Community Authority
It is de rigueur to pay attention to what your contemporaries, colleagues, friends and relatives are consuming when it comes to media. The result is eclectic, cross-genre, multicultural, multinational, and intelligent programming. For years we have come, without realizing it, to accept the programming offered at the schedule time of broadcast and pay-tv television networks, the packaging of songs into record albums by the labels, and the rotation of only bestsellers in book, record, movie, and game retail stores, and even the hits/talk programming defaults of the consolidated radio broadcasters. It is a breath of fresh air, that realization my friend Mark Fitzsimmons described of being in a room full of stale air that deteriorated so gradually you didn’t realize how little oxygen was left until somebody opened a window.
It is one of the most fascinating outcomes of the ultimate community information network, the visions of Vannevar Bush in Memex, Ted Nelson in Xanadu, Doug Englebart in NLS, Alan “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” Kay in Dynabook and Tim Berners-Lee in the World Wide Web. It echoes the spirit of Friendster and the bubbling up of social and business networking groups.
Publishing has always been a hits business in part, but it seems like it wasn’t always that way. You could publish a lot of books that got critical acclaim and sold a single print run and still have a business. And if you got a bestseller, that was gravy. What drove book sales before the independent booksellers were put out of business by the chains were reviews, features, and commentary in newspapers, magazines, and other media, the lending libraries, and the retailer’s taste and book store inventory. Now the chains pepetuate the artifice that the distribution channel reflects without distortion that somehow the state of publishing has shifted to chasing bestsellers and that trend somehow reflects without distortion the state of market demand.
People who read what Jeff Bezos reads also read…
The first brilliant commercial exploitation of the aspect of hypertext that is community was made by Jeff Bezos, who began the online bookstore Amazon with the crippling lack of the ability to browse the pages of his merchandise that his long established competition enjoyed for centuries. In casting about for ways to overcome it, he added syndicated book reviews, but really claimed the high ground with the development of a voluntary system of reader recommendations and a computerized system of tracking purchases to note patterns and using those patterns to increase sales of new customers of the same books.
There is something so genuine, so generous about someone who takes the time to compile and annotate a list of recommended books, movies, records, or games based solely on their experience and motivated solely by their desire to share their passion. It is an expression unbiased by divided loyalties, unmanipulated by personal gain, directly or indirectly. Well, except that companies do pay people to pretend they are unbiased. Even I have written more than one Amazon review for a friend and not made mention of that association.
People who watch what Mike Ramsay watches also watch…
Remember the viral web-based marketing that drove the indie film The Blair Witch Project? What drove home video originally was cinema, broadcast television and pay TV, and then video’s version of the lending library, the video rental store. Seeing a film or children’s program on the big screen or the boob tube was usually enough, but there was always rental, and in the 80s people actually did record tapes off the air with regularity. Movie reviews in print were elements, but for movies these became audio/video media programs of their own following the rise of critics like Siskel and Ebert. What retailers stocked, or rather what they did not stock, was a deterrant more than a determinate factor in a sale that was already made before the customer surveyed the cases of shrink-wrapped packages.
You could tell Mike Ramsay and his partners were very full of themselves when they started shopping TiVo to the consumer electronics and media moguls in 1997, and the timing could not have been more perfect to be reinforced by the tech stock frenzy. TiVo today holds some 60 patents on various aspects of a multimedia time-warping system, including such added-value feats as suggest related programming based on keywords or on previous viewing behavior. Viewer recommendations are now being solicited as well. This may help the company monetize it’s brand and the five plus years spent popularizing the idea of recording the shows you want to see and watching them when you want to watch them.
What else is there, if a PVR consists of a storage device, an electronic programming guide, and interface and operating software, except the concept of time shifting and its logical extension, making entertainment consumption choices based on non-network advice? That was back in 1999 when TiVo went public, and it has been a long five years to become an essential part of the home entertainment kit.
PVRs are at the apex of where the blade meets the shaft in a hockey-stick curve, about to become mainstream. The Infotech Forecast 2020 expects the number of standalone PVRs and PVR-enhanced cable and satellite TV set-top boxes, DVD players, videogame consoles, and multichannel sound systems to grow an order of magnitude, i.e. tenfold over the next five years. Scientific Atlanta and Motorola, who make the cable TV set-top boxes, are now building generic PVRs into them after watching DirecTV use the branded TiVo option to increase satellite’s pay TV market share over cable. TiVo realized at some point it was either going to be a litigator of its patent portfolio or diversify.
The true potential of TiVo devices, indeed, lies not as a TV time-shifter but as a home media network gateway. “TiVo has also opened up its platform to drive even broader deployment in the form of licensing and entertainment services development. The proven, reliable and “always-on” TiVo platform is central to new services like Home Media Option(TM) that deliver networked entertainment services to the living room. With Home Media Option, consumers can stream digital music and photo content from their PC or Mac to their Series2 DVR, remotely schedule same day recordings of their favorite shows from wherever they have access to an Internet connection, and securely transfer programs recorded from one Series2 DVR to another in the same household. All of this while TiVo is still off recording your favorite shows in the background!”
Not that this market for TiVo will mean anything but more cutthroat competition, given the giants of consumer electronics against which it now faces are joined by the PC juggernaut looking for a way into the home entertainment budget for ten years now.
People who listen to what Shawn Fanning listens to also listen to…
None of the aforementioned true visionaries of knowledge networks could have predicted the intense publicity and resulting curious attention given to a rather obscure practice by a limited group of young power PC users of recommending songs to one another and then attaching them in a compressed file format unknown to anyone outside of the MPEG Committee in the latter half of the 1990s, a practice that may well have remained beneath the radar of most of the world were it not for the notoreity inadvertently given to Napster founder Shawn Fanning in the search by an industry trade group for a scapegoat for soft sales other than the kind of piracy that has close ties to organized crime and the particularly fatal response to harassment in which mobsters tend to indulge. No, RIAA’s lawsuit against Napster shone a spotlight on the activity of community authority alright, and yet what would have been even more effective might have been if record execs had paid kids to talk up the songs they were trying to promote on those early P2P networks instead of suing them now for using them now.
Maybe it all started with the baby boomers, the first generation to have their own genre of music that their parents did not appreciate. I remember Carole King talking about going into a (song writing) studio in the Brill Building with Gerry Goffin and trying to rewrite all the rock top 40 AM radio hits. Together, they wrote more of the songs associated with my youth than even Lennon and McCartney. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, Take Good Care Of My Baby, The Locomotion, One Fine Day, and Up On The Roof.
What drove recorded music sales was first and foremost the radio, but also music concerts, variety shows and MTV, and, quite likely, even the unintended function of peer to peer networks. Like home video, the customer gets little or no satisfaction from browsing the shrink-wrapped packages, can’t sample them, or even look up a review on a composer or performer at the retail point of sale. But unlike books and video, there is no lending library, and no rental shops by law for recorded music in the US and most of Europe. Here online sales have a definite advantage in having the ability to present the customer with reviews and samples.
Viral marketing, referral or affiliate programs. Relationship marketing, loyalty programs. Social network, professional networks. It’s a decentralization of the process of creating value, a personalization of the process of imbuing something with value
People who believe Steve Jobs also believe…
What drove site traffic on the web was the search engines and the intended function of hypertext, the self-perpetuating connection that is the hyperlink. The original concept of “push” died long before the internet crash, but a variation began rising to prominence with the blogging trend, a user-selected push called the news reader. By syndicating a wensite or blog, an author facilitates the spread of their work, and by selecting it to include in one’s daily news besotws value on it. The hyperlinks, the links to the authors url’s of interest, and the authors own information is spread.
That’s the tough nut to crack when it comes to independent music publishing on the Internet. How to get out. You the musician are fed up with record labels, or more specifically, you can’t get a contract with one of them to save your life. So you set up on the Internet. On the Internet, however, no ones knows you’ve got a great sound. It’s like buying a lot of ammunition and finding that doesn’t fit your weapon. Music wants to be performed, on stage, out loud, one to many, not wait quietly to be discovered playing night after night in an urban attic. So how does a musician set up on the net and still get the kind of exposure the label would create with tours and all the other promotional techniques that make them effective as music producers?
Today Apple announced some new twists to it’s iTunes music downloading services on the 1st anniversary. iMix lets you post playlists of your favorite music so others can see what you like.
I like the spin Jobs puts on having sold 70 million songs via iTunes in one year, “It has exceeded all our expectations,” he says in today’s PR. Well, it is far more than any competitor has sold, including the services the labels themselves operate. I guess the previously expressed expectation that he could sell 100 million in a year didn’t count. Or maybe Baby Boomers are getting too old to remember that kind of detail in Cupertino.
…the RIAA
Bet your bottom dollar the RIAA won’t forget, though, and take full credit for driving sales to legitimate services by forcefully pursuing illegal file traders. As if no one would have thought that some of the P2P activity existed in the vacuum that was so large you could drive a developing country’s entire GDP through it. All created by the record labels denial over the online downloading business opportunity for the last five years. Now MP3 player sales are at that same apex of the hockey stick curve that PVRs are. You gotta love the balls to outspin the spinmeisters.
posted by julia b schwerin