Oct 8th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Thanks to Mike Arrington of TechCrunch for pointing me to a post by Yahoo vice-president of product development Ian Rogers. In the post — entitled “Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses” — Rogers recaps a recent presentation he made about the business of digital music, and as Mike notes it is well worth reading.
The Yahoo VP — who used to run the pioneering music company Winamp, after dropping out of university for a year in 1995 to tour with the Beastie Boys — describes the early days of the digital music game, and his surprise at the combination of fear, ignorance and loathing with which the music industry greeted the arrival of mp3s and services such as Napster:
“We were naive to be sure, but we were genuinely surprised by the approach. Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.”
Fast-forward to today, and Rogers talks about how Amazon has finally created a music-download service that is actually as easy to use as a p2p network — in fact, easier. Unfortunately, he says, it has taken eight years of wasted effort and millions of dollars in legal fees:
“8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years? How much naivety and hubris did we have when we said, “if we build it they will come”? What did we spend? And what did we gain? We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet.”
As Rogers puts it — before describing the ridiculously convoluted process you have to go through to buy a track and download it through Yahoo Music — “Inconvenience doesn’t scale.” If there is one lesson the music business needs to learn, it is that. It’s true that Apple’s iTunes service has grown to a phenomenal size despite the use of proprietary DRM controls, but think of how much larger the audience for that music could be. As Rogers puts it:
“Platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web are the only way to compete with the control you’ve lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music industry. If your consultants are telling you anything else, they are wrong.”
Sep 30th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Mike Arrington has the scoop on the latest move by Gabe “Techmeme” Rivera: a Top 100 blogs list, which will be made up of the blogs whose posts most often appear on the blog aggregation engine — a site that I (and many other bloggers I know) check at least once a day, if not once an hour or so). As Mike points out, this is a pretty big kick in the goolies for Technorati, which has been losing its grip on the blog-search and blog-ranking business for the past little while, and now doesn’t even have a CEO any more.
Sep 12th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
If there’s one thing that really drives me around the bend, it’s when people misinterpret academic or quasi-academic studies and draw all kinds of ludicrous and sweeping conclusions. It’s something the traditional media love to do with opinion surveys (most of which are completely unreliable), and the blogosphere has a tendency to do it as well. And we can see a prime example with a recent study by The Project for Excellence in Journalism.
I have no problem with the PEJ looking at the headlines on Digg.com and Reddit.com and del.icio.us and comparing those with the stories that appeared either on television or in mainstream media outlets. The project looked at stories over a period of seven days at the end of June. Not surprisingly — at least for anyone who has ever been to any of those sites — there was very little overlap with the stories that traditional media found important.
And what are we to gather from this research? Well, according to people like Nick Carr, it apparently shows that the “people formerly known as the audience” are thick-headed numbskulls and mouth-breathers who are only interested in a narrow slice of tech or other stories, and don’t care about the issues of state or the other topics that right-thinking people pay attention to. In classic Carr fashion, he concludes:
“When you replace professional editors with a crowd or a social network, you actually end up accelerating the dumbing-down of news. News becomes a stream of junk-food-like morsels.
The people formerly known as the audience may be more accurately termed the people formerly known as informed.”
The first problem with Nick’s approach is that it uses Digg and del.icio.us as representative of the entire phenomenon known as “social media” or “citizen journalism,” which is like watching two television shows and reporting that the entire landscape of TV as we know it is an insipid swamp (an argument that would actually be a lot easier to win — but I digress).
As James Robertson notes on his blog, one of the reasons why sites like Digg and Reddit aren’t filled with the top-most important and newsworthy stories on Iraq or the flooding of Texas is that every other news site was filled with those things. To me, one of the main things that makes Digg and Reddit valuable is that they allow people to promote stories and links that aren’t getting enough attention — not the ones that are.
Danny Sullivan notes that “to draw any definitive conclusions about the future of news would be premature and foolish given the limitations and short duration of the study.” But people like Nick are happy to do so anyway. Dan Gillmor has some brief thoughts on the topic here, and there’s a good look at the study at SFGate as well. My friend Scott Karp has his take at Publish2.0.
Sep 6th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)
The cover of the New York Times Magazine last weekend looked like it was selling a feature story about a religious guru, with a photo of a large, bearded man sitting crosslegged in a field, wrapped in a white blanket. And there’s no question that Rick Rubin — the music producer who was the subject of the cover story — is seen as a guru by many in the industry.
Rubin’s abilities have helped to create acts such as The Beastie Boys, and rescued fading stars such as The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond from oblivion. But can he save the entire industry? That’s the subject of the NYT piece, which goes into some detail about how iTunes and file-sharing have eviscerated the business, and how young music lovers pay little or no attention to the radio or buying CDs any more.
In fact, hiring a guy like Rubin — who refuses to attend meetings or have an office at Sony’s Columbia Records despite now being co-chief executive, and who wears cargo pants and a T-shirt instead of a suit — should be evidence enough that executives in the industry are scared out of their wits. And it’s clear that one of the things Rubin wants to focus on is the music, which would be a refreshing change.
As media mogul David Geffen puts it in the story:
“The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content… only 10 years ago, companies wanted to make records, presumably good records, and see if they sold. But panic has set in, and now it’s no longer about making music, it’s all about how to sell music.”
A couple of the other prescriptions for success that Rubin throws out in the piece, however, raise some fairly major question marks, and the first of those is the idea that the online music business has to adopt a subscription model in order to have any hope of staying alive.
The only problem with that idea is that no one has had any real success with the subscription approach, despite repeated attempts. Services such as Rhapsody, the new Napster and Yahoo Radio are still around and have users, but they are hardly growing. The bulk of music listeners simply don’t seem to be interested in subscribing to a kind of virtual radio station online, although some continue to support the idea.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs — who knows a thing or two about music online — has repeatedly said that he has no interest in offering a subscription service. “Never say never, but customers don’t seem to be interested in it,” Jobs told Reuters in an interview after Apple reported blow-out quarterly results. “The subscription model has failed so far.”
And Jobs is far from the only person who is skeptical of the subscription approach.
It’s true that part of the reason a subscription model hasn’t worked is that the record companies and other players — rights holders such as publishing companies and performance rights groups — haven’t been able to get their act together, and have spent most of their time coming up with new ways to screw people through DRM.
Unfortunately, there’s no sign that any of that is going to change anytime soon, with or without Rick Rubin.
Aug 24th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
As plenty of others are reporting elsewhere, the New York Times has launched the public version of its MyTimes customizable home page, which has been in beta for almost a year now. I tried it out when it first launched and I confess my reaction was very similar to some of the other responses out there — in other words, the new offering has some not bad features, but nothing that’s going to alter the fabric of the Web or cause the earth to stop rotating.
I think one of the most interesting features is the ability to check out — and add the RSS feeds for — some of the sites that New York Times reporters and columnists like to go to. I confess I haven’t really spent much time on the site since I checked it out initially, but the last time I looked they hadn’t done much apart from letting you add feeds from NYT writers and add tabs specific to each of your favourite authors.
My friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt isn’t very impressed with the site, and I share his lack of enthusiasm. While it’s not a bad offering, I wonder why the Times bothered with MyTimes when there are others offering much the same features. I assume they’re hoping faithful readers will gravitate to the site because of their love for the brand, but I’m not sure that’s true. If I were them, I would have spent a bit more time trying to make it unique.
