The Web Creates and Destroys Opportunity

It is 1995. In the middle of my golf game I sense a warning: things are about to change. Really? My small Atomic Porch Studio is humming along with a few music clients, plenty of industrial dialog editing work with cassette magazines INVESTOR’S HOTLINE, VALUE TALK (where I am one of the hosts) and THE LINCOLN  JOURNAL radio show giving me solid repeat business.  Plus I am playing organ at a Mass and a Protestant Service every Sunday Morning.  

1996 began with the nastiest winter I have ever encountered. When the snow melted all of this wonderful steady work dissolved.  No reflection on the quality of my work:  technology was advancing.  

The Word Wide Web kicked in and suddenly no one wanted to wait to hear a cassette with two week old stock market discussions on it. HOTLINE and VALUE TALK were shut down. THE LINCOLN JOURNAL grew to the point that they built their own studio. And the US Army decided that church services were available with in 2-3 miles of the Base. I had to agree with them on that one. 

So what was the new opportunity: THE REAL ESTATE CYBERSPACE ONLINE MAGAZINE. Jack Peckham was a very successful Industrial Real Estate Salesman in Boston. He grabbed the web and found out that he no longer needed a crew of 10 people in his office. He could accomplish more with the web in his ‘fuzzy comfortable slippers’ in his apartment building.  Cyberspace was a dialog editing project that ran from 1996 until 2010 when the Real Estate market crashed and the brand new Apple iPhone made our dialog service extinct.  

Now I find myself teaching Music Business and the Internet for the 12th year.  The Keynote slides need constant updating but I do keep some old technology on those slides (remember MYSPACE?) to demonstrate to this next generation, who were 4 years old when I started teaching this course, that technology is amazing but it will change. Stay focused. Try to identify those changing tides of technology before they knock you over.