BLOG: My Trip to London pt. 5 - 'Battersea Power Station and Digital Pink Floyd Music'

It was Sunday morning 9AM, the last day of my personal time in London. With my running shoes on I stepped out of the Tube at Sloane Square and started running. With my Runkeeper App activated to track the route, I ran over the Chelsea-bridge across the Thames and entered the Battersea Park. Lot’s of fellow runners here and families taking a walk or playing cricket on this chilly Sunday morning. Probably few had the same goal as I had. Above the trees at the horizon I already saw them: the famous chimneys of Battersea Power Station. This typical Industrial Brick Cathedral was build in the 1930’s. With the passing of time, the building is now neglected and has been out-of-service for over 30 years. 

In my early 20’s I discovered Pink Floyd music. One of their famous old albums, the 1977 ‘Animals', has the Battersea Power Station on its cover. Back than record companies were the empires in that industry that had the power over this ‘information’ (music). Granting access to this music would cost consumers a lot of money. Distribution was done only via record companies, and you as a customer where obliged to go to that store between 9 and 5 if you wanted some.

How disruptive was (and is) the digitization of information. The fact that records became data (MP3 files) meant that the whole record distribution model was superfluous overnight. I remember the first time I downloaded a Pink Floyd song using Napster, it was a miracle. Bits and bytes just streaming into my computer! Sony owned a lot of record companies and already had invented the WalkMan as a portable music player. A disruptive power out of a completely different industry however took over the music business: Apple with the launch of iPod (’10,000 songs in your pocket’) and the iTunes store.

And here I am running with my earplugs in, streaming the Animals album via Spotify over 4G wireless connection, paying € 8 a month for an ‘all-you-can-eat’ music business model 24/7. Sony is nowhere, EMI (the record company of Pink Floyd) has been diminished and was sold in 2011, record stores are closed. The Battersea Power Station looks like an old record company, disrupted by modern power supply and the roll-out of the ‘smart energy grid’. 

Has the digitization of information been disruptive for the staffing industry? Yes, of course. A vacancy is nothing more than a piece of information holding value for our candidates. For decades we made money out of that information, by distributing it via our own ‘record stores’, the branch offices. Having said that, the comparison falls short as we offer a lot more value than only distributing jobs. That’s why the upcoming of the job boards a decade ago proved to be not a threat but an opportunity. Now leading to completely centralized and digitized sourcing and recruiting.

Back to my running: it was time to stop my Runkeeper tracking. Enough about Pink Floyd for now. I’m heading back to the CitizenM to write the final blog in this series!