I follow a Substack hosted by Ted Gioia (pronounced Joy-yah). Ted is a thought leader who’s been around fifty working years. Primarily, he’s in the music industry as a performer, composer, and critic. However, Ted Gioia is an exceptional writer with an amazing ability to grasp complex subjects and clearly break them into comprehensible components.
A few days ago, Ted published a Substack article titled My 9 Predictions: What the Music Industry Will Look Like a Decade from Now. Here’s an infograph outlining his predictions.
I read his article several times, and it struck me the same thing goes with the book industry. It’s a close parallel, for sure. It got me thinking to take the infograph and substitute words. Replace:
Record labels and music companies with book publishers.
Artists and musicians with writers.
Music and playlists with books.
Music industry with book publisher.
Listeners with readers.
Live music with print books.
Come to think of it, these 9 predictions about books could have been made a decade ago and are realizing now.
Kill Zoners — Thoughts? Comments?
Music and writing often follow parallel tracks so I think you’re on to something, Garry.
The name Gioia rang a bell so I googled and found Ted’s brother is poet Dana Gioia who wrote Can Poetry Matter and says, “poetry is speech raised to the level of song, and though poetry may often be misunderstood as intellectual, it moves us the way music does.”
Lotta brains in that family.
You sent me down the rabbit hole with Ted where I found another post about writing and AI. He talks about a London newspaper that “resurrected” a dead art critic using AI to write about a new art exhibit. At the same time they brought back a dead critic using AI, they also cut 150 human employees: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-new-culture-war-is-real-vs-bogus
Hi Debbie – I’ve followed Ted Gioia for about a year now. Can’t remember how I stumbled upon him, but I like what I read. He’s very accomplished and comes across as right down to earth. He gives only a few interviews, but when he does they’re worth listening to. And I did read the dead art critic essay/ What a world we’ve gotten ourselves into. 🙂
Thought provoking as always, Garry. Though music and reading are different activities, there are commonalities between the respective industries. Readings and book signings are the live events of the reading world, along with interviews at conferences and on the radio. However, live interviews on national radio tend to be the province of the successful to very successful traditionally published.
As for we self-published authors, we’re much like small indie record labels. Connecting with readers, especially in a saturated market, is the challenge. I’ll be at panelist again this weekend at our local science fiction convention, Orycon, and the first panel I’ll be on, Friday evening, will be on marketing your novel.
I think Ted’s 9 predictions can serve as a thought-provoking template of sorts to look at alternate ways to reach readers, the importance of your own unique, idiosyncratic voice, direct sales, public readings and signings and print. Keeping an eye out, always, for alternate platforms and channels.
Nice comment, Dale. Enjpy your panel time!
Fascinating, Garry…
I wonder if any “creative” industry could be spliced into these predictions.
Scary, but then, change usually is.
Have a great day, everyone!
Much of this has already happened. Tom McDonald, the rapper, has become extremely successful as an independent artist even though his viewpoint is very conservative. He’s not the only one.
The real power players have always been the distributors, not the music labels or publishers. That’s where the money is because they are the middlemen between the creators/publishers and the audience. In the early days of ebooks, writers thought they’d finally escaped the control of the publishers, but Amazon and others stepped in and siphoned away the control and the profits. Readers bought into this because they like all humans are lazy as heck and wanted one-stop shopping.
For some reason, WordPress won’t allow me to reply to these other comments. Sorry, not trying to ignore anyone – it’s just tech trouble.
The critical connection between providers and consumers now goes through a middleman: the distributors.
Attempts to make the connections direct, reliable, and fast run into the paradox best explained by a Firefly quote: “About 50% of the human race is middlemen and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated.”
A lot of people’s income depends on being middlemen – without spending time being the creative. They have nothing else to do, and are not themselves creative in, say, the writing part.
If there is ever a way to connect readers directly to the books their previous reading implies they might find the source of their NEXT book, it will work for a while – and then get taken down by middlemen and advertisers SOMEHOW.
‘Twas ever so.
As Debbie said, music and books go hand-in-hand. You could be right, Garry. It’ll be interesting to revisit these predictions in five or ten years. 😉