I know, I know. You would expect a guy like me to make a comment like this.

On my way back from grabbing lunch with Jeff here, we started talking about a type of personality that’s become extinct in the record business: the swashbuckling entrepreneur, the big personality, the brash young trailblazer that’s loved and feared at the same time. You know, David Geffen. Clive Davis. Chris Blackwell. Richard Branson. Berry Gordy. Sam Phillips. Irving Azoff. Brian Epstein. The people that gave the world the modern record business.

Here’s a list of artists and music that, had it not been for these guys, most of us may have never heard of: Elvis Presley, the Sex Pistols, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, The Eagles, The Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, U2, Bob Marley, and the list goes on and on.

Like in sports, you need personalities for people to care (one reason why soccer in the States has not taken off). Big personalities attract attention, money, other creative types, and yes, they help bolster innovation and growth. Look at any business out there. The oil business had Rockefeller. The car business had Ford. The personal computer business had Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The search business has the Google Guys. And so on.

The famous management guru, Peter Drucker, says that if you want to gauge the prospects of an industry, take look at its ability to attract top-notch young talent. When I was a kid, everyone wanted to work for a record label. Can you honestly name one person under 20 that genuinely dreams of going into the record business?

If there is to be a record business in the next 10 years (heck, the next 5 years for that matter) the industry needs to desperately work to attract the very kinds of personalities that made it such a fun (and lucrative, and innovative) business for such a long time. We can talk about all the negatives of the industry but can anyone argue with the fact that our shared cultural history would be poorer had Sam Phillips not recorded Elvis, or Chris Blackwell passed on U2, or Berry Gordy ignored a young Michael Jackson that danced for him by his pool?

But I am not taking about the major label world. I am talking about the ability for artists tomorrow to make a living through recorded music. And for that to happen we need innovation. We need entrepreneurship. We need capital. We need risk takers. We need the next generation of big personalities.

Panos

I wrote the piece below as an op-ed for Mass High Tech.

When I started Sonicbids nearly eight years ago, the last place I expected I would get support from was City Hall. Granted, I was born and raised in Europe where government handouts are de rigueur; but as an entrepreneur in the early 2000’s it had never crossed my mind. (Obviously, today is another story.)

In the early days of Sonicbids I ran the company out of a place called Tech Space in the South End, and one day some City Hall people stopped by for (seemingly) one of those visits that civil servants tend to have: a lot of polite talking, attentive listening, smiling, etc. but of little tangible substance.

I remember saying to one of them “Here I am, taking all this risk to get a business going, working hard to employ people, paying Boston rents and Boston salaries, but what is City Hall doing for businesses like Sonicbids? I mean, if I have a barbershop, I can get assistance because I have a “storefront”; if I’m Gillette, I have everyone’s ear. Somehow Sonicbids, as an Internet business falls in no man’s land – but we are the future of this town”.

That forceful comment (along with, I guess, my persistent nature) ended up creating a chain of events that led to City Hall giving us a low-six-figure loan to help us hire three new people in 2005; and a few years later another loan that enabled us to build-out and move to our own 15,000 sq.ft. office space in the South End. (Sonicbids has grown from just about ten people in 2005 when we got the loan to nearly 50 today – with that early loan providing the critical tipping point.)

Just as importantly, it sparked a drive within me to engage and educate other entrepreneurs and public officials about the common sense and business-sense that public-private alliances make.

I’ve since co-founded a program, along with City Hall, called Boston Young Entrepreneurs to help young people make their business ideas a reality; I co-chaired a City-backed non-profit called CREATE Boston that helps bolster Boston’s creative economy; I am the chairman of the Presidential Advisory Council at my alma mater, Berklee College of Music; and I am also on the Board of Directors of a new initiative by Mayor Menino called Boston World Partnerships, that helps connect companies and professionals with Boston’s talent pool.

I do all this mostly because it’s my way of giving back to a city that I feel has given me a lot (To Whom Much is Given, Much is Expected). But I also do this because it just makes great business sense.

Through my involvement with these initiatives, I have gotten to meet all kinds of people that either directly or tangentially have helped Sonicbids grow in size and stature. I’ve met financiers and venture capitalists; journalists and writers; business partners and future employees; heck, even architects and furniture makers; all of which in one way or another have become part of the Sonicbids story and growth.

As tech entrepreneurs and business people we are trained to focus on the target – to keep the eye on the prize – and just go for it. We think of life outside of business and family as a distraction, a waste of time, something for someone else. We also tend to think that civic engagement is not suitable for people of our drive and ambition and capitalist leanings – it’s just a bit too mushy, too touchy feely, too darn lefty.

But the truth is that our businesses are only as good as the people they employ. And nothing shapes people more than the very communities they are a part of, the social systems that support them, the societies they form and sustain. And our businesses don’t function outside of these institutions  – they rather shape and are shaped by them and the quality of the people that govern and participate in them.

So go out there and get involved. It will not just make you feel great – it will also help you and you business grow.

Panos

I read a great story in the New York Times yesterday about how Obama’s understanding
of the Internet sealed his win in the US presidential election (”How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power, By David Carr).

Running for office is very much like being an entrepreneur or being in a band. You start out with nothing, you work relentlessly, and you tour the country and leverage all and available media to build an audience. Sad to observe, but historically, politicians have proven to be much more savvy about the uses of new media than the music business.

Franklin Roosevelt used radio to win, way before the music business learned to capitalize on it (back in the 20’s music publishers actually sued radio broadcasters); John Kennedy used television to reach a new group of voters, way before record labels learn to use MTV; Obama learned how to leverage social media, YouTube, and LinkedIn, all the while many in the music industry are still busy fighting them. Witness a pattern?

Check out this quote: “Senator Barack Obama understood that you could use the Web to lower the cost of building a political brand, create a sense of connection and engagement, and dispense with the command and control method of governing to allow people to self-organize to do the work.” Substitute the terms “political” with “music” and “governing” with “selling music” and you get the point.

I’ve been on one too many panels where people keep talking about how your team as an artist should include a lawyer, an agent, a manager, a publicist etc. You could have gotten this piece of advise in 1968 too.

My point is that to win as an artist in the modern day music business, you (or your team) will also need to understand and command all things online: blogs and social media; search engine marketing; search engine optimization; knowing how to leverage sites like LinkedIn, and YouTube, and Sonicbids and Flickr and Facebook; putting out podcasts and Twitter feeds; etc.

Here’s a quote from same article: “Any politician who fails to recognize that we are in a post-party era with a new political ecology in which connecting like minds and forming a movement is so much easier will not be around long.”

Panos

Nike has this $50 wristband called Nike + Sport Band, which enables you to record your distance and time while your run. You can then upload all this info on the Nike Plus site, keep a log of your runs, set goals and milestones and also participate in an online community for runners (you can monitor the progress of your buddies, challenge fellow runners to a virtual running competition, talk trash etc.)

The idea for the Nike Human Race was to see how many people from around the world would do a 10,000-meter (6.2 mile) race, all starting at the same time. All you had to do was sign up online, show up the day of the race with your wristband at a designated Nike location in 26 cities (many at Nike Towns), record the run and upload it.

I don’t know how exactly many runners they ended up getting (they say “millions”) but they logged about 3,000,000 miles worldwide and a heck of a lot of buzz. Nike managed to build even more brand equity (Nike = Challenge the Status Quo), bring runners together under the Nike banner, get many new runners join in for their first 10K ever, drive traffic to stores worldwide, sell more Nike Sport Bands, sell Human Race gear, raise money for charity, create a book around the “Day The World Stopped to Run” and get people like me to blog about it.

I love fresh ideas and we need more of them in our business. If you want to think outside the box about your marketing, look outside the music business and borrow (steal) ideas for groundbreaking marketers like Nike.

Panos