Owning Your Space

Photo by David Pupaza on Unsplash

Rented space can be a good thing. It provides for flexibility and minimal commitment, allowing us to piggyback on someone else’s work to serve our ends. Rented space can be a good and useful thing - for the short term.

Longer than that, the problem that arises, is one of control. When you rent, by definition you don’t own. Sure, you might be able to paint the walls and move the furniture around a bit, but if you want to make structural changes, more often than not, you’re out of luck. In addition, if the landlord decides to change the rules - raise prices or move you out, for example - well, you pretty much have to take it. That’s the downside of rentals. 

In the long run, if you want to accumulate any real value, and at minimum, if you want to assert any level of control over your space, you need to own it. You have to have the comfort that you can do whatever is needed in order for you to maximize the value of that space for yourself, based on whatever rules you might define. That’s just a fact.

I was reminded of this over the last week as I watched the fallout from the Joe Rogan/Spotify controversies, and in particular, various artists’ reactions to it. One of the complaints that artists have is that they aren’t paid enough for the art they put out on the platform. 

In fact, while platforms such as Spotify and Tidal and Apple Music have transformed the music industry over the last decade or two (post Napster), artists (creators) have had to come to grips with dueling fundamental truths.

First, technology has transformed the economics of the music industry and the traditional means of making money have either gone away or materially changed. People are buying far fewer albums and singles than they used to and they’re streaming far more. As a result, artists have had to identify alternate ways to make a living (e.g. heavier emphasis on touring, merch as well as new and unique ways to get your content out there) than what so many of us grew up believing to be the norm. 

At the same time, though, artists also have more tools and technologies at their disposal than ever before. They have far greater control over every aspect of their value chain - from the creative to the production - than ever before. There has really been a far greater democratization of access, the likes of which we have literally never seen before. 

What is clear, though, is that this control needs to extend to how artists and creators decide to distribute their wares, their rented versus their owned spaces. 

Today, there are a host of platforms through which one can distribute - and there’s tremendous value that each one offers. For all the issues that artists have with Spotify, it does provide a level of access that isn’t easily replicated elsewhere. For all the value that a Facebook or an Instagram offers (which is a lot), the rules of the game are still controlled by those organizations and not by the creators themselves. In a collective sense, that can make sense and be an asset (otherwise we’d have chaos).

The key - from a creator’s perspective - is to be more thoughtful and innovative about where and how you choose to share your content. It doesn’t mean, ignore these platforms - I’m not sure that’s entirely feasible given their breadth and power. But it does mean being more thoughtful and conscious about the choices we make, the network of platforms (or ecosystem) we build, and about how we go about building our tribes (and the way in which we interact with them and learn about them and grow with them). 

In the sense of creators, this means leveraging the power of the platforms and then directing them back to platforms they control (e.g. their website) where you can control the ‘user experience’ and offer value in different and unique ways. It means then being able to learn more about them and building a direct relationship with them so that you can speak directly to them. 

Of course, there are trade-offs and the most obvious is a winnowing down of what one might want in terms of audience size. You may not be able to achieve the mass access of a Radiohead but you can find your 1,000 true fans, your tribe. And that’s really what matters. 

To do that, means thinking more strategically. It means leveraging the popular platforms and extracting whatever value you can from them, basis their rules of course, but then ultimately channeling that experience back to your own platform(s), so that you manage and control the experience and you manage and control your relationship with your tribe. 

The fact is, that a couple of decades post Napster, the cat’s out of the bag. You can’t turn back that clock. What you can do is assert your control - perhaps in a smaller way than we might initially like - to build our own tribes.