TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

music

New musical solutions to social humans

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I’ve been reading a bit about the discussions happening at the MIDEM event taking place in Cannes at the moment, which is a big business 2 business event for the music industry.

Highlights include the fact that the bags for the event have been sponsored by Napster (as captured by Mr Herdmeister, Mark Earls).

The other highlight I’ve enjoyed is the presentation by Gerd Leonard, who is moderating the panel at which the Herdmeister is speaking.

And in the meantime, I’ve also been having my stab at the future of music, thanks to the People’s Music Store (Found via Springwise).

I’ve always been a closet librarian when it comes to collecting music in physical form, and always had a soft spot for the idea of owning my own record shop (Even before I read High Fidelity!)

It’s not completely revolutionary – basically you can set up your store, share recommendations and reviews, and anything sold through your store earns you 10% as reward points to spend on new music via the store.

Interestingly, I’ve just spotted Amazon has released an MP3 widget for affiliates, which helps you to earn a 10% fee for anyone buying someone from the store.

But the next step is also to include user-generated audio for sale.

It will be interesting to see if the People’s Music Store can emulate the feel of ‘your favourite local independent record store’ enough to differentiate itself and offer more than an affiliate mechanism.  In the meantime, I spent five minutes on the site and came up with the start of my own music store.

And there are plenty of other interesting music services out there for buying or even investing in music:

  • Amie Street
  • Sellaband
  • SliceThePie

I’m not sure I can conclude with more than starting to wonder about the filter and recommendation mechanisms, and how mainstream media might better fit the future. But the evolution of media and entertainment seems to becoming more like Moore’s Law every week, and not just in terms of technology.

Essential tools for working from the family home

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There really are two things which make it possible for me to work from home without having the money to build an office in the garden:
Sony MDR-V300 Headphones with Neodymium Magnet – Folding Design + https://www.last.fm/user/BadgerGravling

That and the fact I’ve got a bookcase partitioning me from the rest of the room and blocking the line of sight to the television (currently showing CBeebies to my partner and my 8-month old!).

Gadgets aren’t important, but tools are

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I’ve just been reflecting on a weekend visit by my parents. I’ve been lucky enough to always have a good relationship with them, especially as they’ve always had a particularly youthful taste in music and films, which means we’ve always had some common ground, and we always have a new band or film to recommend to each other.

In the old days, we’ve each end up bringing CDs and DVDs for entertainment, but things have changed:

I played them new music on Last.fm, as recommend by @stephenfry.

We watched some classic Rallycross on Youtube, which we were at when I was a child. (For the record, one of my favourite drivers and cars of all time was the black Audi Quattro of Dimi Mavropoulos, even when he was up against local hero Will Gollop. In those days, the top Rallycross cars were the awesome vehicles which had just been banned from Group B rallying for being too fast!

We looked at recent holiday pictures on Flickr.

And I helped them do some shopping on Amazon, before catching up with a TV programme on iPlayer.

The only mainstream media which we all actually shared in as a family was the original Swedish language Wallander shown on TV (and far superior to the new English-language version with Kenneth Brannagh).

And it all reminded me that laptops, digital cameras, and mobile phones are no longer ‘gadgets’. They’re tools.

A gadget is a small technological object (such as a device or an appliance) that has a particular function, but is often thought of as a novelty. Gadgets are invariably considered to be more unusually or cleverly designed than normal technology at the time of their invention. Gadgets are sometimes also referred to as gizmos. (From Wikipedia)

It’s why I don’t really care when Michael Arrington claims netbooks are underpowered, too small and hard to type on. Or Wired doing a side-by-side comparison of the specs of the Apple iPhone vs the T-Mobile G1.

The specifications of each device only matter to the geeks – the possibilities matter to everyone.

That’s why I’m so excited about the fact Barack Obama is putting investment and accesibility to broadband at the forefront of his recovery plan for the U.S. I only hope the UK’s copying of U.S. policy extends to one of the best ideas, as well as many of the worst, and one of my Christmas wishes for 2009 comes true!

It’s not about processing power or battery life – my backup laptop is old enough to have been upgraded to Windows 98, and just managed to run Open Office and the unfortunately named Gimp. But that’s more than enough for my partner to check her social networks and interact, and for me to run my blogs, do my dayjob, and keep up with everything.

Snow shovel by cindy47452 on Flickr (CC Licence)
Snow shovel by cindy47452 on Flickr (CC Licence)

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and enthusiasm of obsessing over every minute detail when it comes to technology. The iPhone, N97 or G1 show what’s at the cutting edge, but the INQ is at a more accessible price – and the content and value of your emails will be the same whichever device you use.

You can use Myspace, Blogger or WordPress to write a blog, and the message will have the same value (even if I’d always recommend a hosted WordPress blog!).

It’s all about what you’re doing with what is available that counts. Especially if your budget buying is being cut back at the moment – don’t worry about what you can’t afford, but figure out how to maximise what you can do with what you’ve got.

And remember, the days of broadband, a laptop, or an internet-enabled mobile phone being just a gadget are over.

Will this be the Christmas of the MP3? Or could convergence save record shops?

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With some time to kill before a meeting, I took the chance to browse round the Oxford Street branch of HMV, looking for inspiration for what to buy with a gift voucher I’ve had kicking around, and also to get ideas for Christmas presents.

Aside from reminding me how difficult it can be to find unusual items in even the largest stores (in fact it’s usually easier in the small secondhand record shops I spent much of my music budget in), I also felt something a bit different about the experience. I’m not sure whether it’s the credit crunch, the success of online retailers or the rise of the MP3 but the shop felt slightly emptier than I’d have expected – and the average age seemed slightly older than usual.

The only major exception was the ever-expanding videogames section. Could this be the fact full console games are still viable as a physical product? (Not many options to download a full game, and the filesize would be bigger than the monthly data allowance for a lot of people!) Certainly I got the anecdotal impression that without the videogame section, the average age of the shoppers would be 10 years higher than I’ve ever seen – or maybe I’m just noticing more…

Coincidentally, via PaidContent and Media Guardian comes the news that 32.1 million MP3 players were sold in the UK last year. Jemima Kiss points out, quite rightly, that the title is a bit misleading – 75% of the sales included were MP3 capable mobile phones – but the important point is that 90% of mobiles sold last year were MP3 capable. Whether or not they’re actually being used for MP3 consumption is almost secondary – the point is that a huge mass of people now have the opportunity to be converted at any moment.

I’m not sure that CD player sales dropping to 8 million last year is necessarily related – after all, CD players have been around long enough to have reached saturation point – but if the money drops out of manufacturing CD players, and sales are growing in those little devices that make phonecalls, take pictures and video, surf the web and play MP3s, it’s another challenge to providers and retailers of physical content.

Why would I pust through a packed Oxford Street to experience agoraphobia in a massive store populated by those 10+ years older than me, and then fail to find my ideal purchase without ordering it – particularly when its so closely linked to lifestyle?

Funnily enough, I have seen a packed record shop recently – in Malmo in Sweden. And I wish I’d grabbed a picture, because it wasn’t just records – it was the 50’s style in store cafe.

I realise this has been a bit of a meandering post, but perhaps the takeaway conclusion is this:

Mobile phones are a triumph of convergence to provide value. Convergence is also increasingly happening with living room technology and online applications. Perhaps in a time-starved culture, more retailers need to look at how they could use convergence to build engagement and loyalty in the real world, as much as online? After all, it’s a reason why supermarkets and department stores have continued to have cafes instore. So why can’t record stores look at food and drink, live events, introducing art, photography, specific genre nights, or other ways to hook into the tribes who don’t have a reason to support them anymore?

Are we still debating whether music can be free?

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I just read the piece by Mark Mulligan (of Jupiter Research), reposted on PaidContent, on Why Music Can’t ‘Just Be Free’, and I have to say I disagree almost entirely (As you can see in my comment on the bottom of the PaidContent article).

As I realised in writing that comment, ‘Copyright is a byproduct of the business model put on content creation – not the reason that content was created’. Mark points to the introduction of copyright for music at 150 years ago, but music, and music-derived revenues, existed for far longer pre-copyright than after it.

And this is in no way suggesting that content creators of any kind should not be able to be rewarded for their work. I’ve spent almost a decade writing for a living, so I’m very appreciative of the money it created – but I’m also aware that it’s a priviledge, rather than a creative right, and that it’s necessary to find the most appropriate ways to derive value from content creation within the current environment.

The issue of revenue is probably the hardest, but there are more and more examples of revenue from freemium options, live gigs, merchandise etc coming all the time.

The easier point to remove is the idea that if content is free, we’ll be inundated with rubbish and won’t be able to filter out the good stuff. If that were true, there would be no head to The Long Tail, no A-list of bloggers, and I’d be making as much money as Techcrunch.

And that content creation is not driven by revenue – Wikipedia is just the biggest example.

On the plus side, paidcontent also had some interesting quotes from a Billboard interview with EMI which shows a lot of more promising developments.

  1. EMI was the first major to try dropping DRM.
  2. Focus not on sales
  3. Regaining innovation

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