Take a look at this concert calendar. It’s personalized for me, pops up in iTunes, and makes it really easy for me to keep up with both concerts by artists in my iTunes library and new music released by those artists.
I’ve had the iConcertCal plug-in running inside iTunes for a couple of years now, and while finding the calendar isn’t easy enough (see the menus? “View/Visualizer/iConcertCal?” REALLY?), the other thing that iConcertCal does is when I play music in iTunes by an artists with some piece of upcoming information, it pops up a reminder. It’s really pretty cool.
But because the full-on calendar is called up in an unintuitive way, and because I listen to music on my iPod (or even on my SmartPhone) most of the time rather than in iTunes on my computer, I almost never see this information. So the business change that the inventors of iConcerCal created has already passed me—and them—by.
No problem! there’s an iPhone app for iConcertCal, and a version of iConcertCal for Android phones. They’re back in the game, baby!
But wait! What if I want more generic information about my favorites musical artists? Maybe concert and album release dates aren’t the only news I care about. What do I do then?
I chase my tail some more, by using an App like Bandito. Well, OK, I don’t, since to this point Bandito is iPhone-only and I’m an Android guy. I’ve made my point, though, right? There are all kinds of extra tools that bands can use to promote thir activities and their fans can use to get information … and those tools really work.
But they aren’t obvious and aren’t promoted directly. Artists rely on the Banditos and iConcertCals of the world to get their messages out, and the makers of those add-on pieces of software rely on other software or phone platforms to make their software work. This is real business change. This is Coopetition.
Coopetition is the way things work now. No, of course you don’t really want that; you want all the business you can lay your hands on, not only part, right?
But Coopetition is what’s driving growth and business change.
We recently started doing business with a large company in the music business. They were amazed that I had garnered the number one Google Ranking for the phrase “Axl Rose Business“, until I explained that doing that was a way to make our skills at Search Engine Optimization stand out in the real world. I guess it didn’t hurt that we rank almost as high for “Mick Jagger Business” and do pretty well for Grateful Dead Business, as well. But much as I’d love to do business with Axl Rose, Mick Jagger, or the Grateful Dead, I don’t; my connection to them is one I’ve created, just as iConcertCal and Bandito have created connections to many musical artists.
Who knew? Coopetition actually creates new business opportunities. And you thought it meant settling for a smaller piece of the pie, didn’t you?
Trackbacks/Pingbacks