Ep 137 Media Master Lessons from Prince May 16, 2016

The musician Prince was a master of the media in many ways, ahead of his time, but sometimes behind the times.

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

The musician Prince is no longer with us, having passed away in early 2016. His rich, rich musical legacy does live on. He leaves quite a catalog, quite a library of hits and hundreds and hundreds, if not a thousand other songs that were also great acts of musical artistry. What does this say about his legacy as a media communicator and a media distributor? That's what I'm interested in as far as it relates to this show and what all of you are here for. To me, Prince is a fascinating case because he, like many of us, he's contradictory. He does some things so incredibly well, other things that seem self defeating. And I'm not talking about the source of his ultimate demise. I'm talking about specifically his media distribution strategy. Prince famously was in a war with Warner Brothers, his distributor, his label, because he didn't like how they wanted to control his content. They followed what was by then the established rule of thumb for big record companies is you have one album per year for an act, because it takes a year to properly market it, distribute it, build a whole tour around it, get it in all the stores, get everything honed, refined, produced just the way. And if you do more than that, you risk cannibalizing sales of last year or the most recent album. That was their theory, and certainly there is a lot of merit to that. Prince didn't like that. He wanted. He was prolific, he was a prolific artist. He produced hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of songs. And he wanted to produce when he wanted to, where he wanted, how he wanted. He went to the point of changing his name, writing Slave on his face and was in a protracted, protracted fight with Warner Brothers, eventually getting out of his contract and doing things on his own. What are we to make of this now? For most people in the world, certainly most musicians, they would have loved to have had a contract with Warner Brothers. So Warner Brothers, back in the day of 70s, 80s, that's when there was no Internet. You couldn't create your own YouTube video and become famous a la Justin Bieber. You basically had to go through a big record label. They were gatekeepers. They had tremendous, tremendous power over who got to make records, who got to make money in the record business, who got airtime, who got on radios. And you basically just couldn't make a living as a musician unless you passed those gatekeepers. And clearly Prince met that threshold. The gatekeepers at Warner Brothers and other record labels loved him. They instantly diagnosed him as being a huge talent, which he was. So his problem is not the problem most people have, whether it's in the recording industry, the book publishing industry or any industry. The problem most of us have is getting through the gatekeepers. Prince solved that problem, but he wanted control. He wanted to put out as many songs as he wanted when he wanted. If he was feeling especially prolific and produced five albums worth of content, he wanted to put out five albums worth of content. Warner Brothers was saying, no, stop. We can't market, package, sell, distribute five albums at once. And Prince essentially said, I don't care. I think I can do it better than you. So it was a source of a huge, huge dispute. I don't want to go through all the legalities. That's not of interest these days. There are other principles involved that I do think are important and as relevant today as 20, 30, 40 years ago.

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So Prince wanted control. He wasn't anti control. He wasn't anti having an authoritarian, heavy hand on his content. He just didn't want it to be Warner Brothers. He didn't want it to be ex executives at any recording industry. He wanted to have the control. And certainly this desire to control every aspect of how he's presented to the world is one of the factors of why he was great. I mean, here's a musician who played every single instrument on his album, sang everything well. He had backup singers and other members of a band occasionally, but for the most part, he did everything. A true virtuoso, amazing musical talent. So the very same thing that made him great as a musician, I believe sometimes was not a helpful strategy in some of his distribution strategies, because he was someone who was notorious for making sure none of his content could be on YouTube. He Certainly, to this day, not on most streaming outlets. He wanted to protect and conserve how people experienced him. And again, that's his right. No one's arguing that he wasn't within his rights. Question is, is that really the best way to have the most impact? I'm starting off from the assumption that if you're a musician, all things being equal, you would love for the greatest number of people to hear your music and enjoy your music and to make the most amount of money, whether you just want the money for yourself or to give to Charitable causes. But if you went to most musicians and said, okay, we're going to give away all your music to the whole world and we're going to give you one lump sum of $8 billion, will you take it? I think most people would take it. The fact that each individual isn't necessarily paying for it wouldn't really matter. Prince certainly did experience and dabble with a lot of different distribution strategies. But the one thing that I can detect that he did for the most part though, is he wanted to reign it in. He wanted control. He wanted to be able to say no to this platform, no to Pandora or no to YouTube. An awful lot of no's. And again, things worked out well for him. He sold more than a hundred million albums, he became fabulously wealthy, and he certainly will go down in the history of rock and roll as one of the all time greats. So I don't want to sound like I'm saying, well, if only Prince had followed TJ's advice, he would have been successful. That's not the case at all. But I do want to tease out what he's doing or what he did, see if this makes sense for most of the rest of us. Because what I do see that Prince did, I see it quite often with people of lesser talents, people sort of in my niche of business skills, and they tell themselves, well, I don't want to give away my secrets on a YouTube video or a blog because then no one will pay me for it. I want control. Unless it's in a book that I have created every bit of and sold at $50, I don't want anyone to get my ideas. I've certainly heard that from a number of business experts over the years. Most of these are people you've never heard of, but because they have such a constricted sense of how they should distribute their content, no one hears them. The biggest problem, most people in the world who create content is this. And, and this was not Prince's problem. But the biggest problem most people have, whether you are a musician, a producer of movies, books, TV shows, a writer, a producer of videos, the biggest problem most of us have is obscurity, is nobody knowing who we are, not having a huge tribe of fans and followers. The best way to do that, the best way to get a huge fan is to give away your content. That is essentially what the Beatles on every famous musician has ever done by making their records available for radio. Because radio gives away the music to the end user, the person able to hear it. Now it is True, the radio stations must give royalties to the musicians, but essentially, an awful lot of people were getting the content for free. And of course, people were able to hear Prince's music on the radio for free. The problem, of course, nobody listens to the radio anymore. People are listening, listening on downloadable services or listening on YouTube. So when you pull that back, when you restrict it, you simply make yourself a lot less available. You're much less known. One of the biggest proponents of this, you've heard me mention his name before, Gary Vaynerchuk, the new media social media guru who famously says, you know, spend 99% of your time plus giving away your content for free. And then every so often, you go in and you. You do a right hook and ask for money. You ask people to pay you for that keynote speech. I mean, he gets. He's getting 75, 85, maybe $100,000 a speech now. He doesn't charge. He doesn't sell any ads on his daily video or audio podcast, but he's making $100,000 or so on a speech, and he's making millions from his book sales. I do think for the vast majority of people in the world, especially if you're starting out now, that that's the model. If you want to go back and look at music, the music world, it's the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead were known for sharing their music with their fans, encouraging them to create bootleg copies, encouraging them to copy it, to create communities, to share the music, to get immersed in the music. Because what they found was that the more they give away, the more people would pay to come to their concerts. It's really no different from what a lot of YouTube stars do, like Gary Vaynerchuk, who give away their content in their audios and videos, but then make it up by getting invited to give speeches and people coming to their speaking engagements and paying large sums of money. So certainly we can all learn lessons from Prince in his workmanship, his ability to be a perfectionist, to master every single instrument, to be creative, to be different, and to want to control his own media empire. I give massive credit for all that. I just wouldn't necessarily follow his example on the control aspect unless you already have millions of fans who love you and will seek you out no matter what. Do that, and you can get away with anything. I'm T.J. walker. Thanks, by the way. I didn't share with you my. And I never met Prince, but I was very lucky one time just to be sitting at a restaurant bar in Miami, probably Six people in the room and there's a little band, no one's paying any attention. They hop off the stage. This was a block away. This is on Washington Avenue, a block away from Ocean Drive in Collins. And I notice a tiny little figure hops up on the stage, turns around, it's Princess. He gives an impromptu 30 minute concert. Now the room got pretty full quickly, but still it was probably no more than 40 people in the room. Really got to see him up close. Now why was he doing that? Practicing the same thing I encourage all of you to do constantly with your speeches and presentations. You're giving a big speech to 50 clients on Thursday, practice in front of two colleagues on Tuesday. That's what Prince was doing. He was practicing on me and my friends in this little dive bar so that when he was going on a national tour next month, he would be at the top of his game. And it was a great thrill to see him. Now the only other time I saw him I happened to. Don't ask me why or how, but I happened to get invited to the opening night of Prince's nightclub in South Beach. This must have been 1993 and fabulous event. I can't even remember if he played live or if it was brought in by satellite. But an electrifying performance as most of his were, and a memorable experience. He will be missed. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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