Beautiful, Great, or Kind

Normative, LLC, part one

jakoblodwick:

As of 6:29am, I am the proud owner of Normative.com, which I bought from a Russian squatter for $3,500 with the help of GoDaddy’s Domain Buy Service. This relieves a major clog in my brain: the fact that I should have owned {the name of my company}.com before starting a new business. I sort of jumped the gun, establishing Normative, LLC as a legal corporation and telling my friends that my new company was called Normative before acquiring the domain. How embarassing if I had been stuck with Normative.us.

It’s a bad idea to talk in detail about what you’re going to do, because sometimes most of the energy goes into the explanation. Or your plans change, but you half-stick to your original goals because you don’t want to be indecisive. However, at this point, I’m prepared to talk about the recent past of Normative, and give you some hints about what the future might look like.

A familiar theme in storytelling is when a place is destroyed, and the survivors dust themselves off and decide to rebuild. Sometimes it follows the apocalypse, or maybe the city was bombed-out in the war. The nightmare is over and you’re standing amidst pebbles of concrete, twists of steel, torn bodies deep-red, cloth mashed with flesh, a complete absence of leadership and, therefore, a hazy fear of the future.

The American record industry is in bad shape. It’s not that bad, yet. But I don’t want to wait around for it to crash. I don’t want to watch it get worse. Instead, I intend to capture the spirit of rebuilding. I want to pretend that the major labels were each hit with a hydrogen bomb, and now all these musicians are standing around, asking, “What do we do now?”

I want to answer that question.

The word normative refers to defining norms.

The company Normative works by asking, How should this be? and then pursuing that conclusion uncompromisingly.

It embodies my complete disinterest in the past except as a record of previous experiments. I am wholly concerned with the future: the slice of existence which can be shaped by my will; the blank canvas upon which I can paint my ideals; the one place where we might live amidst triumphant art and where existence might be tolerable.

It is only by disregarding the dominant paradigms that we can create the future that we ought to live in. I have no interest in tweaking the present system. I intend to invent something new, not “reinvent” the old.

Musical success in 2008 will require a deep familiarity with three important concepts: art, commerce, and technology. I believe this truth stands without exception. A label that doesn’t “get” the web will fail. A bedroom music producer who cringes at signing a contract will fail. A web entreprenuer who sees musicians as entertainers, not as walking gods, will fail.

The reason for the above premise is the theme of our present phase in history: Technology gives us the power to do almost anything. This means making a profitable album no longer requires hundreds of people. It requires two or three. Big record labels, and large corporations in general, are no longer needed to make money from art. This is not to say that Normative will buy magazine ads and mail press releases ourselves. That’s too much work. It means we will promote our albums in new ways that are hundreds of times more efficient; ways that record labels don’t understand, but are obvious to a seasoned web entrepreneur.

It also means that if you want to make money from music, you’re going to have to pull your weight, or you will be left behind. In the old model, a small number of artists created a living for hundreds of label employees. When those arists realize they can split the money with a couple of partners instead, will they? I’m betting the answer is yes, and every musician I talk to seems to agree with me.

I’m going to keep quiet about what I’ve accomplished so far, except to say that I’ve already signed one artist. I’m not going to make any policies about disclosing my progress, but if you’ve been following my life for the past few months, you’ve probably guessed that I’ll err on the side of revealing less, not more, than you’d like to know. My new thing is “here is a morsel from my life” instead of “here is what I ate for lunch”; I have learned my lesson about putting my whole life out there.

PS - a few weeks ago I linked to the Normatism teaser site. Normative is the company, Normatism is the philosophy behind it.

The ambition of defining new norms is admirable.  Rebuilding from the ashes is a dramatic and bold move.  His word choice is right on.  If he can follow through with these words, even a little bit, I would consider this a great action.

[great] 

Testing a new trifecta

I want to look for actions by others that are beautiful, great, or kind.  Or two out of three.  Or, maybe occasionally, a trifecta action that’s beautiful, great, and kind.  I want to keep posts short, numerous, and interesting.  There’s a link in the sidebar that will let you submit your own reports as well.  Please don’t report your own actions, just the actions of others.