Doing Words

iTunes Festival could be a triumph… of email marketing

// July 1st, 2011 // 0 Comments // Content, Marketing, Music

In my email inbox this morning was an invitation from Apple to watch a live music festival in London starting tonight, my time. The festival has been running since 2007 but it’s been gradually morphing from focusing on attending the live event towards leveraging Apple’s extraordinary distribution pipeline to deliver to a worldwide audience. This year I think they’ve cracked it.

Via a dedicated free live event app you’ll be able to watch the three nights of performances from 62 artists, live or on-demand, free. And we’re not talking B-list bands here either, there’s Paul Simon, Moby, Duran Duran and Coldplay (yes, I’m that old).

As in previous years, tickets will also be available to attend the festival if you’re in the UK, and they’ll be available only to contest winners.

Could this be bigger — and more profitable — than Glastonbury?

From today you can buy the latest album from each artist performing from iTunes Store or from the app and I’m guessing that’s part of the reason why artist management agree to the concept.

The other reason, and the reason why the festival is most interesting, is the email marketing opportunity. Here’s why:

How many people do you know these days who own an iPod, an iPad or an iPhone? Lots, right? It’s not a static number either, it’s still growing fast.

If they’ve ever used iTunes Store to buy music, TV, movies or apps, Apple has their email address, and unless they’ve opted out, their permission to send them weekly emails about content for sale in iTunes Store.

No big deal, right? Every online retailer and content publisher has an email database. But this is an email database unlike any other, since it now represents arguably the biggest and fastest-growing entertainment content marketing database the entertainment industry has ever seen. There’s an iPod Touch, iPad or iPhone in the bag of nearly every person on the train with you, in the pocket of nearly everyone jogging in the morning. There might be as many Android phones out there as iPhones, or Kindles as iPads, but add up iPhones, iPods and iPads? Big number.

The music industry created the commercial radio industry to market new content to consumers, but never knew who those consumers were, what they listened to, and where they were at. Then, MTV added a little granularity for marketers, was able to provide some logbook data on audience size, viewing habits and geo location.

Today, businesses as diverse as Amazon, CDBaby, MySpace and Facebook have a database of content customers they can market to via email, but with nothing like the detailed purchase and consumption data Apple has access to. And not only does Apple have the biggest database of entertainment content consumers, they also own the whole stack, from bringing major labels and artists together for an event, to reaching an enormous global market of music consumers via email, to actually selling and delivering and tracking the consumption of the end content.

Analysts studying Apple’s market performance look at profit per device shipped, app sales volume, and PC and handset market share. Does anybody know what the open rates are on emails from iTunes Store? What their click-thru rates are? Perhaps Apple’s biggest untapped and unvalued asset is the ability to reach more of the world’s music fans than any other media publisher?

iTunes: what a truly global retailer looks like (yes, even in Kazakhstan)

iTunes Festival is a big endeavour, and while Apple is the king of hardware, it doesn’t yet have enough entertainment content culture in its DNA, so along the way there have been mistakes made, goals reached for but unmet, and lessons learned.

But Apple is also the king of execution — it learns perhaps better than any other major brand. This year you can watch the whole event from your iDevice of choice instead of on YouTube, and for the first time, you can watch in HD on a TV equipped with an AppleTV using AirPlay.

The world’s number one retailer of music is on the cusp of becoming the next MTV and the next Glastonbury, all rolled into one. Like, wow.

The ‘rubber band’ and the future of music

// June 20th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Music

Been working on a new music startup recently, with a marketing colleague who stopped listening to popular music through most of the ’90s. Now his teenage kids are re-introducing him to the music industry of the present day and it’s been an interesting process of discovery for him.

For instance, he keeps referring to “bands” these days, like the smallest unit of commercial music is still two guitarists, a vocalist and a drummer.

That was certainly the case in the past, but like the internet atomised the album into 12 discreet musical products and a video, it’s also in the process of atomising the “band” into something looser, stretchier, more of a ‘rubber band’.

A rubber band’s configuration changes more frequently than in the ’80s and ’90s, with little or no media and fan panic. Each of the members of the rubber band is an independent artist to a greater or lesser extent, and each collaborates with others outside the rubber band from time to time. Each will increasingly have separate management, publishing deals and content contracts.

Taking a broader view, the rubber band is an interim step between the industrial music industry’s smallest denominator (band) and the independent artist, both in creative direction and legal entity.

The internet’s atomising effects won’t stop at breaking up the rubber band, it will move on to atomise the artist themselves, creating discreet commercial entities for each track, coffee table book, short film, app, game and item of tour merch. The eddies and surges of ecommerce will sometimes recombine these elements in traditional ways, and sometimes in surprising ways, but only because the internet has first split them apart.

The legal and business friction still holding the artist together as the smallest unit of artistic commerce will soon be gone. Not only will the art remain, it is in the process of becoming vastly richer, more collaborative and complex.

Apple: awesome hardware but terrible at eCRM

// September 10th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Customer relationships, Music

I sell the odd bit of music on iTunes through my hobby record label Littoral Records and I’m frequently amazed at how poorly Apple manages its online relationships with music labels.

The team at iTunes Connect frequently send out emails announcing new features or changes, and the email includes not a single link that might give you one-click access to that feature, not one trackable URL that give the Connect team some idea of who’s responding to their email relationship management.

Wow.

An email update from iTunes Connect. And no link to click on.

You’d like to sell digital content? First, print and sign these contracts

// June 10th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Music

You want to sell music, TV, movies or apps on iTunes Store? First you apply for an iTunes publisher account, and when you’re accepted, the manual labour begins. You might have thought you were entering a Brave New World of media as digital bits, but for now, it’s back to the Stone Age for you.

Apple asks you to print out and sign a 70 page contract, in duplicate, for each geographic market iTunes services (US/Canada/Mexico, Europe, Japan, Australia/NZ, then you have to FedEx that stack of paper to Apple in Cupertino, where they will manually review each signature page, countersign each contract, and FedEx back your copy. They then scan and store their copy in some vast archive.

Apple feels this stack of paperwork and penmanship is necessary before you enter into the business of selling digital content over their digital distribution network.

Sadly Apple has yet to adopt digital signature technology

Bandcamp Defender and brand personality

// February 25th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Branding, Music, Relationships

I may have passed Physics I and Mathematics I and gone on to complete a science degree if it weren’t for Donkey Kong, Asteroids and my favourite University coffee-shop distraction, Defender. Defender was insanely fast compared to other games of the time, and one slip of the greasy, warm joystick or buttons could send you flying into a lunar mountain, crashing into an alien spacecraft or wiping out whole crowds of innocent civilians (I wonder if it was the first example of a graphically violent video game?)

With clients I’m often talking about the importance of sprinkling a little personality into all things you offer customers. Many new brand owners are too worried about harming their brand equity and won’t add any personality. Please! Unless you really want to establish yours as a brand without any personality, best to get started experimenting early, when you have relatively few customers and less to risk.

Too much personality can be bad thing, but no personality at all is always worse.

Below is a beautiful example of a nugget of personality added to a brand experience without risking any damage to the brand. Online music publishing platform Bandcamp offers some great reports and charts that’ll show you how many people have viewed, listened to and purchased music from the artists you manage on Bandcamp. For a bit of personality in an otherwise dry series of reports and graphs, if you click the right link, you get to play Defender instead. Here’s a video I prepared earlier.

Bandcamp Defender from bigyahu on Vimeo.

You stay within the Bandcamp website while playing Defender, so there’s no risk of losing the user. And these days, there’s no longer any risk of upsetting people if you manage to slide your attacking spaceship into a crowd of tiny, 8bit outlines of people. To reward the early-adopter users who discover Defender for themselves, Bandcamp deliberately didn’t make a big deal of this in a blog post or a news release.

A little bit of personality goes a long way!

Loving that iPhone ringtone feeling

// September 14th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Mobile, Music

I’m loving The Feeling’s music at the moment, particularly the 2006 song ‘I Love It When You Call.’

Then it struck me how good it would sound as a ringtone on my iPhone.

Just in case you think it would sound great on your iPhone too, here’s the ringtone I made.

(Just drag it onto iTunes and it should appear in your list of ringtones.)

Don’t thank me, just buy the album, it’s great!

• Twelve Stops and Home on iTunes Store US
• Twelve Stops and Home on iTunes Store Australia

Do CDs have a future in the developing world?

// June 23rd, 2008 // 0 Comments // Media, Mobile, Music

‘Doomed’ in music album covers rendered by Amaztype – check it out

In Canada, PWC forecasts that music downloads will exceed physical music sales by 2011. That’s no longer amazing, though it would have seemed so to the music industry five years ago. Now it’s just further confirmation of what we already knew – the music industry is undergoing change at of such magnitude and pace as to be almost indistinguishable from extinction.

It’s not so much the fact that it’s happening but the rate at which its occurring. In 2007, the Canadian download market was less than a quarter of the size of the physical sales market, yet in only four more years the minnow will overtake the whale due to the rapid rate of change – the decline in Canadian CD sales, for instance, was 11.9 per cent in 2006 and 19.8 per cent in 2007.

So far, all shocking stuff that no longer shocks. The unanswered question is: where will the CD market bottom-out? How many CDs can the industry still expect to sell in, say, 2020? And where? (more…)

iTunes: when labels lose the plot

// March 26th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Glocalisation, Music, Other news

iTunes: when labels lose the plotOriginally uploaded by thatjonesboy It’s tough managing rights and markets and content on the interweb. The interweb aggregates so well that all your whack geographical or distribution-focused pricing policies, never intended to be seen together in the one place, may suddenly collide, such as in this case with a Phoenix album available for both $10.99 and $17.99 in iTunes.Same album, same tracks, same file format, different price.iTunes doesn’t do a lot to help labels manage their content, offering only a very basic label and content management application.Still, take my advice: buy the $10.99 version

Obama set to music: Yes We Can

// February 5th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Advertising, Music

Ringles don’t make me tingle

// September 12th, 2007 // 0 Comments // Mobile, Music, strategy

ARIA’s latest figures show a 47% decline in CD single sales year-on-year.

The only really shocking thing: that so many Australian consumers are still paying through the nose for the physical music product when the identical track is available online for about a third of the price.

Anyway, there’s nothing to wring your hands about (unless you own a CD pressing business) because sales of online digital single tracks increased by 64% in the same period, and at $8.38m in sales revenue is a little more than twice the value of physical single sales. Plenty healthy. Factor in the higher margins at almost every step in online versus physical production, distribution and delivery, and it’s a healthy business to be in, as long as you’re big enough to have a roster of successful artists and at the same time small enough to be able to keep up with the pace and true direction of change.

By “true direction” I mean where the industry is actually going, versus where some believe it can be steered. The former is entirely in the hands of the consumer, influenced by the content offerings available to them, how that content is priced and to what device it is delivered. The latter almost entirely the exclusive domain of large music labels and the industry bodies that serve them.

Evidence of a failure to keep up with the true direction of change: talk of prolonging the life of CD singles by including “ringles” – ringtone versions of the single – on the CD, along with software that will make it “easy” to transfer the ringtone version of the track to a mobile phone.

Please, don’t let’s pretend for a moment that this might have the slightest chance of widespread consumer adoption! Consider the “Sony rootkit” fiascos, and what might need to be installed on the consumer’s PC in order to deliver a ringle from CD drive to handset. Better find a way to provide technical support for Windows ’98, 2000, XP, Vista, OS X and Linux installation issues for product that retails for $5. Don’t even start about what tiny percentage of mobile consumers ever successfully connect their handset to their PC, or want to do so for any reason.

Is it even possible to deliver a software application within the constraints of CD single data storage limits that might have a chance of being compatible with the diverse community of mobile handset operating systems, ringtone file types and carrier locks out there in the marketplace? I don’t like the word “impossible” – it always seems to get me in trouble – but let’s just say I’d be flabbergasted.

The only sensible way to deliver ringtones to mobile handsets is online, and for the majority of mobile consumers, the carrier – not the label, not the handset manufacturer – owns that pipe. No CD single “ringle” is going to influence that in the slightest. Labels: work with the carriers… or maybe acquire them. Carriers are to the future of music what radio broadcasters have been in the past, plus the entire retail supply chain. Getting out of that headlock they have on you is going to take more than a “ringle” or two.