music – Looking Forward

May 16, 2017

Analytics And Leading Change

Next week, I’m teaching the summer semester version of my Columbia University course called Analytics and Leading Change for the Master’s Degree program in Applied Analytics. While there are elective courses on change management in business and public administration schools, this combination of analytics and change is unusual. The course is also a requirement. Naturally, I’ve been why?

The general answer is that analytics and change are intertwined.

Successfully introducing analytics into an organization shares all the difficulties of introducing any new technology, but more so. The impact of analytics – if successful – requires change, often deep change that can challenge the way that executives have long thought about the effect of what they were doing.

As a result, often the reaction to new analytics insights can be a kneejerk rejection, as one Forbes columnist asked last year in an article titled “Why Do We Frequently Question Data But Not Assumptions?”.

A good, but early example of the impact of what we now call “big data”, goes back twenty-five years ago to the days before downloaded music.

Back then, the top 40 selections of music on the “air” were based on what radio DJs (or program directors) chose and, beyond that, the best information about market trends came from surveys of ad hoc observations by record store clerks. Those choices too emphasized new mainstream rock and pop music.

In 1991, in one of the earliest big data efforts in retail, a new company, SoundScan, came along and collected data from automated sales registers in music. What they found went against the view of the world that was then widely accepted –
and instead

old music, like Frank Sinatra, and genres others than rock were very popular.

Music industry executives then had to change the way they thought about the market and many of them didn’t. This would happen again when streaming music came along. (For more on this bit of big data history, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_SoundScan and http://articles.latimes.com/1991-12-08/entertainment/ca-85_1_sales-figures .)

A somewhat more recent example is the way that insights from analytics have challenged some of the traditional assumptions about motivation that are held by many executives and many staff in corporate human resource departments. Tom Davenport’s Harvard Business Review article in 2010 on “Competing on Talent Analytics” provides a good review of what can be learned, if executives are willing to learn from analytics.

The first, larger lesson is: If the leaders of analytics initiatives don’t understand the nature of the changes they are asking of their colleagues, then those efforts will end up being nice research reports and the wonderful insights generated by the analysts will disappear without impact or benefit to their organizations.

The other side of the coin and the second reason that analytics and change leadership are intertwined is a more positive one. Analytics leaders have a potential advantage over other “change agents” in understanding how to change an organization. They can use analytics tools to understand what they’re dealing with and thus increase the likelihood that the change will stick.

For instance, with the rise of social networks on the internet, network analytics methods have developed to understand how the individuals in a large group of people influence each other. Isn’t that also an issue in understanding the informal, perhaps the real, structure of an organization which the traditional organization charts don’t illuminate?

In another, if imperfect example, the Netherlands office of Deloitte created a Change Adoption Profiler to help leaders figure out the different reactions of people to proposed changes.

Unfortunately, leaders of analytics in many organizations too infrequently use their own tools to learn what they need to do and how well they are doing it. Pick your motto about this – “eat your own lunch (or dogfood)” or “doctor heal thyself” or whatever – but you get the point.

February 15, 2017

Creativity Versus Copyright

In the Industrial Age, the fight between labor and the owners of industry (“capital”) was the overarching political issue. As we move away from an industrial economy to one based on knowledge that debate is likely to diminish.

Instead, among the big battles to be fought in this century, will be about intellectual property — who controls it, who gets paid for it, how much they get paid, who owns it and whether ideas can properly be considered property in the same way we consider land to be property.

I’ve written about this before, but a recent story about the settlement of a suit by Star Trek was settled recently, as reported in the NY Times, brought this to mind, especially as I came across an interesting series of posts that provide some new perspectives.

These were written at the end of last year and the beginning of this year by the former chair of the Australian Film Critics Association, Rich Haridy.

His aim was to “examine how 21st century digital technology has given artists a set of tools that have dismantled traditional definitions of originality and is challenging the notions of copyright that came to dominate much of the 20th century.”

Here’s a quick, broad-brush summary of his argument for a more modern and fairer copyright system:

Not just in today’s digital world of remixes, but going back to Shakespeare and Bach and even before that, creative works have always been derivative from previous works. They clearly have originality, but no work is even close to being 100% original.
The tightening of copyright laws has undermined the original goal of copyrights — to encourage creativity and the spread of knowledge.
This reflects the failure of policy makers and the courts to understand the nature of creativity. This is getting worse in our digital world.
While the creators and distributors deserve compensation for their works, this shouldn’t be used as a reason to punish other artists who build and transform those works.
The enforcement is unequal. While bloggers and artists with limited financial means are easy targets for IP lawyers, the current system “while [theoretically] allowing for fair use, still privileges the rich and powerful, be they distributors or artists.”

It’s worth reading the series to understand his argument, which makes a lot of sense:

Haridy is not proposing destruction of copyrights. But if arguments, like his, are not heeded, don’t be surprised if more radical stances are taken by others — just as happened in the past in the conflict between labor and capital.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/157274980178/creativity-versus-copyright]

October 11, 2016

Blockchain And The Arts

Huh? Blockchain and the Arts?

If you’ve heard about blockchain at all, it is most likely because of Bitcoin, the alternative non-state sanctioned currency. But the uses of blockchain go beyond Bitcoin.

If you don’t know about blockchains, there are many sources of information about them, including Wikipedia. For a little, but not too much detail, I like this explanation:

“The Blockchain is a … database technology, a distributed ledger that maintains and ever growing list of data records, which are decentralised and impossible to tamper with. The data records, which can be a Bitcoin transaction or a smart contract or anything else for that matter, are combined in so-called blocks. In order to add these blocks to the distributed ledger, the data needs to be validated by 51% of all the computers within the network that have access to the Blockchain.

“The validation is done via cryptography, which means that a mathematical equation has to be solved … Once the validation is done, the Block will receive a timestamp and a so-called hash. This hash is then used to create the next block in the chain. If even one bit in the block changes, the hash will change completely and as a result, all subsequent blocks in the chain will change. Such a change has to be validated again by 51% of all the nodes in the network, which will not happen because they don’t have an incentive to work on ‘old’ blocks in the chain. Not only that, the blockchain keeps on growing, so you would require a tremendous amount of computing power to achieve that, which is extremely expensive. So it is simply not worth it to change any data. As a result, it is nearly impossible to change data that has been recorded on the Blockchain.”

The protection of the digital material from snoopers, the strong validation and the decentralization of blockchains are especially attractive.

The potential uses of blockchain are a hot area for venture investment. And there’s a cottage industry in consultants providing advice on the subject. One of the most well-respected gurus of the business world, Don Tapscott, just co-authored a book on the subject with his son Alex, who is CEO of a venture capital firm that specializes in blockchain companies. It’s called “Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, And The World”.

More than a year ago, R3, a consortium of banks and related companies from around the world – now numbering about four dozen – started to develop their own blockchain.

Sure, it’s understandable that bankers are interested in this technology. But artists?

I suppose some artist will, at some point, figure out how to use blockchain as a new art form – dropping little pieces of an artistic puzzle in a chain. But that’s not what the usual interest is about.

Instead, since the digital age started, quickly followed by widespread digital piracy then reduced incomes for many artists, people have wondered how artists will be able to continue their artistic work – the long history of “starving artists” aside.

Blockchains have been gaining adherents as a way to help establish ownership and subsequent payment for use.

In their book, the Tapscotts describe a virtual nirvana for artists, built atop blockchains which would enable artists to register their works, enter into “smart contracts” and generally be at the center of the creative ecosystem, rather than as the lowest person on the totem pole.

Last week, Don Tapscott reiterated the point in “Blockchain Could Be Music’s Next Big Disruptor – Artists can finally get what they deserve”.

Daniel Cawrey made a similar argument in his article, “How Bitcoin’s Technology Could Revolutionize Intellectual Property Rights.”

There are already some startups providing blockchain services for intellectual property, such as Blockai and Ascribe .

And blockchain technology, in theory, could be beneficial for artists. But there are practical obstacles in making this happen and, in the long run, a fundamental flaw in the plan.

Let’s start with the practical question as to how this gets set up.
Here are just a few questions, off the top of my head.

Who does it? Without getting into the technical weeds here, there is also a question as to what characteristics a particular blockchain service would have – yes, there are options. How can the “platform” provider be reimbursed? Do you start from scratch or try to negotiate with agencies already serving related functions, like ASCAP? Who polices all this to make sure that the record established in the blockchain is actually being used to compensate artists?

The bigger issue is treating ideas or creativity as “intellectual
property” – in economics terms, as a private good, instead of a public good. As
we have learned, most inventions and creations are not the result of a
solo hermit genius, but are the result of direct or indirect
collaboration. So this concept of the idea as private property of the
first person (or corporation) to claim it is debatable. New ideas and
creative works may be more public, than private, good.

As Thomas Jefferson, amateur scientist and political philosopher, said some time ago:

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

I’m looking at this issue in a very pragmatic, non-ideological way. Simply, although technology may make it feasible to track ideas and government laws may try to put a private label on them, this often doesn’t work because it goes against the nature of the good. Some things might start out as private enterprises, but if they are in essence public goods, the private enterprise will fail.

Consider the development of mass transit in many cities, mostly which were franchises to private companies until those companies realized they couldn’t really make a profit in the business.

I’m not sure what the answer is to prevent artists from starving because they can’t live on the money they receive while being artists. Blockchain may have a role. But the solution will take more than just continuing to think about the problem in a fundamentally flawed way as the protection of private property.

If you’re not an artist, you need to understand this also affects you. How people get enough income to live comfortably is an ever increasing problem in an age where an ever increasing number of people have to be creative, not just making music and art, but all kinds of ideas and works.

[Note: For a related blog post, see The Internet & The Battle Over Innovation.]

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/151670251222/blockchain-and-the-arts]

April 24, 2014

What Were They Thinking?

I learn of interesting new technologies and products every day. Because a successful business reflects more than the value of its products, most of these won’t be big hits even if they are really good ideas – and many are really interesting technologies.

But then there are others which remind me that not every technology advance makes sense. Some indeed raise that old question – what were they thinking? I’m sure I’m going to get complaints about pointing out some of these items, so I’ll apologize ahead of time that maybe I’m just missing the genius of these ideas 🙂

The government of the United Arab Emirates has decided to adapt one of the ideas proposed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. See the Reuters story at http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/10/us-emirates-drones-idUSBREA1906E20140210 The UAE too would use a very modern technology – unmanned drones. But instead of delivering products, they would deliver paperwork to their citizens. The technology also uses sophisticated fingerprint and facial recognition. Perhaps they haven’t heard of a different technology that eliminates the need for the paperwork to begin with – ah, the Internet?

Then there’s this concept that is the merger of the much heralded Internet of Things and wearable clothing – the bra that cannot be unhooked without “true love”. While the Japanese clothing company responsible for this idea only created it as a celebration of their anniversary (https://www.ravijour.com/anniversary/moodup) you can see they do take it seriously in this video at http://youtu.be/B8Wd831gUt4 . I’m not sure anyone else would trust or try to use this particular application of the latest tech.

There have been a few recent experiments in making music in non-traditional ways. (I’ll have more on that in a future blog post.) But one of those experiments that belongs here perhaps is Lickestra. As you can see at http://www.emiliebaltz.com/2014/01/lickestra/ , people generate musical sounds by licking ice cream. Obviously this is not for concert length pieces.

And so it goes on the far edges of the technology world … more to come, I’m sure.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/83736814898/what-were-they-thinking]