Since the global financial collapse I have seen a worrying trend in big business to centralise and reduce resource, designers are pulled together into regional pockets, sales teams become call centres and some skills are simply lost.

I recently read a piece from Twitter suggesting that the more you centralise the less successful any process becomes; in the piece it was demonstrated that teams of people with varying skill sets working in the same building achieved greater productivity than those within a region, so with the increasing trend to pull similar skills together I started to worry that this was destroying the chance to do our best as teams.

Let me explain, I am a designer, a creative technical mind that can produce my own designs and theories while at the same time being equally capable of bringing the ideas of others to life.  Personally, I feed from other colleagues no matter who they are; I know I am only as good as my ideas and my ideas can be constrained by my own capabilities and creative boundaries, so being able to discuss any project with others helps to free me from those constraints and improve any concepts I may already have.

This can only be done by surrounding people like myself with colleagues who have completely different skill sets, yet this is where the problem starts. Slowly but surely teams of differently skilled individuals are being removed and replaced by teams of similarly skilled individuals, these skilled teams are then all based in one place and can no longer communicate easily in a face-to-face environment with other sections of the business. Instead a meeting takes place in a conference call or emails are cascaded around to gauge opinion, any ideas put forward by others can then easily be disregarded and pushed aside during the creative process.

The popular music industry is a prime example of the separation that is happening everywhere.  Collaborating musicians never meet, the mixing is done by a team in one place while the instruments are recorded elsewhere.  This in my opinion has led to a music industry that really hasn’t managed to produce anything truly provocative and influential for the last decade at least.  Instead they keep mass-producing to a certain trend, which leaves all music of any time painfully the same.

The main culprit here is technology!  It has never been easier to communicate, share and discuss with the modern devices available to us all on a day-to-day basis, but with all the technological advances that are happening we are not communicating more, we are communicating less and I don’t think we should ever under-estimate the importance of face-to-face discussion.

Conclusion

I know that most of this is only my opinion and is not greatly backed up with ground-breaking research or examples but I work in a business where this is happening, I can see the industries and businesses around me doing the same and with that I can see that creativity is being lost.  Technology seems to me to be the only sector where there is any innovation occurring, everything else has simply started regurgitating what has gone before.

For businesses to survive and things to feel exciting they need to push boundaries, not stick to formulas, however, this appears to be happening less and less. Surely centralisation of skills can only lead to good individual skill ideas and not great team ideas.

Around eight years ago I helped a friend create both his and my first website, this became as much a labour of love for me as it has for its owner Martin Woodhead.  In the last six months we decided to get our heads together and give the site a much needed face lift both creatively and technically,  finally, we launched the almost complete site last month.

What it’s all about – in Martin’s words

Imageacoustic promote music through concerts, photography, artist management and agency work. The site is primarily focused on the photography side of things, though concert tickets can be booked from the concerts page. The photos are mainly of musicians and of landscapes and urban scenes.

In my opinion Martin is a fantastic photographer and the new site finally presents Martin’s work in a way it should always have been.

Even though the site is live, it is still a work in progress so please bear with us.  However please feel free to give us both your feedback. You can visit the website at www.imageacoustic.com

The recent court verdict regarding Pirate Bay makes me wonder if it will make any difference to the download world, this also begs a new question, whether illegal file downloads are actually damaging to the music industry like the major labels would have you believe.

I don’t think I know one person who doesn’t own some music downloaded via P2P or torrent, it has become a normal part of life for a whole generation and will only increase even though the authorities are frantically trying to strike the fear of god into people.  The Pirate Bay verdict is in my opinion futile, there are an infinite number of torrent sites offering the same services as Pirate Bay, all this recent verdict and any future verdicts will do is force change within the download community.  For example before torrent there was Peer 2 Peer, and after torrent there will be something else and so the cycle will go on.

At the heart of all this is the music labels fear of users getting MP3s for free, but hasn’t that always been the way of things, from vinyl to tape, Mini-Disc to CD  there has always and will always be a way to copy and share; what is it that makes the industry assume illegal MP3 downloads will suddenly put them out of business.  The industry lays blame for the drop in revenue on download culture but surely it could be simply that media is just more accessible and cheaper than ever before, even if downloads have increased I don’t believe for one minute that would stop people purchasing music they really like; there is just something more human about wanting to own the music you really like.

I mean, am i missing something , surely MP3 downloads are only making music more accessible? If music is more accessible then you can hear a wider range and if you can hear a wider range then I believe the user is likely to buy more music not less.  In my late teens I would purchase an album every few months, Cd’s were expensive back in the day and I wanted enough cash left to go and get blitzed at the weekend!  These days I purchase music monthly and instead of having the weekend to worry about I have a house, 3 kids and car to maintain which are not cheap, yet I purchase more regularly, the music business is missing the point I think.

The internet has always offered things for free, google are a prime example of how giving users something they want for free can make you money (they are after all one of the richest companies in the world!), and in recent years a number of bands have chosen to give fans the option to put a price on what they feel the music is worth, immediately you would expect that to be a mistake but Radio Head were said to have made more money on their recent album than their previous offering, surprising?, no not really, if you offer something for a low price then interest will be considerably bigger. A good example of offering music for free is spotify where you can listen to music through there website, although you cannot download the music to own, but you just never know what may happen.

If the authorities and industry fail to realise that free isn’t always a negative then I will start to worry for the Internet, the ethos of the web has always been the free communication and sharing of information between people, to try and control this would be to change it for ever and that will be the worst crime of all.  I am not saying that illegal downloading is right but maybe there is something in the idea of free downloads that could be controlled by the music labels, and maybe, just maybe it would increase sales and restore people’s faith in the music business.