Entries tagged with “music” from Tools of Change for Publishing
Lessons from Digital Disruption in the Music Business
Andrew Savikas
October 29, 2009
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Last week's On The Media (mp3 download here) devoted the full program to challenges and changes during the past decade or so in the music business -- from the unanswered legal questions about sampling (check out Girl Talk for the genre taken to the extreme) to the shifting economics of concert tickets and promotion to the changing role of industry rankings like Billboard's Hot 100. (Fun fact I picked up while listening: more than 8.5 billion songs have been sold via iTunes.)
My favorite segment was near the end, about the changing nature of the relationship between artists and fans, a segment called "Why I'm not Afraid to Take Your Money" which featured a great interview with Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls:
Everyone has to stop thinking there is an answer. The answer is, there's an infinite number of answers.
People don't love music any less. There might be a lot less money out there in the industry, but maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the fact that the live industry is tanking to a certain degree means that ticket prices are now going to be reasonable. As far as the music is concerned, maybe it ups the ante. If you're a teenager with a dream of being a rock star, maybe you'll really think about why. Were you doing this to be rich and famous or are you doing this because you really love music and you want to connect with people, and you'll do it even if it just means you make a living wage? If that's true, I'm - you know, I'm a fan of the new system.
Content is a Service Business
Andrew Savikas
July 13, 2009
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I've been a fan of Trent Reznor's music since first hearing Pretty Hate Machine in junior high school, but in the past few years I've been increasingly impressed by his attitude and approach to the economics of the modern digital media business. His release of Ghosts I-IV is a case study in how to do exactly what Kevin Kelly outlines in Better than Free : "When copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied." Notice that even though the Free Download option is right there at the top, the $300 "ultra-deluxe" version is sold out (and was sold out within 24 hours of being released).
On his forum a few days ago, Reznor posted advice to aspiring young musicians eager to make it in the music business, and the advice is just as applicable to writers and other artists working in almost any digital medium and attempting to compete with the vast content available on the Web:
[W]hat you NEED to do is this - give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people's email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special - make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan. Make a premium download available that includes high-resolution versions (for sale at a reasonable price) and include the download as something immediately available with any physical purchase. Sell T-shirts. Sell buttons, posters... whatever. [emphasis added]
This is not just about using free digital content to sell physical goods. It's an acknowledgment that what you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight "qualities that can't be copied": Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include "content." The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, "protecting" it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying.
Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business. Look at iTunes: if people paid for content, then it would follow that better content would cost more money. But every song costs the same. Why would people pay the same price for goods of (often vastly) different quality? Because they're not paying for the goods they're paying Apple for the service of providing a selection of convenient options easy to pay for and easy to download.
This is not new to digital content. Why would the price of admission to see a given year's Razzie Award winner be equivalent to the price of admission to see the year's Best Picture? Because the price of admission is not for the content. It's for the privilege of seeing it early, and doing so on a big screen in a social environment -- movie patrons pay for the service provided by the theater, not for the movies themselves (here's a counterpoint on movie pricing). That's the point that Reznor and Kelly are making: think long and hard about what your customers want, and provide the service of giving that to them.[1]
"But people are still buying content when they buy a book or an album," the argument goes. Yes, they are. The same way that you're buying food when you go to a restaurant. You are purchasing calories that your body will convert to energy. But few restaurants (especially those you visit frequently) have ingredients any different from those you can get yourself at the corner store, for much less money. So it can't be true that your primary goal is to purchase food; you're purchasing a meal, prepared so you don't have to, cleaned up so you don't have to, and done so in a pleasing and convenient atmosphere. You are paying for the preparation of the food and the experience of eating it in the restaurant, not the food itself [2] (beyond the raw cost of the physical ingredients, which in the case of digital content is effectively zero).
This came up during a discussion on Peter Brantley's email list recently, in the context of what someone is paying for when they buy one of our Cookbooks (which contain "Recipes" for how to accomplish specific tasks with a particular computer language or technology, often culled and curated from material and techniques previously published in blog posts, mailing lists, or help forums). I asserted that rather than the content itself, people are paying for the preparation of that content, to the extent that it helps them solve their problems more quickly and conveniently. When you think about what we do as a service business, then it makes perfect sense: readers are paying us for the service of finding a bunch of great and interesting stuff, and putting it together in a convenient package. It's the convenience of not having to find it themself, and the concise package that saves them from having to dig through a bunch of web bookmarks or search results. I didn't buy "Home Buying for Dummies" last year because I wanted a book on home buying; I bought it because I didn't want to screw up something really important (buying a house) and was willing to pay someone to spell out all of the stuff I needed to worry about in one place. People don't buy Jim Cramer's books because they want Jim Cramer's content -- they buy his books because they think it will help them get rich, and they think paying him is a great shortcut alternative to acquiring his knowledge (knowledge, not "content") themselves. These are services, not products.
The recent (and absurd) notion put forward by European publishers to "strengthen copyright protection as a way to lay the groundwork for new ways to generate revenue online" is intimately tied up with this issue of the value of content (and therefore the value of various players in the content value chain, like authors, publishers and the latest bogeyman, aggregators and search engines). Arguing that you need to beef up copyright protection to make sure there are ways to generate revenue online incorrectly assumes that what people are paying for is the copyrighted content itself. People do not care about content, they care about themselves and their problems.
You don't get an "A" for effort just by spending time and money creating content (and you are not entitled to your business model -- you have to earn that money every day by doing something that people find worth paying for -- and they decide it's worth paying for, not you). Content only has value to the extent that someone will pay for it because it accomplishes something they'd rather exchange money for than do themselves -- and when was the last time you said "Gee, I really need some content. I could write some of it for myself to read today, but I'd rather pay someone else to do it." [3] Google and other aggregators haven't stolen any value from the creators of the content they are aggregating -- they have done what intermediaries have always done, which is create new value based on doing for customers what those customers cannot or do not want to do themselves -- the service of sorting through all that content to find the thing that solves their problem. (I use "problem" loosely -- it may be boredom, loneliness, a tax audit, an idea for a first date,...) Again I'll return to Kevin Kelly, who elucidated the role of aggregators in relation to content creators far more eloquently than I ever could:
The giant aggregators such as Amazon and Netflix make their living in part by helping the audience find works they love. They bring out the good news of the "long tail" phenomenon, which we all know, connects niche audiences with niche productions. But sadly, the long tail is only good news for the giant aggregators, and larger mid-level aggregators such as publishers, studios, and labels. The "long tail" is only lukewarm news to creators themselves. But since findability can really only happen at the systems level, creators need aggregators. This is why publishers, studios, and labels (PSL) will never disappear. They are not needed for distribution of the copies (the internet machine does that). Rather the PSL are needed for the distribution of the users' attention back to the works. From an ocean of possibilities the PSL find, nurture and refine the work of creators that they believe fans will connect with. Other intermediates such as critics and reviewers also channel attention. Fans rely on this multi-level apparatus of findability to discover the works of worth out of the zillions produced. There is money to be made (indirectly for the creatives) by finding talent. For many years the paper publication TV Guide made more money than all of the 3 major TV networks it "guided" combined. The magazine guided and pointed viewers to the good stuff on the tube that week. Stuff, it is worth noting, that was free to the viewers. There is little doubt that besides the mega-aggregators, in the world of the free many PDLs will make money selling findability -- in addition to the other generative qualities.
I love his metaphor of the internet machine ("a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly"), and it's one worth keeping in mind if you think you're in the business of selling "content," because you are probably wrong.
Update: Jim Lichtenberg kindly reminded me he gave a presentation [PPT] on the same topic at the 2008 TOC Conference. Worth a read.
1. Many publishers have actually been doing the same thing for years with hardcover, trade, and mass-market editions of the exact same content at different prices.
2. This is why celebrity chefs aren't particularly worried that doing TV shows and selling cookbooks describing exactly how to make the food they serve in their restaurants will harm business.
3. There are people who do in fact want to pay someone to write content for them as a service. They're called publishers.
History Repeating with Book Publishing's Mobile Efforts
Peter Brantley
December 10, 2008
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A Computerworld blog post from Mike Elgan looks at recent mobile announcements from book publishers. From the perspective of technology, watching book publishers slowly grapple with the tentative migration of books to mobile platforms is painful. Interestingly, the comments attached to the piece are almost all more conservative.
The music industry was holding on to physical CD sales so tightly that they let Apple run away with control over digital distribution and the future of their industry.
It looks like the book publishing industry is about to do the same thing.
Publishing industry: The book isn't the paper. It's the content! Why don't you understand your own product?
What Cookbook Publishers Can Learn from the Music Industry
Mac Slocum
November 4, 2008
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The similarities between the music and book industries tend to diverge when you examine the smallest possible component of each format: unlike songs, book chapters aren't usually self contained.
But recipes are a different matter. A recent story in the New York Times looks at the upcoming Web site, Cookstr, which aims to catalog recipes from top chefs:
Cookstr, which will be supported by advertising revenues, will aggregate recipes from published cookbooks. All of the authors will have their own pages, with biographies, links to recipes and books, and in the case of restaurant chefs, links to their locations on Google maps.
Cookstr isn't blazing new trails here: All Recipes, Epicurious, Big Oven, FoodNetwork.com and other Web outlets have built their sites around aggregation of individual recipes. But there's still a silo-based mentality in play because recipes are only free to roam within the boundaries of each site. This is equivalent to a record company only making songs available through its own proprietary service. As we've seen with the success of iTunes, YouTube and most recently through Hulu, users flock to platforms that replace traditional boundaries with massive catalogues of material. Shoehorning content and users into a specific channel rarely works on the Web (iTunes is the exception), so the record labels eventually moved toward wide distribution across multiple platforms.
There are key differences between songs and recipes -- paid downloads vs. free text content most notable among them -- but a variation on the song model might work for recipes: sell advertising against publisher-owned recipe pages; allow standalone recipes to disperse with attached branding and pull-back opportunities; and use increased attention from wider distribution to deliver related products with built-in scarcity, such as traditional cookbooks, custom books, curated collections, cooking classes and events.
TOC Recommended Reading
Mac Slocum
September 25, 2008
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Direct-To-Fan: Radiohead, Marillion And The End Of Labels (Robert Andrews, paidContent.org)
80s rock group Marillion, hardly a Top 10 draw nowadays, engages its fans so closely that they funded its latest album to the tune of £360,000. Erik Nielsen, who masterminded the strategy as MD of Marillion's Intact Records business arm, told our London EconMusic conference: "About a decade ago, we set out to release the bonds of the record companies over the artists. We worked out that we needed 5,000 fans to finance an album - when 12,000 did, we thought 'well, we can do this now'. We've continued to do that since 1999." By releasing the digital version of that album specifically on to P2P networks this month - "just to see what might happen, because we knew it was going to happen anyway" - the band has tripled its normal sales of physical deluxe copies.
State of the Blogosphere: The How of Blogging (Technorati)
One in four bloggers spends ten hours or more blogging each week. The most influential bloggers are even more prolific. Using Technorati Index data, we analyzed the posting and tagging behaviors of bloggers according to their Technorati Authority. Over half of the Technorati top authority bloggers post five or more times per day, and they are twice as likely to tag their blog posts compared to other bloggers.
Why the Financial Times can charge for metered content (Jason Preston, Eat Sleep Publish)
Those people who are just passing through and "joining the conversation" can be given free access, while those people who are your actual customers will be asked to pay for their content. By metering their content instead of simply throttling it like the New York Times did, FT is able to keep their content out from behind a wall while still charging for it. [Emphasis included in original post.]
Amazon and Google Challenging iTunes through Mobile
Mac Slocum
September 23, 2008
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T-Mobile's Android-based mobile phone will include a connection to Amazon's MP3 store. From Wired's Listening Post:
Owners of the device will be able to browse, search, preview and purchase music on the Amazon MP3 store using the phone's cellular connection. In order for purchased MP3s to download, the phone must be connected via Wi-Fi. (The mobile iTunes store, on the other hand, remains completely offline without WiFi.)
Report: Radiohead Experiment Yields Indirect Success
Mac Slocum
August 4, 2008
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Much of the analysis around Radiohead's "pay what you like" experiment focused on the average price paid for the band's 2007 release, In Rainbows. But a new research report (PDF) from the MCPS-PRS Alliance takes a different approach:
... did the project succeed in diverting traffic away from venues where the band receives nothing, and towards a venue where it could receive something, be it the currency of cash or (at least) an email address?
Will Page and Eric Garland, the authors of the report, offer a two-part conclusion. First, luring people away from their chosen outlets is a significant challenge:
The venue hypothesis suggests that even when the price approaches zero, all other things being equal, people are more likely to act habitually (say, using The Pirate Bay) than to break their habit (say, visiting www.InRainbows.com). The implication of this 'venue hypothesis' is that if you wish the customer to deviate from his habitual action (and try a new venue), then you must offer him an improved venue, at least in his perception. [Emphasis included in report.]
Second, the massive publicity Radiohead received from the experiment likely diverted some customers from file sharing sites. In this case, "some" traffic diversion is enough to claim success:
Let's break it down real simple and treat torrent sites like a local bar, where curious consumers can enter and leave a venue of their choice anonymously, and found 'In Rainbows' to be the guest ale at the time -- and popular it was too, more popular than going anywhere else, like visiting the brewery where it originated from. Whilst the stand alone brewery did lots of new business thanks to the promotion, all the bars up and down the country did even more business. Hence the twist to our answer -- in that it is possible to redirect traffic back to your site, as well as bring new addition traffic to the torrents.
It's a murky outcome, to be sure, but Eliot Van Buskirk from Wired's Listening Post says publicity from Radiohead's experiment and the exposure In Rainbows received via official and unofficial downloads helped propel the band's traditional album and ticket sales:
All of this torrenting of In Rainbows contributed to the album making such a big impression on a listening public that's bombarded with an ever-increasing amount of information. Without its album being so widely traded, would Radiohead's album have shot to the top of the charts? Would their worldwide tour be such a smashing success? ... Not necessarily, says the report, and we agree.
Sorting through these types of reports is an arduous process because the permutations and relationships within the file sharing universe work against firm conclusions. Nonetheless, there are key takeaways:
- Page and Garland's "venue hypothesis" is worth serious consideration in any file sharing experiment. Depending on the desired outcome (i.e. general publicity vs. trackable/marketable data), going where the people already are could be smarter than luring an audience to a new destination.
- A "rising tide lifts all boats" gameplan isn't ideal, but it's suitable when you're up against an inherently murky landscape.
- Finally, the quality of the content is, and always will be, the driver of interest. Alternative distribution boosted awareness for In Rainbows, but chart success and sold out concerts were the end results of good material. Put another way: attention is most valuable when consumers bond with the content.
News Roundup: Foldable E-Reader Coming Soon, New "Libraries" Bring New Privacy Issues, Analyst: Digital Change Targets TV and Film
Mac Slocum
July 11, 2008
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Foldable E-Reader Launching in Europe This Fall, U.S. in '09
The New York Times takes a look at the Readius foldable e-reader:
... the Readius, designed mainly for reading books, magazines, newspapers and mail, is the size of a standard cellphone. Flip it open, though, and a screen tucked within the housing opens to a 5-inch diagonal display. The screen looks just like a liquid crystal display, but can bend so flexibly that it can wrap around a finger. (Continue reading)
New "Libraries" Bring New Privacy Implications
As Google, Amazon and others become de facto digital libraries -- and lawsuits emerge -- Jeff Jarvis wonders what this means for users' privacy. From BuzzMachine:
Any site with content -- Google, Amazon, a newspaper, a blog, an ISP -- is now the moral equivalent of a library or bookstore, two institutions that try hard not to hand over information on what content we seek and consume arguing that that would violate our First Amendment rights. The controversy in the telco immunity legislation is that those searches were made without warrants. In this case [Viacom/YouTube], there is a warrant. When I ran sites, we got subpoenas all the time and handed over IP addresses when ordered; that was company policy. I always found it troubling and as a result ordered that we would change our data retention policy and get rid of IP addresses as soon as possible. Should Google and other sites erase IPs and rely only on cookies without personally identifiable information?
Analyst: Digital Disruption Has TV and Film in Crosshairs
In the wake of Lehman analyst Anthony DiClemente downgrading a wide swath of the entertainment industry, paidContent.org provides some blunt analysis:
Boiled down, the core argument is basically: You saw what happened to the music industry and the dramatic fall-off in CD prices. You've seen what's happened to the broadcast TV and newspaper industries. Now it's time for it to happen to TV and filmed entertainment. Hopes that digital revenue might somehow make up for lost physical sales are misguided, he [DiClemente] says, and again, you just have to look back at the music industry. (Continue reading)
Last.fm Cuts Artists in on Ad Revenue
Mac Slocum
July 9, 2008
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Last.fm is sharing ad revenue with with bands through its new Artist Royalty Program. From Wired's Listening Post:
Bands and labels that register (or already registered) will start accruing money into Last.fm accounts whenever their music is streamed from the site as of today [7/9/08]. The company already pays artists through rights organizations, including SoundExchange, but this new plan allows artists to receive direct payment for their music being streamed without joining ...
As Wired notes, some bands are embracing an aggregate model that pulls in multiple revenue streams from a variety of sources -- concerts, merchandise, album sales, licensing, etc. A program like Last.fm's rev share won't replace past royalties (those are dwindling or already gone), but it could contribute to a multi-pronged, diversified income.
Writers can employ similar strategies by mixing revenue from traditional outlets (books, columns, teaching, conferences) with ad and affiliate income via blogs and podcasts.
Analyst: Digital Disruption Has TV and Film in Crosshairs
Mac Slocum
July 8, 2008
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In the wake of Lehman analyst Anthony DiClemente downgrading a wide swath of the entertainment industry, paidContent.org provides some blunt analysis:
Boiled down, the core argument is basically: You saw what happened to the music industry and the dramatic fall-off in CD prices. You've seen what's happened to the broadcast TV and newspaper industries. Now it's time for it to happen to TV and filmed entertainment. Hopes that digital revenue might somehow make up for lost physical sales are misguided, he [DiClemente] says, and again, you just have to look back at the music industry.
During a conference call, DiClemente also touched on the growing issue of rentals vs. purchases. From CNBC:
"Owning a collection of movies in this new digital world is really just not that cool for young adults in the target demographic that we look to for the future of the business," DiClemente said.
Rhapsody Courts Apple Crowd with DRM-Free MP3s
Mac Slocum
June 30, 2008
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Rhapsody, a digital music subscription service, is now offering MP3 downloads with no digital rights management (DRM) restrictions.
Rhapsody's subscription service remains under digital rights protection, but Reuters says the company is looking to expand its reach into the Apple-dominated music sector by making its downloads compatible with iPods.
Amazon, Wal-Mart and Napster also offer DRM-free MP3 downloads, but to date no company has challenged Apple's iPod/iTunes model. An industry analyst offers Reuters one potential explanation for Apple's dominance, and it has nothing to do with DRM:
[Apple's] success has been due partly to a seamless interface between iTunes and the iPod and because it provides a good user experience, said analyst David Card of Jupiter Research.
Path to Web Retail Getting Easier for Independent Music Labels
Peter Brantley
May 9, 2008
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This is an interesting story from the music world. The implication is that the barrier to retail is dropping in music, which has different hurdles than publishing.
The Independent Online Distribution Alliance, better known as IODA, launched itself in 2003 to help independent labels, artists and others in the music industry make the leap from physical to digital. One of its functions has been to act as a conduit to online retailers, such as Apple's iTunes Store, eMusic, Napster and Rhapsody. Now it's giving its members the option of being retailers, too.
Specifically, IODA is supplying labels and artists the technology to plug downloadable music stores into their websites. Unlike some earlier efforts to sell downloads, the stores integrate seamlessly into the sites with other e-commerce efforts ...
The Digital-Only Sequel
Mac Slocum
April 7, 2008
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A sequel to a successful film soundtrack isn't a new idea, but the team behind "Juno" is tweaking the concept: the film's second soundtrack -- "Juno B-Sides" -- will only be released in digital format.It's an interesting move: ride a wave of popularity in a low-risk digital format. If the album doesn't sell, the backers don't have to deal with a warehouse full of "Juno B-Sides" CDs/coasters.
In a roundabout way, a digital-only release is a hybrid concept that plugs into the efficiencies of a long-tail mindset and the Web 2.0 beta ethos. Basically: the low cost of digital distribution gives companies the confidence to release an ancillary product (or any product, for that matter).
If you extend this thinking to book publishing, digital-only releases could be the domain of updated book chapters, fan fiction or "inspired-by" material, and editor's picks that relate to a book's core themes. It could also be a test-bed for weird or esoteric products (i.e. is there a market for "Juno in Esperanto"? Probably not ... but you get the idea).
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