I post on a music industry message board from time to time, and I recently posted this 'thesis' of a post this past weekend. I thought I would repost it here...hope everyone is having a good weekend!

Bradley

The Power Of Collection

What is it that seems to separate music from other forms of entertainment in our culture?

After all, on some root level, CDs are the same as DVDs, which are the same as video games, which are the same as books...all have value as forms of entertainment for people to pass time.

The genius of American marketing has added another aspect to American consumption of entertainment, though...The Power Of Collection.

When you purchase a book for yourself, you read ('consume') it. But when you're done, guess what? It still has value!

You take it and add it to your "library", and the book takes on its new purpose of being part of your collection.

DVDs have begun to capture this "collector's" appeal. In advertising, you'll hear "Add Terminator 2, Special Edition, to YOUR COLLECTION TODAY!" And guess what, you will.

Pokemon...Beanie Babies...baseball cards...bobble-heads...The Power Of Collection dominates our culture, thanks to marketing that tells us we are losers if we don't conform.

Yet, the music industry has lost its connection with this key aspect of American consumerism.

Clearly, this didn't always used to be the case. Baby boomers everywhere either talk about their vinyl collection, or how they sold them all and really wish they still had them today.

Kazaa and the advent of widespread piracy of music has stripped CDs of their "collection" aspect, for good, and given it to the proprietary MP3 format.

Without this power of collection behind it, no wonder CD sales have slowed steadily.

The people who go to buy a CD as a gift don't pick one up for themselves anymore. The people who go to buy the new release by an established artist don't pick up a catalog title. And the people who go to buy an album from the best band in their favorite genre don't pick up the new release by a new band in the genre.

In short, the loss of the collection appeal has brought "impulse buys" of CDs to a standstill.

Had the phenomenon of CD price inflation not existed, CDs could have given MP3s a battle over which format would best support the American NEED to collect.

But a variety of pricing factors made it easy for Americans to turn their back on CDs. Now, as a result, we have a culture that has, by and large, shifted its music consumption to the computer.

For the music industry to again generate massive profits, and get back to where it should be, the full exploitation of the American desire to collect will have to occur in this new computer medium.

Combine these developments with the exponential increase in average storage space on American personal computers, and you can see where this is headed.

The music industry has to:

1) Get every single song ever recorded onto one central database (accessible to iTunes or whichever of its competitive offspring manages to defeat it, for licensing.)

2) Don't shut out indies or amateurs to this database. It is impossible to shut out competition over the Internet, so failure to include anyone who makes music who wants to be part of this service will stall American consumer acceptance.

Attempting anything else would "run against the grain", would go against the very spirit of the Internet.

3) Appeal, via deliberate marketing efforts, to the desire of consumers in the digital age to have as many songs as possible in one place.

The collection aspect will have users getting on iTunes to download one song that they happened to hear on the radio or in a friend's house, and then they'll end up downloading 50 songs simply because they get caught up in downloading song after song because they "need" them.


The Power Of Collection is going to be what puts a lot of money in the pockets of music industry executives - and artists! - in as little as a year. Its already managed to do it on a smaller scale with Mac users via iTunes, and its just the beginning.


Related notes:

1) 99 cents per song (the current iTunes pricing) is bad for two reasons. One, its too high. Second, pricing all songs the same is damaging to the promotion and marketing of new artists.

Who's going to pay for the mp3s of a new rock act when U2, The Eagles, and Fleetwood Mac have all their songs for 99 cents?

Is a new band's mp3 worth as much as "With or Without You"? Hell no! Pricing all mp3s the same is not only counter-intuitive, but counter-productive as well. And this is just one situation where equal pricing becomes a problem.

As for why 99 cents is too high, my reason is that its too much of a jump from free. But whoever ends up pricing mp3s is going to have some pretty interesting numerical analysis to do.

2) MP3 downloads MUST be on a permanent basis. None of this "the file deletes itself after 30 days" business, because no one's going to be able to "collect" something that magically disintegrates after a month.