A presentation from a talk I was asked to give on the Future of Media in Colombo Sri Lanka for the South Asian Mobile Conference in May 2012. I was honored and happy to participate.

1. Future of Media
Shamal Ranasinghe
CoFounder, Topspin Media
Entrepreneur Serving Artists
@shamalman

2. My Mental Framework: The
Artist-to-Fan Connection
Production Marketing Distribution

3. Shamal’s Background
• Born in Sri Lanka
• Based in California
• In the media industry since 1996
• For fans: RealJukebox MP3 Player, Headed
Musicmatch Product line acquired by Yahoo
• For artists: Topspin CoFounder, artist
services and promotions

4. Entrepreneurship
• Anticipate the market
• Think BIG
• What’s the biggest problem?
• What’s the big bet?
• Is what you’re doing changing the world?
• If so, plan for the long-term

5. Topspin

6. Future of Direct-to-Fan

7. Future of Media
• The revolution has happened for fans
• Consumers will not be denied
• We’re swimming in music and media
• The future belongs to the artists
• Good quality flows downhill from the creators
• Revolution coming but still big problems exist

8. The Past

9. Production Prohibitively Expensive

10. Distribution Gated

11. Physics of Broadcast

12. Marketing is Limited

13. The Present

14. Exploding Rate of Creation
and Consumption
• One hour of video uploaded to YouTube
every second
• 35K record releases in 2000, 212K in 2011
• YouTube up to 1 TRILLION plays a year 2011
2005,Yahoo lead Internet with 3 Billion plays in one year.Today YouTube does more than that daily.

15. Production Democratized

16. Distribution Evolves into On
Demand “Consumption”

17. Ownership Evolves into
“Access”

18. On Multiple Devices
>70% of Pandora listening is on mobile devices
38% of Internet Users own a Smartphone

19. Future is Mobile

20. Marketing More
Challenging Than Ever

21. The Future

22. Marketing is Biggest
Problem...
Marketing
etc.... etc....
Proliferation of Programs, Fragmentation of
Sounds, and Genres Consumer Tastes

23. Marketing Evolves
Filter Target
Proliferation of Programs, Fragmentation of
Sounds, and Genres Consumer Tastes

24. Targeting Groundwork
Exists Today
• Every public Like and Share is a retrievable
preference statement
• Who you explicitly follow and are
influenced by is publicly available
• Listening and purchase info. all accessible
via the social services
• The era of the public interest graph

25. Data is Accessible

26. Social Sharing Still
Growing and Maturing

27. Filtering’s New Era
• Curation = your profile
• Sharing = your statements
• Trading in taste, expertise, and influence
• Trust graph
• Reputation economy

28. The Filtering Equation
My Media Who I’m Following
Interest Graph Trust Graph
Radiohead Tastemaker
Bob Marley Periodicals
Holy Other Services
John Butler Trio DJ’s
Fanfarlo
+ =
Friends
FourTet Journalists
Staves Influencers
Nahko Labels
Gruff Rhys Producers
Joe Higgs Musicians
Nosaj Thing Bloggers
Sigur Ros Artists
Jose Gonzalez Promoters

29. ?

30. Solves a Big Problem:
Generating
Demand for Artists

31. How Big is Filtering?
"Let's remember one of the cardinal
rules of social media. Out of 100 people,
1% will create the content, 10% will
curate the content, and the other 90%
will simply consume it. That plays out on
this blog, that plays out in Twitter, and
that plays out in most of the services we
are invested in."
--Fred Wilson

32. What’s the Big Bet?
• Rise of a tastemaker class
• Filtering = 10X producer base
• Attention marketplace
• Tastemaker’s attention is worth something
• Their trust and influence are quantifiable
• Solve the problem of demand generation for
artists = $30 Billion market

33. What Does this All Mean?

34. “The secret of change is to
focus all of your energy, not
on fighting the old, but on
building the new”
~Socrates

35. Content and Quality
will Only Flow
Downhill

36. Filters Will Be the
New Marketplace

37. Opportunity is Now
• Focus on the tastemakers and influencers
• Plug into their available preferences
• Understand sources and patterns in sharing
• Market belongs to those who make an impact

38. Thank You!
shamal@gmail.com
twitter: @shamalman
US # +1-415-763-7373
UK # +447818683901