How To Be Creative

February 26, 2010 by Leave a Comment

In today’s world, being creative is a requirement. Don’t you think so? The good thing is that everyone was born creative. The bad thing is that things like school (and 8-4-4) often steal our creativity. Hugh MacLeod’s How To Be Creative is a book that teaches you how to get back your creativity. Do you want to be creative? Download the book below.

Hugh doesn’t teach you how to come up with your big idea, nor is the book a collection of theories on what makes something innovative. Rather, Hugh’s rules teach a mindset conducive to pushing great ideas to their logical conclusions. This book won’t teach you how to paint, but if you’re lucky you’ll come away with the mental frame you need to avoid having the outside world crush your creativity.

My favorite line from the book: The more original your idea is, the less good advice people will be able to give you.

Download it here: [download id=”27″]

Hugh MacLeod is a brand consultant, copywriter and cartoonist. Born in America but educated in the UK, he has spent most of his life shuttling between the two countries. He started out in straight TV advertising writing in the early 90s but with the advent of new media it evolved into new brand thinking and cultural transformation. His website, http://gapingvoid.com, is widely read in the blogosphere.

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Starting An Online Record Label

February 25, 2010 by 10 Comments

How much do you think local musicians earn from their music? I bet it is pretty low. Perhaps that is why musicians in our part of the world have full time jobs. As a musician, when you give your song or album to a local record label such as Ogopa Deejays, or Calif Records…how much do you earn? How much do they earn?

I believe that all artists should have affordable access to all channels of music distribution, get all of the money generated from the sale of their music, and all without giving up any of their master recording ownership, copyrights, merchandise rights, live performance income, public performance royalties or any other rights or money. Do you share my beliefs?

So recently I helped a friend (a musician) set up online. He made a sale yesterday. A Swedish couple, in Sweden, liked his album, and bought it. My friend emailed me saying, “you should start an online record company.” I actually have thought about that for quite a while. I know for sure that our local artistes have a far better chance of earning from their music online than through the local market. Blame piracy.

Is there need for an online record company? Well, look at it this way…if I was a musician and I found out that I can quit my day job and focus on my music, I would jump at the opportunity! Would you? The bigger issue is whether there is a market for Kenyan music online. More research needs to be done on this but I do feel there is a large and untapped market for anyone’s (not just Kenyan) music online.

What would it take to start an online record company? I do not know. But as with all good ideas that I have, I shall share my thoughts with you, dear readers.

First and foremost, one needs to know how to market online. You shall be taking the hopes and dreams of people and you shall be responsible for their success or failure. You need to know how to build an online presence, nurture it and grow it. This requirement means that, currently, not many Kenyan are qualified to start an online record label.

Secondly, one needs to understand how to market music online. Apart from setting up the artist’s website, blog, etc etc one must be able to actually find a market for the music, and then sell it. The most obvious places to sell seem to be places like: iTunes, Amazon MP3, Zune Marketplace, Rhapsody, eMusic, etc. One should also understand the more indirect methods of selling – for example, one American band famously gave away all their songs free on MySpace. They then went on a tour of the USA, and had live – well paying – shows in almost every town, big or small. Despite being a small unknown band, almost all their shows were well attended. It turns out almost everyone knew of them and liked their music (they got it free).

Looking at the two requirements above, I would say that, really, all a prospective online music label needs to have people who know the Internet; people how know marketing and, above all else, people who are creative and are not afraid to to do new and different things. Could this be you?

Let’s be honest, some music is harder to sell than others. If I had an online record label, I would find ways to work with only those musicians whose music inspires or impresses me. One would think that the best way to run the business would be to accept all musicians. I be to differ. Perhaps you can offer certain limited services to every other musician but I believe real success can only be achieved if you work with musicians who you believe in. Marketing is challenging, online marketing even more so. if you do not believe in what you are trying to market, then you will not market it so well.

Finally, my type of online music record label would be creative in how it charges its musicians. I believe that musicians deserve 100% of all their royalties, copyrights, merchandise rights, and any other rights. Instead of charging a commission on the royalties, for example, I’d charge a small annual fee (depending on how much work I do for them).

Does this make sense to anyone? Discuss below, let’s start an online music record label, shall we?

Photo by Shankar, Shiv.

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No Balls, No Babies

February 13, 2010 by 5 Comments

You know something? If you really want to achieve something, then the only one who can help you achieve it is you. The buck stops at you, you are responsible for the achievement of your own goals and dreams.

I met Hottie today. For those who do not know her, she is a promising local musician. What struck me about her was her passion for what she does, and her ambition. She told me a story of how she once pushed her producers, not wanting to settle for anything less than perfection, until she was 100% satisfied with a song she was doing. That particular song ultimately earned her a Kisima Awards nomination. Nice, eh? I could tell that she will go far in her career just by listening to her.

What do you want to do with your life? Where do you want to see your business grow to? Most importantly, who do you think will help you achieve all that? I do not know if you know this, but the power to achieve all that you want lies with no one but yourself. Just believe in yourself and in your abilities. Don’t you know the story of a black man from a third world country who became the president of one of the most powerful nations in the world? You have to believe that you can do it.

And belief bring courage; and courage brings success. What do you want to do? Whatever it is, you better get off your behind and do it. No one is going to do it for you.

As the saying goes, if you don’t have balls, then you won’t make any babies…

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Pumzi – A Kenyan Sci-Fi

January 26, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Pumzi, Kenya’s first science fiction film, imagines a dystopian future 35 years after water wars have torn the world apart. East African survivors of the ecological devastation remain locked away in contained communities, but a young woman in possession of a germinating seed struggles against the governing council to bring the plant to Earth’s ruined surface.

The short film, which will screen at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “started off as a small script about what kind of world we would have to be if we had to buy fresh air,” writer/director Wanuri Kahiu told Wired.com in a Skype interview.

Read More.

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Mind Your Own Business

January 20, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Some people say a man is made out of mud
A poor man’s made out of muscle and blood
Muscle and blood, skin and bones…
A mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store

Those are lyrics to an old Country & Western song done by Merle Travis. You can listen to the song here.

The song talks about the tough life of a coal miner way back then. It vividly depicts a feeling of being trapped, as such, “You load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.” Life sure was tough back then, eh? What about today? Have things changed?

Kenyans are renown for their hard work and dedication. But we got to ask ourselves, who are we working for? If you pour your heart into your work and work extended hours and weekends, who stands to gain the most? In his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert T Kiyosaki gives this advice, “Mind your own business“. Simply put, this means: stop enriching your employer and start working for yourself!

Do you think, honestly, your boss cares about how much money you make? Does she sit and worry if you can afford to pay your child’s fees? Does she care? See, she is minding her own business and you are very important, because you make her wealthier. Maybe its time you started making yourself wealthier.

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Facebook: The Age of Privacy is Over

January 11, 2010 by 2 Comments

In an interview with Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spent a while talking about Facebook’s privacy policy. The gist of his talk was that the “age” of privacy is over. This is part of what he said:

“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’

“And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

“We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

I don’t know about you, but what he said sounds a lot like BS to me. The guys over at ReadWriteWeb share my view.

I came to Facebook from Myspace specifically because Facebook allowed me more control over my privacy. Now, Facebook has changed its privacy policy so much that I cannot make some things private. Why would they do this? I don’t buy the official explanation – methinks that Facebook are looking for two things: more money, and more control.

What do you think?

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Unemployment In Kenya

January 5, 2010 by Leave a Comment

It’s a shame, isn’t it?

We help run Kazi360, which is a job board and career resource website for young professionals in Kenya. The website is still very young and has a long way to go before we consider it “successful” but it does already have quite a number of users. We attribute this to the sad fact that a large number of Kenyans are looking for jobs.

So recently I advertised a job opening on behalf of someone that I know. I set up the job ad and was subsequently responsible for screening the applicants. To be honest, I did not expect the number of applicants to be more than a few – the job was one of those low-salary affairs. But I was wrong. The response was much more than I expected to the point where I wish I had not signed up to do the screening on my own.

You know what, though? More than half the respondents were university graduates, some with Masters degrees and years of experience. The potential employer was hoping to get someone who had not been to university but what do you do when you have so many wonderfully qualified people wanting your low pay job? I’m sure anyone else who has tried looking for employees has come across this phenomenon, ama?

What does this say about our country Kenya? 🙁 We have so many graduates who are languishing in unemployment and dead end low pay jobs. How do we change this? A couple of months ago I was visiting my auntie who lives in Buru Buru. It was a certain Wednesday – a full working day. Friends, as I was walking down the Buru streets, I could not believe my eyes – there were young people all over the places. What were these youth doing idle when they should be at work, or at school? It turns out that most of them had finished college/university but just didn’t have any jobs. I am sure this doesn’t happen only in Buru Buru. The surest sign of trouble in any country is when you find the majority of the youth just….idle. 🙁

What can we do? One of my favorite solutions is encouraging people to go out on their own, to start their own businesses. Don’t sit on that pavement and wait for “the man” to give you a job, go out and get your own thing up and running! It is not that hard, trust me. Do you know that we started Like Chapaa with less than Kshs 5,000 capital? Why, exactly, can’t you start your own thing?

Here’s where you can start, quick:

So, what are you starting? How can we help?

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