The third approach is what I call the Atavist Strategy. It’s used by successful musical throwbacks like Kid Rock, who, before October, didn’t offer his music as digital content. His new CD Rock n Roll Jesus went platinum in May—without the help of downloads. As Kid Rock’s publicist, Nick Stern, puts it, “Music labels are either conning people to pay for something they could get for free, acting like bottled-water companies, or they appeal to an older demo, like Kid Rock, to people who are not used to going on the Internet, at least for now, but do go to Wal-Mart.” The media equivalent of the Atavist Strategy? The Wall Street Journal’s subscription-only online presence, with its firewall. But tread carefully. You have to be very clever to get rich off being backward.
Another part of the Atavist Strategy is musicians getting by not on their recordings, but on live performances. Once, a band that was eternally on tour struggled daily with obscurity and/or poverty; now it’s par for the course for even the biggest artists. Similarly, authors these days try to cash in with speaking engagements. Like musicians, they want to build their brand first, as opposed to that of their company or label. Some younger journalists have learned these lessons already, and are benefiting from them (though one I spoke to compared the process to speed dating). Jennifer 8. Lee, a thirty-two-year-old New York Times reporter who recently published a nonfiction book entitled The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, tells me she has done fifty talks in support of her book in the last half year.
