I’m on a plane heading to the left coast and listening to an album that I last heard more than 15 years ago in my college days – a beautifully crafted thing that helped the teenage version of me cope with the myriad challenges of college age living in dictator led Nigeria at the time. I downloaded this album a couple of days ago when I had a flash of nostalgia – I thought it, punched it up on my phone and Presto!, it was there and I was enjoying it. And lest you think this is all about nostalgia, I have the latest boast single from Beyonce (dunno why she’s asking other “bitches” to bow down, but Ok) which I wanted to sample.
It’s just pretty phenomenal to be a lover of recorded music right now – you have a virtually unlimited supply of music available to you stretching back almost as far as your known life. You get this on very device you have (ok, except maybe your car but a few cables can fix this for you till you get your next new car) and its pretty decent quality. All for the price of a subscription. My own poison is Xbox Music, although I have a free subscription to Spotify that I use on my laptop. Xbox music satisfies my cravings because it deep and wide and works seamlessly with my Windows 8 laptop and my Windows Phone. Also my Xbox (duh!) and my Media Center.
Down a level, I want to do a quick examination about why this is so awesome from my perspective. Why do I think this is a golden age?
- Instant access – I can access the music instantly on any device at any time. I can quickly indulge my whims and make myself happier than I ordinarily would. Granted I could learn the guitar and soothe myself, but this is simply less work.
- Unlimited selection – It’s simply amazing that I can dial into the music of the present, but also the music of my childhood, adolescence and teenage years, pretty fluidly. Discovery tools are also aplenty either integrated into the music software or run on websites by independents.
- Simple and hassle free payment options aka a subscription – I get one bill from my platform of choice. And then all this magic happens. I feel like this is a reasonable bill.
- Almost same day availability – When new stuff is released, I have access to it almost instantly.
- Choice of providers – you can get the same thing from Spotify, Pandora, Xbox music and ton more providers. In other words you have an actual market that works as markets are supposed to work and over time making things better for everyone.
Virtually the only fly in the ointment of the recorded music smorgasbord is the rise of content ‘renting’. You own nothing. How do you pass it on? Maybe just a list (metadata) of your downloaded music and playlists? A universal list that can be exchanged and then plugged into any music service? Use this laterally for books, tv and music? <Startup idea? Or nonprofit? The list would likely need to be encrypted with your ID and maybe a central trust authority can verify it’s yours and it’s been delegated appropriately, etc.>.
Contrast this to the movie industry and to a lesser extent the TV industry and you see why it’s a shit show from a customer choice perspective. Almost none of this is true although Netflix comes close. Hulu is also on the right path. Both are hardly enough. All in all Netflix seems to be the only company that gets the future that I suspect will become inevitable; to wit that to adapt to the digital age, the movie industry needs all the things that I have listed to prosper. Now I know the economics don’t work out yet. Some of this is the distribution channel for content is still clogged up with rent seeking (they did build the pipes…) cable companies which restrictive content policies that prop up their profits (For example, HBO cannot unchain HBO Go from the cable walls for fear of contractual issues with Cable; which drives almost all their revenues). Also no one has been able to replace the economic model of blockbuster film releases driven through multiplexes. To show you how far out of whack the economics are, I came across a device that does same day releases of movies (protected by biometrics and sundry security schemes; Prima Cinema. This thing costs $35k and its $0.5k per screening for the privilege of watching Man of Steel in your own home without rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi. Now this is admittedly a luxury device but at the very least you can imagine what kind of hole the industry feels it needs to make up to take us to a future similar to the Nirvana that the music industry has transported us. Additionally music ‘rendering’ is so much simpler than video – witness the large economic gulf between the relative investments needed to make the iPod Nano and any decent phone, phablet or tablet, not to mention a high definition TV. As a result ‘rendering’ devices are not as well penetrated in the population, US or global; which constrains demand.
But some facts please. The music industry is finally
growing. Imagine that. And it’s not even mapped out and tapped the pirate ridden and poorer markets of South America, Africa, South East Asia and China, which it will. In the same way. I estimate tremendous headroom over time, especially as global culture coalesces and the rendering devices become commodity along with internet access. All this in the face of a black market for unprotected music files – take that RIAA consumer scare mongering of the aughts. In the same vein, the movie industry is probably forgoing a lot of future potential by not pushing this transition faster. Instead it’s investing in 4k formats (umm, mp3s are ruling in music), esoteric DRM (I’m looking at you UltraViolet) and release ‘windows’. In the end the people who lose are the cable companies and probably the multiplexes. But what do content companies care? In the end these value chain actors were always a means to an end: getting your products into as many customer’s hands and getting paid for it.
Change is in the air – the only question is how fast. But in the meantime it’s sure great to be into recorded music right now. Oh my.
