Stel jezelf eens over twintig jaar voor, maar dan de negatieve versie. Hoe ziet jouw leven er dan uit? Je werk? Je bedrijf? Vorige week maandag mocht ik bij de YourChallenge avond, georganiseerd doorModelMinds mijn uitdaging wat betreft ondernemerschap vertellen, één van de opdrachten die ze mij lieten uitvoeren was het schrijven van een heaven- en een hell-scenario.

Hell assignment

The music industry is never coming back. At least not in the way we remember it. The year is now 2031 and Alexander has given up trying to be an entrepreneur in music. Ever since the last straw was drawn in 2012 he has decided to give up the dream of a music world where new ideas where met with enthusiasm and supported by the copyrights associations.

In 2012 downloading has been declared illegal by governments worldwide and the Recording Industry Association of America and it’s cousins have started a global campaign in order to prosecute anyone who breaks the rules. The internet and all it’s users is now being monitored by a few of corporations who provide the access. “Nothing comes in and goes out without us knowing about it” is their mission statement.

The only music allowed on radio, television and major internet-sites are checked by the copyright associations. These associations are property of the larger entertainment corporations, such as Disney and Time-Warner. As you can easily guess, the decisions made about what entertainment is available and what is not has more to do with cronyism than anything else. Leaving the public to listen only to recycled pop-music which has been designed to hipnotize 13-year-olds into buying more of pretty much everything.

And what is he doing now? Alexander works at an insurance company, selling people a VIP goodbye for when they themselves can’t make use of it. He doesn’t really listen to music anymore, all there is to find is just the same old pop-song we’ve been hearing for the past thirty years.

It’s not that Alexander hasen’t tried, it’s just that there weren’t enough of people like him. Or they weren’t well organized. But that’s probably what you could call evolution, and most of us have chosen this route.

When Alexander walks the streets and see someone busking he always stops and watches for a minute. But It’s never long before the police come and the busker to stop because of copyright violation. You see, a song can only be played if it is registered by a copyright association.

Oh well. What are you gonna do.

 

Stel jezelf eens over twintig jaar voor. Hoe ziet jouw leven er dan uit? Je werk? Je bedrijf? Vorige week maandag mocht ik bij de YourChallenge avond, georganiseerd door ModelMinds mijn uitdaging wat betreft ondernemerschap vertellen, één van de opdrachten die ze mij lieten uitvoeren was het schrijven van een heaven- en een hell-scenario.

Today is February 28th, 2031

Alexander is woken up by his high-tech alarm clock in order to start a new day at his company: Virtual Studio Network. The company is a network of multimedia companies and spreads to over 90 countries.

After a quick meal and some yoga he gets into his electric car on the move to his first job of the day. He doesn’t drive to a building with the name ‘Virtual Studio Network’ on it. Alexander has a desk at home with a small logo statue, but not an actual building. No, he drives towards a common networking area where a lot of his ‘inner-circle’ people come. It’s a bit like a café, but with different intentions.

At the area he doesn’t get straight to business, or so it seems. He just starts to chat with some of the familiar people there. He asks them for new idea’s they had this weekend. Within a minute or two he grabs his mobile device and starts laying connections. Connections between people, knowledge, databases and the proposed ideas. In the two hours he was at the area about three events and two new services had been made up, teamed up and could be up and running within a month.

The next job is to drive to a studio where an artist currently is in a recording session. Alexander is there to check if everything is running smoothly, because it’s the first time VSN has worked with this studio. In the afternoon Alexander has a conference call from home with his tech-team from Kenya, India and Germany, to discuss updates to the network.

For the past twenty years Alexander has been working on setting up the infrastructure that make these fast and fluid co-operations possible. He has made it his life work to find out how collaborating in a network can be optimized, and is trying to find the perfect balance between expertise and quality control on the one hand, and open co-creation on the other.

He started out as a music producer in a time when the music industry was slowly fading away and a new music world was still looking for a business model. Nowadays he has ported his vision on economic value based on consumer-maker relationships to other industries.

It wasn’t always easy: at the start there was a lot of negativity coming from dropping sales in the music industry, and people didn’t take the more independent movement seriously. But Alexander knew he had something special when he understood where this independent movement was going. It was because of his trust in his instinct that he kept true to his goals of coming up with a new business and economic model for the music world. His endless optimism helped him trying again and again even though he failed many times. But there is no failure if you consider it learning.

His ideas started to become more clear and it became easier to explain them to people without sounding like a theoretical physicist going on about string theory. The more clear his ideas got, and the better he got at telling people about them and showing them, the more they started to work. His network started to grow at an ever accelerating pace. More and more people started to add ideas to his own. His ideas on how people should behave according to principles on order to surround themselves with like-minded people and provide them with a structure that will help to co-create became a reality for himself. He lived his own theory and thus it became real.