Over the weekend, I had occasion to stop by the Twist & Shout record store over on E Alameda here in Denver. Apart from enjoying the actual experience of being in a record store for the first time in a while, I was happy to be at least tacitly [1] supporting a local, independent establishment – just as I shop the Tattered Cover for books – over its online equivalent. I still maintain a faint hope that the pendulum will one day swing against the mass-market, overcommercialized one stop shop approaches and give new hope to the specialty stores, the mom & pop shops that are so vital to ensuring variety. Yes, I’m admittedly biased on this front given that I work at a boutique analyst firm.
Anyhow, the purpose of this post wasn’t as a generalized comment on the importance of independent book and music sellers, but rather how universal the need for evangelism is. While I’m familiar historically with the practice of evangelism from a religious perspective, and I have a fair degree of experience with it from a technology perspective, I’d never really considered evangelism as a component of the music industry. But the association is obvious, in retrospect.
What clued me in was an essay in Twist & Shout’s Fall/Winter rag, entitled “My Backpages.” The front page piece described a regrettable incident in which one of the employees found out that a customer was deceased, simply by recognizing the titles in an estate sale. The author describes the event as follows:
I received a call the other day from a nice woman wanting to sell me a record and CD collection. We chatted for a few minutes and as I started to unwind the story, it became clear that this was the collection of a recently deceased man. I asked her to describe some of the music and she started rattling off names…She continues, “He has every record by a group called Dr. Feelgood.” My heart sank. I mentioned the name Barry and asked if he was the deceased. She was flabbergasted. “How did you know who he was?” I then proceeded to name ten to fifteen groups that could be found in the collection, as well as books he read, and movies he watched. “You must have been good friends,” she remarked. I thought for a moment and told her that I only knew the guy as a customer.
There’s an obvious lesson there for the would-be evangelists, I think: relationships matter. A lot. I’d be willing to bet a fair sum of money that the deceased was quite the evangelist of Twist & Shout, simply because the staff took the time to get to know them as a person, rather than just a customer. I know I’d count myself as an evangelist of a store here and there for that very reason. But that’s not the only lesson imparted by the author, as they instead to go on and ponder the importance of the evangelists for fledgling bands.
But there is another side to this. I started to think about what Barry – a true fan – meant to the band [Dr. Feelgood, apparently an obscure English pub rock band]. They’ll never know, but the ripples that this one guy created in terms of making the stores in his city aware of the band and thus carry the music were broad indeed. He would also talk to every music fan he could to find about the band, trying to turn the world on to his band. Like I said, a true fan. It leads me to consider what the career of an average non-superstar kind of artist is actually composed of. A couple of true fans in each state can cause enough of an impact in terms of getting other people to try the band, maybe buy the albums, maybe cause a local promoter to bring them to town…and that’s exactly how many bands actually get their start. A couple of true fans start the fire, and sometimes it goes out, and sometimes it explodes…We’ve seen so many great artists start out and start to sell, play a small club, move to a theatre, an arena and end up in an [sic] stadium. Think I’m exagerrating? Think about Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, Phish, Jack Johnson, Oasis, and hundreds of others, great and small. I remember when each of those bands had virtually no following, save for a couple of very vocal kids who loooooooooooved that band and wanted everyone to know it.
Try susbstituting Ubuntu for Radiohead, Ruby on Rails for Smashing Pumpkins, RSS for Phish and so on. The music and technology worlds may be different, but the song remains the same. The lesson there is not for the individual evangelist, but for the object of their affection. Whether you’re a big technology company or small, the value of the people out there that love your technology and want people to know it cannot be counted, and my recommendation to virtually all of our customers is the same: do whatever you can to empower and sustain these people. They can often do more on an individual basis than hordes of marketers armed with monster budgets can achieve, simply by turning others on to the technology they love. If you want to see this in action, you might simply look to Ubuntu’s/GNOME’s Jeff Waugh – a definite Friend of RedMonk. They don’t hand out those Google/O’Reilly Open Source awards for nothing, you know.
[1] I actually wasn’t buying on the this trip, as none of my family was slated for the gift of music. A friend of mine, however, was.
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