After spending a considerable amount of time looking for product opportunities in the digital audio device world (and finding
one) for the better part of five years, and while being a chronic early adopter and experimenter of all things web 2.0 and similar, I've gleaned some "truths" that I thought I'd put down here.
I doubt I'm breaking any new ground, or telling existing marketers anything they don't already know -- or "feel" -- but for marketers wondering why their products are stacking up in warehouses, or for consumers who don't necessarily look at new products and services, and ask "why?", but rather more likely ask, "how?", and "how much?" this may be interesting...
I will answer the question: What has the digital audio consumer experience become?
In a word, the digital audio experience has become all about "interactivity." Consumers and effective services have slowly cobbled together a new closed-loop experience that over the next 2 to 5 years will rationalize into a more predictable and profitable channel.
You might be thinking... “Interactivity? Really? Interaction between whom?”
Well, interaction between consumers, marketers, and content creators -- with each other, and between each other. In fact, I have deep personal convictions that in order for the "new" music industry to be profitable -- for the artists, the content marketers (i.e. distributors, broadcasters, retailers), and the device makers -- interactivity is an absolute must.
Any device, service, user interface or content protection scheme that limits interactivity, will limit its own market viability.
Let's break down the elements that make up this interactivity.
- Navigation
- Listening
- Discovery
- Feedback
- Sharing
- Purchasing
I'll explain each of these in turn...
Navigation of one's personal plenitude... what am I talking about? I mean now you have tens of thousands of songs on hard drives, you have various Internet radio accounts the likes of
Pandora,
Slacker or
Last.fm, and you have your addiction to Howard Stern on
Sirius or
Ricky Gervais's podcast, you get the idea... Well, this is what I mean by plenitude... as a consumer, these are your "tunes" dude. How do you comb through them, sort them, tag them, filter them, slice them, dice them... so that you can navigate the plethora of tunes based on a believable mental model to ultimately queue up what exactly it is you want to hear... Lots of differentiation to be made in this area. Apple's done their thing with click wheels, cover-flow, and sadly even done nothing and convinced everyone to just "shuffle."
Sonos wowed everyone for about a year with their remote... but I can't help but think there is a better way to go...
Google may have
some ideas... search is no doubt a tool to exploit... and of course leveraging all that yummy meta data that comes wrapped around our tunes in this digital age. It all plays a part.
Most important thing is to maintain an overall ease-of-use. Key to this is providing a scenario-appropriate level of content access. Conversely, there are many paths to poor execution, but I can’t think of anything more detrimental than overburdened user interfaces, i.e. trying to do too much with too little -- either in the way of controls, display, processing horsepower, etc -- is the harbinger of FAIL.
Listening - Well it’s not hard to grasp what this is all about. Home-stereos,
clock-radios, iPods, music-phones, PC+speakers, car stereos, and even TVs are the dominant ways people render their music... for the most part there are at-home and on-the-go scenarios that drive rendering device designs. Obviously volume and playback, or transport, control is a basic user interface requirement here... but what’s noteworthy is that in this day and age consumers have come to expect a heightened awareness about what the content playing is... and meta data and displays have provided this aspect of the listening experience... content state awareness. Enriched UIs are giving means to support new features and enhancements to the listening experience, which we’ll get to next.
Discovery of new content and content-related experiences is really an old aspect of the music industry's consumer experience... it’s what happened to listeners as the took in the radio, the Top 40, etc... it’s how radio stations made money, by listeners sticking around to hear more from a feed... given the stations a chance to push ads... and giving record companies a way of auditioning their artists’ new releases to an upcoming album. The iPod experience and the mp3 player experience in general largely hamstrung this aspect of the user experience. While consumers hunted and gathered vast libraries of files, and they listened to these libraries on their portable, unconnected devices, the discovery process become stunted... or amputated. Well this is changing finally... with Internet radio services and all-you-can-eat subscription services, and online stores like amazon collecting vast information about user tastes (more on this later) and existing collections, they now have the ability to feed or recommend new content to listeners that stand to create revenue once again for the distribution channels.
Increased consumer choice and consumer exposure... i.e. discovery potential, increases the amount of money making opportunity for the value chain. Don’t be surprised as a listener of your tunes to start hearing new songs and instantly knowing the artist name and song title. Also, you’ll start seeing ads that are focused and related to what you are hearing or what you more generally enjoy. These music tastes of yours become publicly known, and thus you can see new album ads, tv appearances of your favorite artists, upcoming concerts driving by a coupling with location services, and even non-music related ads that are driven by segmentation correlations made by more sophisticated marketing tiers. It’s a treasure trove of value your listening habits.
Tastes feedback - A lot can be gained by services who have access to your media library table of contents. Add to that the rating you give the songs, albums, and artists, and algorithms start to get more sophisticated and precise. So what should devices do? Devices and services more and more need to capture that feedback and make it more pervasive and complete. Tracking whether you skip songs midway thru, or ban a song from a Internet radio station, or express love for a track of artist are all refining info on your consumer tastes and your predicted future behavior. Devices and front ends that enrich this knowledge base about you will be bring more value to the market and thus will be more profitable. Ad rates for channels that invoke such probing user interfaces will be higher than those that employ dumb head ends.
Social with one's social networks is valuable on many levels.
Facebook,
linkedin, Myspace and Last.fm aren’t in business only to give you the ability to keep in touch with friends. Their model hopes to capitalize on consumers’ inherent desire to communicate, connect with friends, and be their own kind of exhibitionist... sharing what they are doing, what they love, what they hate.. and yes, what they are listening to, whose concert they loved the night before, and what songs their friends should also love (see
tumblr +
Streampad). This is why tapping a social network also opens up a wealth of insight into what your friend might want to buy in the future... after all, each consumer is telling them what to love or hate.
In addition to connecting with friends and peers, consumers are able to connect directly with artists. See Radiohead's
marketing of In Rainbows as one extreme example. See
Topspin as a modern example of improving artists tools in the new market. See
myspace as an example of artists sharing a conversation with fans as friends. These will all be micro-markets that when looked at in aggregate have amazing business potential.
Purchasing content will always have its place in a consumer experience. Consumers will want to exert ownership of some subset of the content they have access to. So beyond simply paying for subscriptions, or buying concert tickets, consumers are going to buy tracks, store them locally and cherish them. This instinct will not disappear over night and the user interface that can broker the purchase decision with point-of-sale capability and secure the transaction will provide enormous value to the overall experience. To the extent content publishers can reach their consumer most efficiently, will reduce the loss to non-value-adding middlemen. But there-in lies opportunity as well. Middlemen who can more effectively target purchasable content with likely buyers will be able to tax the market and make a nice living. Device makers and service providers who get this can carve out a piece of the pie for themselves. Simple features like bookmarking or tagging can make a device like a “wish list or shopping cart filler” -- feeding people who like to shop around -- and buttons like a “buy-now” can satisfy the impulse purchaser. Oh joy! Bad for me.
So to summarize, what the hell am I getting at?
Basically, I think that consumers need to start discriminating their choices in devices and services based on whether they can deliver or contribute sufficiently to the complete experience. I also think that device makers and technology providers need to focus in on the core consumer experience and build great products that complement the experience and empower users to become the little morsels of value we know they are!
The more savvy we all get about creating the supply chain the market needs, the sooner we'll get some coherence in the horribly disrupted ecosystem that has been the music industry of late. It will also ultimately be better for artists too -- as their path of making a living will be more clear and their freedom and willingness to explore their talents and express themselves will be ever emboldened.
Rock on.
Friday, December 11, 2009 at 3:45PM 
