David Emery Online

Packaging commodities

7 January 2008

Ian Rogers from Yahoo! has just posted up a paraphrased version of the presentation he gave at the Aspen music conference, and it is not only well worth a read if you’re interested in technology but well worth some comment as well:

Talking To The Music Industry Again, The Aspen Live Conference

Now, I’m not going to go through it point by point as we’d be here all day so I’ll just pick out the really interesting bits. One of the first things he touches upon is this idea – widely discussed already, of course – that you really can’t “market” to The Kids. Obviously the definition of The Kids is going to vary a bit but it hits upon something that has been a slight bug-bear of mine recently:

Nothing else really matters if you have good content.

If you have good content, any ‘marketing’ that you do is really only the icing on the cake – as long as your distribution is good enough (i.e. as long as it gets in front of people), the content will look after the rest. Obvious but worth repeating, again and again until it maybe sinks in. This really goes hand in hand with another of Ian’s main points: that of the pointlessness of trying to artificially create scarcity.

Now, I think it’s worth clarifying that this only makes sense digitally; physically scarcity is making ever more sense, at least for music, as the value of an ‘artefact’ increases as music becomes more commodified. Digitally, though, trying to limit a product is not stupid, it’s impossible. Once it’s out, it’s out whether you like or not. If you try and limit it, then you loose whatever control and input you had; everything is available somewhere.

So once you’ve got the good content, the next step is to think about the experience that surrounds that content. We used to have LPs and CDs with nice bits of artwork, liner notes and multiple packaging options and now we’re reduced to having practically nothing. iTunes looks like a spreadsheet, apparently.

Forgive me if I don’t think this is a big deal.

For one, does iTunes really look like a spreadsheet anymore then a shelf of LPs look like a shelf of thin document folders? You still get large front cover artwork in iTunes (larger then a CD if you’re using CoverFlow) so what we’re really missing is the inside booklet content; the lyrics, the context.

There have been quite a few attempts to bring booklets into the digital age. Back before iTunes 6 the prevailing wind was blowing in a ‘Flash embedded in Quicktime’ direction; it allowed for the interactivity and ‘experience’ that a lot of people were after and could be happily be played (and sold or bundled) in iTunes. However in iTunes 6 (and the Quicktime update that came with it) Flash in Quicktime was disabled by default and iTunes gained overlay video controls – the combined effect was to completely halt this line of development.

A good thing too, if you ask me; while we’re now left with PDF booklets which are simply reproductions of the physical artwork it now leaves us free to think about the best way of doing it (which was never going to be a proprietary plugin to a proprietary player). As Ian touches on, HTML is obviously the way to go – I’m thinking a simple bundle of html, images, video and audio that can then be viewed while looking at tracks in your player of choice is the way to go; maybe even some simple (javascript based?) way of navigating around the music tracks in the album would be nice too.

I’m sure people would be able to come up with something pretty special that would be far more interesting the a 6 page CD booklet.

Although, and here’s my devil’s advocate point for the day, what’s the difference between that and an artists website? If people care enough about the music, surely they can manage to Google there way to somewhere that contextualizes it with lyrics and other info? Like the point above about marketing to The Kids – if they care, they care enough to Google.

Booklets have already been digitised – they all start with www.