Strands of Genius: Cultural Recycling, Pandemic Hobbies, Subscription Living
Strands of Genius: Cultural Recycling, Pandemic Hobbies, Subscription Living
plus our thoughts on: subscriptions
WRITING FROM | Nashville, TN
WORKING ON | Business admin (dealing with procurement, taxes, banks, etc), life admin (got vaccinated, various), workshops continue this week and a new project kick off.
LOOKING AHEAD
May 10 - June 4: Nashville, TN
June 4-9: Beersheba Springs, TN
June 9-30: TBD: Northeast…
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
And we’re back! Back online/at work - had some lovely time off, thanks, ate nice food, did some relaxing and reading, walked around, saw some art. Back in the USA - got vaccinated! Very grateful for that Jansen Jab and for Ashley who helped make it happen. We’re decompressing, sorting mail, recovering from travel and shots, sorting out life and business admin - getting fully back into the swing of things.
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
‘relatively painless’ flights with a layover, Judy, Graybar, space to decompress, vaccines, starting to make plans again, local supermarket shopping, having a car to use, big screen TVs, more stable internet access, settled stomachs, good pillows and decent sleep, brownies, ramen, some cooler weather, no mosquitoes, Lauren, Rosie’s first pedicure since pre-pandemic (she got purple toes in case you were wondering), Trader Joe’s.
S C H O O L O F S T O L E N G E N I U S >> H I G H L I G H T S
//SOSG x Joseph Kilran | Community Meet Up//
Starts (Weds) May 19, 2021 at 12:00 PM EDT
Establishing your style: 99% perspiration 1% inspiration
Are you ready to discover the creative power of processes and protocols? Developing a style takes years and dedication. But once you’re branded to your style, you feel as if you’ve deciphered the Da Vinci Code. Drawing became a relevant part of my life once I realized I could use it as a means of escape. It’s yours to call your own. Getting there is not easy, but processes and protocols help you define and establish your unique style.
About Joseph Kilran: He’s a self described “nerdy creative” with 15+ years of experience leading projects, managing critical work streams, and actively engaging business, technology, and creative stakeholders.
//SOSG May Yoga | Community Meetup//
Starts (Thurs) May 20, 2021 at 12:00 PM EDT
We hope you'll join us for our fourth community yoga session! Our instructor will be Elea Soler, and she'll be leading us in a practice designed for all levels -- meaning you're most welcome whether you're new to yoga, or have years of experience.
Enroll at http://schoolofstolengeni.us
:: THE LINKS ::
CULTURAL RECYCLING - YOU SAY YOU WANT A DEVOLUTION?
This essay by cultural critic Kurt Anderson (author of Fantasyland: How American Went Haywire: A 500 year history) covers a lot of territory to establish its core premise: “For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.” It seems spot on… even more so when you realize it was written a decade ago! (VanityFair)
PANDEMIC HOBBIES - A YEAR IN LOCKDOWN TRENDS
Google published this site showing the hobbies that trended hardest (saw the most year on year growth) on every day of the last year across a few different categories. ‘Container gardening’ is a thing…
(Google Trends)
SUBSCRIPTION LIFE - HOW SUBSCRIPTIONS TOOK OVER OUR LIVES
Subscriptions and recurring revenue bundles are extremely salient right now, in a variety of forms. The recent set of new entrants in the streaming wars led McKinsey to segment the subscription market into digital and box delivery, but this article looks at them through a different lens: emotion vs utility. Where does Patreon or Substack fit in? How many subscriptions can we handle and when will there be service that manages them all for us? (Vox)
Strands of Genius is currently read by 12,000 subscribers. Support us by sponsoring an issue, becoming a member of The School of Stolen Genius, or encouraging friends or colleagues to subscribe.
:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE ::
Like and subscribe, like and subscribe. Thanks to his ability to write catchy jingles, I now always think of podcast master Adam Buxton when I hear the expression ‘like and subscribe’. (Imagine if advertising discovered jingles!)
It’s an expression of internet culture, an appeal for support and an ongoing relationship, it was even a satirical show about influencer culture (Funny or Die).
Subscription means at least two different things here, which we should always be cautious of and consider when thinking about something - words mean different things in different contexts - communication is hard! With a digital subscription, you could be talking about subscribing to a podcast, a Youtube channel, or to this newsletter…
(…which is free and always will be.)
However, Substack has been making waves tempting mainstream media journalists from marquee titles and the papers of record into starting their own not-free newsletter media titles - a way of unbundling newspapers even further.
If paid newsletters are in the intersection, then on the other side we have subscriptions as in ‘something you pay for regularly’.
(The act of signing your name to a document is also called ‘a subscription’, but for clarity we’ll leave that alone for now, although Faris has thoughts about how weird it is the a signature is still a legal form of ID).
We don’t get any box or physical media subscriptions, for obvious* reasons (*nomadic) but we do have, like everyone else, a seemingly ever-increasing list of digital subscriptions to…things. We can probably grant that Netflix was the prime mover here (ahem). Remember when it was DVDs in the mail and NO LATE FEES was the big benefit?
They almost messed things up when they tried to split the business into two - an online and a DVD offering (Qwikstar) but the backlash was so big and immediate they changed their mind. (The DVD business has been in long term decline, for obvious reasons, but it still has more than 2million paying customers today.) The stock market’s incredible appetite for recurring revenue and a huge runway for growth was great for Netflix for a very long time. It’s only now facing any real competition in content streaming.
Netflix launched in 1997 and only started rolling out a streaming service a decade later. In the interim, Amazon launched what is arguable the most game changing subscription innovation in online commerce - Prime - in 2005.
Amazon Prime is an odd beast, a rundle - recurring revenue bundle of offerings (HT Prof Galloway) - that only makes sense because it comes from a company of many offerings. Ultimately, postage and packing costs - especially as a percentage of the price of small items - are a significant barrier to e-commerce. It’s still the biggest reason why people abandon their online shopping in the basket. Amazon removes that barrier with an annual fee and bundles in some online shows too because…. internet. Amazon recently announced they have 200 million Prime subscribers worldwide, and 147 million in USA, which is huge! And Prime members tend to shop more and spend more, making this a brilliant business idea.
Many people have had Prime and probably Netflix for so long we probably don’t think about them in the same way as other more recent entrants. There’s subscriptions for news and magazines, either for individual titles or through rundles like Apple News (which is itself part of the larger family of services rundles from Apple, like the Apple One). There’s subscription health, as in medicine, Teledoc and Talkspace, as in exercise, Peleton, Aaptiv or your local yoga studio, as in quantified health, Fitbit. There are video content subscriptions, from broad & global to local & niche. There’s supporting creators on Onlyfans or Patreon, there are the games that require subscriptions, the software you buy as a service, there’s the smoked salmon club, kindle unlimited, whichever apps you downloaded on your phone and are paying for after the trial period expired, and that random charge for…something…that you should really get around to checking or cancelling but it seems hard…
In the USA, your bank account will also often come with a monthly fee if you don’t keep above a certain balance, and might charge you a fee for your credit cards - more subscriptions! Your mobile phone and ISP bills are your internet subscription fees.
Marc Andressen is fond of saying that there are only two ways to make money in business - bundling or unbundling. Cable companies bundled up channels into a handy single box and monthly fee for you, unbundling gives you more and more finely grained choices and options, each with their own billing and customer interfaces and passwords.
Companies very much like recurring revenue, it’s great for business planning, so now every time you buy a packaged good on Amazon, the platform tries to upsell you on a subscription to batteries or whatever with a dynamically calculated discount offer. We are seeing some really big trends come to fruition here with the internet dis-intermediating traditional gatekeepers and creating direct to consumer relationship potential for anything, providing digital delivery of anything that can be digitally delivered, and logistics as a form of technology and operations that every company will have to learn how to manage. New models create new confusions for the consumer as they try to manage all these new subscriptions. It gets even harder when every other company seems like it’s trying to get into subs…
When everything is clamoring “Like and Subscribe” and you realize how many you are now managing, you begin to worry that you need keep an eye on it.
And when consumer problems emerge, new solutions do likewise to profit from solving them. Truebill allows you to connect to your bank and manage your subscriptions from their app. The premium version provides automated cancellations and smart savings features, starting at a $3 monthly subscription, of course.
Don’t forget to LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE! Send it to a friend, sign up if are that friend.
:: AND NOW… THE CANTASTORIAN CLUB ::
Do you give presentations as a key part of what you do for a living? Congratulations, you are a cantastorian, welcome to the club.
If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed
Know someone who could use some inspiration in their inbox? Send ‘em our way!
It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)