How much extra would you pay for an iPod that has unlimited access to all the music on iTunes?
Personally, I think I’d be willing to pay up to 50% more than the price of the iPod alone. I reckon this could be a pretty successful business model. Unfortunately, I recently bought a new iPod. If this rumour is true, I hope they offer an upgrade for existing iPods as well as selling it with new ones.
I suppose I shouldn’t be impressed by this kind of thing anymore, but somehow I am. I just stumbled across Chouchou (warning: Myspace), a band that ‘exists’ only in Second Life. The singer Juliet Heberle lives in the US, the musician Arabesque Choche lives in Tokyo, and they collaborate online. You can buy their music at Amie Street.
Production, marketing, distribution and sales, it’s all online. Kids these days probably take this for granted, but when you think about it, it’s quite a big change from just a few years ago.
I spend a little time browsing for new music on sites like Jamendo and Amie Street. I’d spend a lot more time if it weren’t such a painful process. Basically there is an informational problem: These sites feature music by a lot of unknown (to me) amateur artists, so I have no idea which are good or bad, and which I like or dislike. By random browsing, I’ve found a few songs that I like, but a lot that sound crap, or at least aren’t to my taste. This process is painful because the information I’m provided with by the websites (the artist’s name, a picture, the genre, etc) is more or less useless for informing me about what the music sounds like. To actually hear the music, I have to click a play button, wait for a player to load, buffer something, etc. Then after all this waiting, 99% of the time I don’t like the music anyway.
If this process could be more efficient, I’d spend a lot more time browsing for music on these sites. The probability of finding something that I like is low, and the quality of a lot of amateur content is low too, so the cost of browsing needs to be low. The music may be free, but finding it is not, and at the moment, searching is too expensive in terms of time.
So here’s my suggestion for the ‘killer app’ for these sites:
Make a sample of the music play instantly when I hover the mouse pointer over the artist’s name or picture.
It doesn’t matter if the sound quality is low, I just need to get an idea of what the music sounds like, and I want to hear it fast. That way, I can quickly screen out the crap. Then I’m more than happy to click and wait for downloads of the stuff that I actually like. Surely it can’t be so hard to do?
I’ve been reading an interesting post by marketing guru Seth Godin about lessons we can learn from what the music industry is going through right now. Some of his lessons:
Read the rest here.
A couple of months back, Trent Reznor produced an album by Saul Williams and they offered it as a free download with optional US$5 payment. Now Trent has released the results of the experiment on his site. Basically, he seems disappointed with the revenues that they received. About 154,000 people downloaded the music, and about 28,000 (18%) chose to pay the $5. As Trent says, once production costs are taken into account, “nobody’s getting rich off this project”, even though they spent nothing on marketing and very little on distribution. The donation model looks like it’s going to be a pretty difficult one to pull off. Most likely, I think it’ll be used by lesser-known acts to get themselves established. But, Radiohead aside, I don’t think we’ll see many major artists using it.
