Context
Thanks to Fred von Lohmann for pointing to this post from Ian Rogers of Yahoo!.
Cheap and great music is better than free and lousy, context is everything, and the recording industry has missed all possible online boats for the last eight years. That’s Rogers’s message.
First the labels sued Napster instead of selling their content to their users in the format the users wanted: MP3 files that any device can use. In 1999, Rogers thought that was dumb. “Make it easy, I wrote, and convenience will beat free.” Then the labels DRM’d everything and tried every form of control they could engineer. Now, with Amazon’s MP3 download service, users finally have what they want: MP3 files that any device can use.
“8 years. How much opportunity have we [the music industry] lost in those 8 years?” Rogers’s point is that “convenience wins, hubris loses.” And he’s not going to play along any more:
I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! [on the condition that Yahoo!] put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. . . I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience.
Rogers wants his whole industry to get into building context. The web has context - incredible information about the music - but iTunes is context-free. There’s a huge opportunity here to make it really easy to access the music and provide a rich context for it and people will pay for that. People will pay many many small amounts for this context:
Context is where the opportunity is and therefore where the innovation will be. The next five years [are] gonna be fun. I think we’re finally going to see some innovation in digital media.
It’s good to see progress here with the new Amazon service. Maybe the marketplace is working; maybe there’s a bright musical future out ahead. The price for music may go to (close to) zero, but the services that accompany that music will be worth paying (a little bit) for. Plus I loved hearing Rogers’s voice, experienced and frustrated.
Comments
One Response to “Context”
Got something to say?
It’s about time! This shift on the part of Yahoo! Music - and others - is a direct response to the changing times, tech and consumer backlash. No industry can force their customers to accept shabby products and service when a viable alternative exists. The marketplace is changing, the old business models no longer apply and the dinosaurs, regardless of how much power they wield, must either embarce these changes or risk losing their customer base and subsequently their entire industry. This is but the tip of the iceberg and the next two years are going to favour us with some massive changes that will show just how desperate the majors media companies are to retain their crumbling hold on their once powerful business model. It’s all going away - and it’s about time.
Cheers.