Steve Jobs: The Great Innovator

Why would Steve Jobs be the subject of a post on a site called Live 2.0 about the rise and dominance of the live entertainment business?

After all, isn’t he the father of the ipodosphere, the antithesis of a Live-driven world?

Yes, he is, and people in the live business should thank him for that.  Until the ipod and the world it created, it wasn’t clear when and whether we would move into a low-to-no cost world for electronic content.  Sure, there was Napster, but as an old boss of mine used to say, that had hair all over it.

Lots of people were never going to use Napster because it wasn’t only illegal, but it was also kind of a hassle.  Jobs himself said this in 2003:

“If you go to Kazaa and you try to find a song, you don’t find a single song. You find 50 versions of that song, and you have to pick which one to try to download, and usually it’s not a very good connection. You have to try another one, and by the time you finally get a clean version of the song you want, it takes about 15 minutes. If you do the math, that means that you’re spending an hour to download four songs that you could buy for under $4 from Apple, which means you’re working for under minimum wage.”

Absolutely right.

The rickety sled that was the music business was already sitting at the crest of an icy hill, and the ipodosphere just gave it a little shove.

Is it a coincidence that since the launch of the ipod in 2001, all of this has happened:

-Major League Baseball bought tickets.com, effectively enabling it to ticket itself

-The secondary market exploded, with sites like Stubhub

-Live Nation parted ways with Ticketmaster

-Overall sales of CDs plummet

-Pop and rock music acts see their income dramatically swing to concerts as their main source, including some truly startling numbers from tours like that of The Police in ’07 and ’08.

It’s not coincidence.  It’s the fact that once consumers really got what an ipod could do, they began to understand that electronic content was cheap and ubiquitous and that changed the dynamic for live entertainment.

Now that’s great for the consumer and great for Apple, but it’s even better for the live entertainment business because it means that live performance has one very important quality:

Scarcity.  It’s what drives value and makes something truly special, and we certainly have Steve Jobs to thank for that.

But there’s more.  Steve Jobs is right now the most innovative marketer in the world.  He’s the Julius Caesar of marketing in that his ability to see what needs to be done and to be able to execute it flawlessly appear to be superhuman.

Still, he’s shown us something that needs to be at the foundation of our thinking about live entertainment, and it’s simply the primacy of innovation.

In other words, tearing down and then rebuilding the future and never stopping that process is the only marketing plan that works today.  You might know that maintenance crews for the Golden Gate Bridge literally never stop painting it:  they finish painting it and then go back to the beginning and start again.

Anybody who is creating or marketing live content should be thinking that way if they want extraordinary results.  Somebody invented Lucha Va Voom, and that was brilliant.  But to stay brilliant, it’s got to keep being re-invented.  If Lucha Va Voom were an ipod, what would the ipod nano be?  What about the app store?

There’s been a lot of talk on the ticketing side of the business about things like print at home and mobile tickets.  Obviously, these could be useful things, but to look at it through a Jobs-ian lens, the question is whether or not they add up to something more for the consumer.  For example, it’s nice to be able to put music on an mp3 player and carry it around, but what the ipodosphere overall makes possible is an entirely new relationship with media.

So this post is simply to say that Steve Jobs and his innovation have driven the Live 2.0 revolution forward as much as anyone else and to say that even if we’re not all innovators of his skill, the future demands that we try.