Of course, I don’t know the future of radio… but when asked today I realized I had a few thoughts to share.

1.  The Internet may rule – I imagine that the internet will eventually find it’s way into all of the places where we currently favor terrestrial radio (namely the car being the last hold out).  Once that happens terrestrial radio will face some significant competition, most likely threatening its survival.

2.  Community advantage – The advantage that terrestrial radio has is that it is community-based.  As you may have picked up from previous blog posts, I’m a big fan of strengthening community simply by reaching out and getting involved with what’s going on around you.  Local radio stations can speak to communities in much the same way that local friends can.  They share your home town, they know the nuances and the secrets for the community, they can talk about news pertinent to your town, and be a real contributor to the local experience by playing music for that place.  Think of local radio like the local farmers.  Think of how much you appreciate the local farmer at the farmer’s market vs. the big factory farm.

I grew up outside of Philadelphia in the 80s/90s and the classic rock stations were my favorite.  Those stations and most specifically, the DJs of those stations, were local heros… and famous to me.  There was John Debella on one station and Pierre Robert on another.  I’m not sure it will be like that again, but in Charlottesville we have several stations that are very active in the community and they matter.

3.  Radio as filter – In the case of a DJ in a local community you trust them to “show” you new music.  By listening to them you are implicitly giving them control to introduce you to new music.  The DJ or station become a filter for you.  This is still an important role.

4.  User control – In some cases though, you will find times when you don’t want someone to show you something new.  You want control over your listening experience.  In that case you’ll choose to plug in your iPod and listen to your music.

5.  Reach or Accessibility – There are some places where terrestrial radio just doesn’t reach, or more importantly if it does reach there the options may be limited.  In small town America this can be the case.  I recall going to a hunting cabin in the back woods of Pennsylvania when I was a kid.  There may have been one radio station.  Last year I was on the big island of Hawaii and radio options were limited.  Guess what?  The house had a WiFi connection.  I pulled up Pandora on my iPod and chose what station I wanted to listen to.  It was a defining moment for me in thinking that radio as we know it may be going away.

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Maybe the future of radio is that we’ll have the best of all worlds – community-based internet radio stations, accessible everywhere through WiFi, and free to program any music they wish, thus acting as a true filter for its listeners.

Thoughts?

I read a book called The Talent Code this weekend and I now recommend it to you.  Many of the ideas are directly applicable to the being a musician or a business owner.  Below I will paraphrase some ideas from the book as they apply to our industry:

1.  Talent is nurtured – it takes time and consistent effort.  According to some of the greatest coaches in sports, it is rare that a genius with innate skills and abilities comes along.  Most stars are people who practice consistently and wisely to get where they are.  The book discusses the science of myelin, which is a tissue that wraps around your neurons each time you practice a skill.  It is this insulation that helps you improve a skill and it takes both time and repetition to grow the myelin.  Additionally, myelin is always breaking down and growing anew so if you don’t practice a skill for a while you “get rusty” because your myelin has broken down a bit.  A mantra often repeated in the book is:  Skill is insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals.

2.  Surround yourself with other driven people who you admire.  Though the book didn’t say this outright, I’m combining with an idea I talk about in coaching and one I’ve read from other successful people: The people you hang out with are a reflection of you.  In many talent hotbeds (like the Seattle grunge era or the rock scene in 1960s San Francisco) the author found that the athletes or musicians were surrounded by other artists honing and producing their craft.  This served as a positive feedback loop in the person’s mind.  One artist sees another doing great work and thus it makes it much more real for that person.

3.  Playing an instrument requires skill, so does running your business. As you know, it wasn’t easy to start playing an instrument.  It took lots of hard work to get to the point where you are now.  Business is a whole new set of skills.  You’ve got to experience what it means to run a business much like when you first picked up an instrument.  This is a reality.  If you want to succeed as an artist business, you must not shy away from the practice required to build your business myelin.  It may be hard when you first start out but it gets easier with time, just like learning your instrument.

4.  Imagine your future. This isn’t just some empty self-help advice, it’s real advice that has been studied.  The book points out a study of new music students that were asked how long they planned to play their instrument.  The students that imagined playing the instrument forever were the most successful group by far… and the ones who imagined this and practiced the most each day were the best of those students.

For every new coaching client I take on I ask them what their big vision is – where they imagine their career going.  Most artists tell me they can’t see that far into the future, but I think most people have just been trained not to shoot for the stars.  Take a moment to list 30 things you’d like to be or do in your life.  What does the future look like?  If you don’t define it, no one else will.  If you do define it and believe it, you’ll step up to the challenge of making it real.

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There were many other great topics discussed in the book like what makes a great coach, the concept of deep practice, how to ignite someone’s drive to learn, and the different types of neural circuits.  Too much to go into unfortunately, but if you’ve got the time, check it out and let me know what you think: ben@theartistfarm.com

Here is a beautiful 4-minute clip of Bobby McFerrin talking about Yo-Yo Ma going to an African village to experience and learn about their music.  I would have trouble describing these ideas any better so please watch the video.  It will be worth it.

Imagine the world where we always feel the music inside – that feeling that we have at festivals or on stage, that feeling of pure beauty coursing through our veins.  Imagine being able to feel the music in the world, everywhere you look – the hum, playfulness and at times darkness of the natural world.  Imagine everyone intertwining these inspirations into their own song and feeling ok with the changing nature of that song – realizing that stability and consistency isn’t the goal.  Imagine finding the song even under what seems ugly at first – the oil spills, war and violence.  Imagine being able to see the lightness beneath it all.  Imagine that world.

World 2.0 has a silent mantra running through it’s veins: “Build people up, don’t break them down.”  Beneath the blogs that you follow, the business management books that you read, and the message of the grass roots movements you will find that they all collectively share this mantra.

Building people up starts in our own minds (building ourselves up), then extends to our family and workplace.  From there it extends to how we as collectives interact outside of our human scale relationships – in big corporations, with investors, and international relations.

Breaking people down is the informal and unspoken rule of old style business.  Financial growth at all costs was the mantra even if it means usurping and depleting energy from external sources.   Verbal abuse to those below you?  Sure.  Physical abuse of overwork and poor conditions?  Yes.  People in this case are merely sources of energy to use and abuse to reach some financial goal.  I know this still exists but the goal is to end it.

In World 2.0, with our focus on building human-centric businesses we no longer see humans this way.  People are no longer pieces of meat to be abused.  A person is untapped potential waiting to be built up.  When empowered and invited into the conversation, people come alive with potential.  When you build people up you encourage them to do the same with others (and be warned: the opposite is true as well).  Building people up doesn’t only feel good, it makes economic and social sense.

Look around  - your family, your office, your community, your country.  Are you interacting with people who are in the business of building people up versus breaking them down?  Building people up starts with you.  And likewise, the cycle of breaking people down stops with you.

Get on the wagon… share your stories… be part of the conversation and make some change.

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Me?  I co-own a small music management company.  We build people up by engaging in non-violent communication, asking our employees questions about how we can run our company better, and asking them how they want to grow personally.  It’s a small, small dimple on the world’s problems.  But it’s a start.

Think of something that you find good or bad, ugly or beautiful.  On the surface this would be a subjective thought.  But if you dig beneath the surface thought you can define the components of any topic.  Start by asking the question: “why?”

Ask yourself what aspects of this thing you can define or measure that makes you determine whether it is good or bad, ugly or beautiful?  If you are talking about a house, perhaps you are defining beauty by: style of house, window size, color, materials, location, etc.  With each element, you can dig further into your definition of beauty by putting guidelines or measurements to your definition.  For example: I find the most beautiful window size to be no more than 4 ft height per every 12 feet of elevation.

Once you get the aspects defined, the statement becomes objective and makes discussion or negotiation with someone else much easier.  You might even find that arguments go away completely.

A few days ago I had a “blind business date” with a guy named Rob Douglas co-founder of a video production company called Squid and Beard.   (Interestingly, he has a video project in which he interviews local heros to highlight how these individual threads comprise the fabric of our community).  Rob mentioned the idea of “being part of the conversation” several times.  I had been thinking loosely about this idea recently so I asked him to clarify what that meant for him.

Fusing his words and mine, ‘the conversation’ is happening all around us every day.  The conversation in particular is how to positively push, direct, and affect civilization – this big human experience – while refining what it means to be human.  The conversation happens in both thoughts and actions – in business, in the home, in your community, and online.

There are three things I want to mention about the conversation:

1. Who is in the conversation? If you are reading this then you are engaged in the conversation.  It’s open to all.
2. What’s the best way to contribute to the conversation? As with all conversations I think it is most effective to listen, absorb and digest some ideas, experiment in your own life, analyze the results, and then contribute your findings back into the conversation.  This system helps base the conversation in personal fact/experience rather than conjecture.
3. Where is the conversation happening?  The conversation could take place with your friends, online through a blog, in your workplace, or in your community government… anywhere really.

The conversation is happening.  It’s more interesting with more people involved.   And there is room enough for everyone.  Spread the word!

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P.S – I’d like to read and learn from you how you engage in the conversation.  Drop me a line at ben(at)theartistfarm.com if you’d like to have a conversation about “the conversation.”  I enjoy knowing what you are working on, learning from you, and feeling what we are all creating together.  Thanks!

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It is often proclaimed that networking is a major key to success in business.  I have also read often about the success that coaches and mentors can have on careers.  Coaching implies someone who helps bring out the best in you on a certain area of your life.  Mentoring implies that there is a more senior business person advising someone younger.

What I’d like to recommend is another type of business relationship that I didn’t read much about in books, nor did I see it much in the companies I worked for prior to being a business owner.  I’ll call it the peer-to-peer relationship.  Peer-to-peer implies two people of similar standing getting together to talk about business and life.

I have some friends whose businesses encourage this (record labels, law firms) idea.  Many businesses I have seen don’t.  I suspect this is because it is not seen as a valueable way for an employee to grow.  The common thinking is that you come into the office, spend 8 hours there, and then go home.  But, in the Business of You, you can certainly employ this strategy!

To get some Peer-to-Peer meetings rolling, find people in your community who interest you.  Or you can ask friends to connect you with like-minded people who you may not know.  Then simply drop them an email briefly explaining who you are and how you know of them.  Ask them out to an afternoon tea/coffee at a cafe.   This ‘blind business date’ is a cross between an interview and networking.

Mostly, you are doing this to connect with your community but of course the business implications are there as well – you just may know the perfect employee for their company to hire or you may need their services at some point.  Another good reason to do it is to pull yourself away from the mentality of “I’m so busy, I could never do this.” and get you out of the office to enjoy some fresh air and face time which is always worth while.  Lastly, this is yet another way to share ideas, weave the fabric of your community together, and feel great for meeting more inspiring humans.

I’ve been wanting a phrase to describe our business philosophy.  Actually it’s not just our business philosophy, it’s one that I see traces of in many of the great business books including ones written by Tom Peters, Peter Drucker, Dale Carnegie, and Seth Godin.  The concept is to build a business around being a better human as much as you build it around generating profit.  The phrase that comes to my head to define this is Human-Centric Business.

To me, Human-Centric Business means that as an employer you take on the role of teaching, empowering, and growing your employees.  Running a human-centric business means that you don’t just hire employees to do a job, to delegate tasks to, or to run part of your assembly line.  You are creating a community with your business and your role as an employer is to be a mentor in business and life.  If it’s not one of your strong suits currently, get some “life coaching” (bad term, good profession) to learn how to be more self-aware.  Self-awareness generates more awareness of others and this is the single key to becoming an amazing boss.

Human-Centric also means that your business is generating something positive for the world – something with the benefit of the larger population in mind.  I recognize this is a gray area but I feel confident that if you find self-awareness the rest will take care of itself.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, your most effective marketing comes from word of mouth.  As you may also know, it is easier to retain a customer than it is to get a new customer.  Put those two ideas together and you see that it is more cost effective and efficient to keep your current customers happy so that their word of mouth will help you to gain new customers.  On top of this, mix in the benefits of the internet where word of mouth is archived and global and you can see how it is a powerful tool for marketing.

What I’d like to propose is a new form of marketing that I call “Stoking.”  Stoking puts all three of these elements together and combines the idea of “gifting” as well.  (Gifting is the practice of giving away something of value when you expect nothing in return.  The act of the gift and the pleasure it creates is the value).

So, how does ‘stoking’ work:

1.  Search the internet for your band (or business) name.  Try google, twitter, facebook, youtube, and flickr.  You are looking for people who are talking about your band.  Most likely you’ll have fans out there that you didn’t even know about.

2.  When you find some people who have been talking good things about you (archived word of mouth!) then drop them a line to say thank you and offer them a gift.  It could be a ticket to a show, a free t-shirt, a free album, or anything else you can dream up.

This simple act makes you feel great for being the giver of the gift.  It makes the recipient feel great for getting a gift and being appreciated.  And of course, it’s all good for business because you’re taking the time to be awesome and everyone appreciates that.

You can take this deeper if you want by trying to track and analyze all of the responses but I’ve found that the idea of gifting stands in contrast to all of my analytical marketing efforts.  It’s not about analysis and measuring, it’s about perpetuating the giving cycle.

Try it out.  You’ll be surprised how fun and rewarding it is.

My work is an expression of who I am.  I figure out who I am and what works means to me at the same time.  In other words, this is what I would be doing even if I didn’t “have to work.”  The very intentional goal has always been to make “work” not work but rather constructive play with friends and the world.

I have always assumed that this approach to work isn’t for everyone.  I’ve heard that some people just like to have a job that they can leave at the end of the day and not have to think about it.  I realized recently that I don’t really believe this.

If you enjoy the work you are doing then you are doing it for your pleasure and for the Business of You.  On the other hand, if you are miserable at work then you need to adjust something in the Business of You.

We all go home at the end of the day.  Not thinking about work has nothing to do with the work itself but rather your ability to be mindful and in the moment.

So… if you fit into this category, no more excuses.  Find the work that makes you come alive and make the work live.  We all benefit from this.