Introducing: Manic Monday

Today we’re veering from the oft-serious topic of the digital music business to go slightly mad. Well, not entirely (at least not yet), and I’m not going to break out in song on a tech blog. I am, however, introducing a new title to this column, ‘Manic Monday’, which could be applicable to any number of things related or not to tech, since we all “love” Mondays. But bear with me a bit, and I’ll show you a bit of what’s in store.

So for those of you who don’t know, ‘Manic Monday’ is a song by a band called The Bangles, which are probably more popular as the band behind the song ‘Eternal Flame’. The song itself was written by Prince, which became a no.2 hit in 1986, only outsold by Prince’s own ‘Kiss‘. The song’s lyrics basically tell about the fleeting dread that we feel when faced with yet another Monday, a feeling that most of us feel all to well.

The recorded music industry itself might be in a manic mode itself lately, as the staple of their income, the CD album, has probably disappeared from most music consumer’s minds for the past 10 years. Sales are slightly back up again thanks to artists like Adele, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, but it seems that the CD, with its prerequisite system of production and distribution, simply cannot compete head-to-head with the exponentially-propagating and decentralized Internet. But of course, we all know, this isn’t just the case with music – this is the case with many entertainment-based businesses which emphasized control of distribution for profits.

The ‘Manic Monday’ column title was initially suggested by Aulia in an email thread between myself, him and Rama on discussing my writing a music business column for DailySocial. I suggested ‘Music Monday’ since it would be more concise, so as a new column, people would know what it would be about. So we went ahead with that. As a person who worked a long time in the digital music industry, writing about the music industry was pretty obvious, but since then I have been able to dabble in various other entertainment-based industries, from mobile/SMS, to internet news, even movie production; and from where I see, there are so many things that have only been touched slightly – or not at all – on DailySocial outside of the digital music arena but still essentially entertainment services. So I went back to Aulia and Rama and proposed a widening of topic for the column, and the change to ‘Manic Monday’.

While you were reading this article, you probably opened a few of the links above about The Bangles and Prince, looked at Wikipedia entries, or even searched for other stuff related to this article, all in the span of these few hundred words. The favorite buzzword of the 2000s, ‘media convergence’, has probably happened for some time already and it’s now just a part of daily life.

I was at a company conference way back in 2005 where aside from the speakers on the stage, the main screen was displaying one thing, then there were separate screens displaying yet more stuff, all different yet relevant back to what was being talked about at the event. The guy who organized it said that we already live in a Bloomberg-type world, where we feed on different feeds of information at the same time.

And now, we probably consume different feeds of information or entertainment from different sources at the same time, without thinking about it. When was the last time you just sat in front of the TV and watched the shows, without doing anything else?

Many people today might not even differentiate between wanting to listen to music, watch a movie or TV show, read a book or whatever – they just want to be entertained. NOW. And it’s up to the entertainment industries to go slightly manic and adjust to this new reality. And so, that is what Manic Monday will be all about! Enjoy.

Ario is a co-founder of Ohd.io, an Indonesian music streaming service. He worked in the digital music industry in Indonesia from 2003 to 2010, and recently worked in the movie and TV industry in Vietnam. Keep up with him on Twitter at @barijoe or his blog on http://barijoe.wordpress.com.