Outsourcing part 3

Before any company should decide to outsource parts of it's business (processes) to another company, one should think first about what it is that makes up their business. What makes you the money and where does your core competence lie? This internal assessment is vital for the decision making process  and should be done without fooling yourself with what you think you are good at. The other aspect is your competitive edge, what makes you win the battle with your competition. In the business we are in one could argue that having a proprietary infrastructure would create an edge over competitors. Imagine DHL would build their own roads. I believe in the entertainment industries the edge is the ability to create great experiences/products. So the differentiator would be the ability to  gain exclusive access to the people that create and help them develop their potential. The infrastructure to get  creations out to the ears and eyes of the audiences would be secondary. Having said that I also think that within a shared infrastructure companies should be able to develop an edge over competitors by making smarter use of the shared infrastructure. Like no other industry my observation in the music/entertainment industry is that people make the difference. Their ability to collaborate, discover, communicate, network and so on. It takes a great deal of collaboration to align all the different possibilities to reach the audience and make it stick. Andrew Dubber is spot on with his Hear, Like and Buy dynamic. This is how this game works best and this is what should be the focus of any company creating entertainment with the purpose of making a living out of it. Create stuff people like,  engage them with it via every possible channel and have a mechanism to get paid once people like and buy what they want. It's not rocket science, but it's getting more complex now people can go everywhere at any given time. Every day I discover new species in the media industry eco system and they all relate to each other in one way or another. How to create a healthy environment where every species is using resources in the most optimum way? My believes are that outsourcing of the supply chain to an independent entity is the way to go frwd and makes business easyer to every species in the eco system. All can rely on the infrastructure and when it needs work to deal with the new conditions evolving as a natural result of evolution in any eco system the species can rely on the latest technologies and methods to get their creations to audiences everywhere. Maybe I am becoming too philosophic, but that's just the way my brain works. I always try to take everything into account in thinking about the word that surrounds me. More thoughts to come..