Colin Charles Agenda

The business of making music compilations are changing. Ministry of Sound. NOW That’s what I call music. 

Today you can make compilations as a playlist, and share it with the world on services like Rdio and Spotify. It’s clear that the Ministry of Sound isn’t too happy with this – read more about how the Ministry of Sound is suing Spotify.

Listen to the quotes from the MoS:

• “What we do is a lot more than putting playlists together” – Lohan Presencer, CEO MoS
• “A lot of research goes into creating our compilation albums, and the intellectual property involved in that. It’s not appropriate for someone to just cut and paste them.”
• “We painstakingly create, compile and market our albums all over the world. We help music fans discover new genres, records and classic catalogues”
• “Millions trust our brands, our taste and our selection. We give them great listening experiences at a good price.”

I call bullshit on all of this. Yes, people like a curated compilation (I for one enjoy it – like dance hits of the year or something). But everyone can now curate compilations. This doesn’t make the MoS special any longer.

The commercial business of making compilations will go away in time to come. We will soon get to federate playlists so you can take your compilations with you, so it wouldn’t matter if you use Rdio, Spotify or something else. DJs will share their mixes that they played in a club and attendees and others will get to listen to the mix – this will eventually decide how “hot” a DJ is.

This is the future, and compilation manufacturers will find something else to do. MoS has nightclubs to fall back on. Embrace sharing.

Some interesting news happening in the Malaysian e-commerce space today.

• Shopify, the Canadian company, is now in Southeast Asia thanks to SingTel backing. Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and India get access to Shopify, and by September, you can work with local payment gateways as SingTel will help Shopify get onboarded. In Malaysia, that means working with MOLPay (NBEPay) or iPay88. Both have woefully terrible pages that break the flow.

• With Maybank pushing e-commerce and “blogshops”, I’m surprised they didn’t have the foresight to do this. Shopify could have chosen Malaysia as a headquarters, no? Alas, the sufferance when Singapore is your much more welcoming neighbour.

• This is great for merchants. They have more places to distribute their goods. Love that they’re supporting locals.
• Target market is 18-35 – I think that’s two broad, you get at least 2 distinct age groups there, if not three!
• I checked out the site – nice design. I notice that the items are generally quite pricey, so definitely not mass market fast fashion prices.
• Checkout page can do with improvements. (I must accept terms but can’t read it via a clickable link?) Payment page basically sucks, it heads to MOLPay.
• No idea if they’re drop shipping or holding inventory. Zalora started via drop ship, but soon realised that fulfilment was an issue, so they have a warehouse with inventory.
• Zendesk is their Q&A platform (odd choice that you’d pay for such a service).

Overall, I’m hoping to see improvements in payment gateways with lobbying by all these players. And I wish the girls at Off The Rack the best, it’s a tough space to be in, but one that can only grow as Malaysia itself grows digitally (as does the region).

PRISM and the NSA has blown up recently. We have Malaysian politicians worried about it naturally. The opensource zealot will tell you need to prism break.

I’m more pragmatic. I prefer opensource. But if there are no opensource alternatives, I will use the proprietary tool. This extends to cloud software like Google Docs/Drive. Its great at collaboration, which is something you can’t get close. 

I was suggested that FENG Office might work. I retort that it’s not the easiest install and it requires maintenance. Also, with PRISM, the web host clearly matters (they look at the pipes). I didn’t even think to consider LibreOffice due to lack of collaboration in desktop software.

In Malaysia, next generation children are going to be roped into the online Google world via Chromebooks.

So my thinking is simple: if there are no alternatives (to being hosted in the US or to having better controls over your cloud offerings), you should start one. This can be a great business. As the FT says, data privacy is a handy weapon to challenge the titans with.

Watch this video of Fred Wilson. If the world thinks Dropbox is suddenly insecure, its ripe for alternatives to crop up. It also doesn’t mean that people just start using alternative services… DuckDuckGo might have had a 50% increase in search traffic, but all that search traffic may be what Google processes in a moment ;)

This PRISM stuff isn’t going to blow away anytime soon. Now’s the time to come up with matching software that has additional features (like privacy, encryption, etc.). Maybe Kim Dotcom was ahead of the curve with Mega?

“The market is so small you have to think international” – Mattias Miksche, CEO, Stardoll (TWIST#343).

Sweden has like 9 million people. They don’t think they need to “go global”. They start thinking global. The local market is too small. It’s not like the USA.

I’ve said the same thing about Malaysia (and Singapore) before: why are you building locally if you’re a web-shop? Build, test, prove yourself, but make sure you’re global. 28 million people separated by different language needs will ensure you don’t have much larger than the population of Sweden when it comes to launching a product. 

So don’t think about going global after a year. Think about being global from day one.

No rules in this game | Derek Sivers: “Gurus will say what you can’t do or must do. They mean well, but they’re wrong.

For every rule they tell you, there’s an exception. They are just telling you their specific past, not your specific future.

There are no rules in this game. You change them as you go.”

(Via Derek Sivers.)

Derek is talking specifically about the music industry. I think this applies to more than just the music industry. This is sage advice that applies to any industry.

Remember, be open to advice, but be influenced by none.

I cannot say this better than Dustin Curtis can, so read it: What a stupid idea.

They saw the future and they built it. But for some reason, my first reaction to their earliest attempts wasn’t to give them the benefit of the doubt—it was to immediately find problems and then dismiss their ideas.

The future is extremely hard to see through the lens of the present. It’s very easy to unconsciously dismiss the first versions of something as frivolous or useless. Or as stupid ideas.

We all talk about being disruptive, but how many people say things like “the relational database market is a $9bn market, I want to reduce it to a $3bn market and take 1/3 of that”? Saying is one thing, having the vision is another. That was me paraphrasing Marten Mickos (former CEO, MySQL – exit $1bn) speaking to Danny Rimer (partner, Index Ventures).

I live by the mantra that the best way to predict the future is to engineer it (via Alan Kay) and that the future is wide open.