lose - so we can think outside it more easily.
We still need the funding, of course. In my view we Europeans have to go to Palo Alto (or perhaps New York) for that. When we find something truly scalable,
This is fabulous news for us Brits. We can conceive and test our ideas in a small environment where it’s easier to be original. Unencumbered by the perceived wisdom of crowds, bereft of a peer group who all think in a similar way about the same alleged problem, we can take a blank sheet of paper and do something truly radical. Nobody will take us seriously at first, in fact they won’t even notice us, and their first reaction will be to assume that we’re no good, because we’re not in America. Therefore we can get traction whilst under the radar, before anyone thinks of copying our stuff. (This can produce pleasing results: Amazing has not yet raised its Series B, but has already broken even. Imagine!) Then, once
Where
will music go? Not into
Spotify, Pandora or iTunes. They’ll never discover the next big thing
the concept has been proven in the UK laboratory, we can seek scale with the biggest VCs in the world backing us.
This, I think, is why that New York conference was so dull, but also strangely inspiring. Here in the UK, creative entrepreneurs are not slaves to the algorithm. We’re part of a New Wave, the entrepreneurial equivalent of punk: creative anarchy in the UK.
47 entrepreneurcountry
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