Some More Music Industry iTunes Failures

It’s a fish/barrel/shotgun scenario, really, but a couple more examples of minor irritants that are troubling in the context of the customer expectations that digital distribution enables.

First up, this scenario became inevitable in the same moment that the “partial album” was brought into being:

Second: what happens when record labels don’t appreciate the value of ancillary products:

Digital Distribution and the New Ecology of Customer Expectations

We’ve written previously about the possible impact of digital distribution on the impulse purchase, and will have more to say in the future. But something else in the equation occured to me after a handful of particularly frustrating attempts to buy music online recently. Something that’s obvious but goes unstated in discussions about preserving traditional industry practices.

I was irritated a few months ago when I placed Hjaltalín’s wonderful album Sleepdrunk Seasons in my iTunes wishlist playlist, only to discover when I went back to purchase it on payday that the territorial rights had changed and it was no longer available via the Canadian store. (I was eventually able to purchase it via the record label, Kimi).

This week I have tried and failed to purchase Cliff Martinez’s beautiful score to Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Solaris, and — astonishingly — The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld.

(And if you’re looking for music which is not available on iTunes, discovering that the record label in question is a subsidiary of one of the majors is really, really bad news. Small labels appear to have discovered the benefits of having in-house mp3 stores. The majors? Not so much.)

A few years ago, this kind of thing would have been mildly irritating but not all that surprising. So your local record store was sold out or didn’t carry that particular release. That’s inconvenient — but with those cumbersome industrial production processes and a physical supply chain to negotiate, it wasn’t going to shake you up. You were used to it. You’d place a special order, order it yourself online and wait a few days, or just give up. Oh well. Nobody has a right to everything.

Nowadays, though, these oversights feel absolutely unforgivable — not least because so many of the alternatives (the secondhand stores, the large independents like Sam’s, the in depth assortment at large branches of HMV) have disappeared precisely because of the benefits promised by iTunes and its legal and illegal competitors.

This reminds me of something that Dustin Curtis wrote about recently on his amazingly attractive website. The customer experience is only as good as its weakest link. iTunes is an astonishingly good customer experience — in the context of everything that preceded it — and offers a breadth of selection unlike anything the average consumer has ever known. But when you can’t get something that should be easy — easy — it feels as if they don’t care.

And for the most part these things aren’t the fault of iTunes, Amazon, or other digital retailers. Territorial rights are a massive barrier to the promise of universal availability. But there has been a sea change, I think, in customer’s tolerance for a lack of product availability. In the past, it was possible that the retailer was trying but that they weren’t very good. This still persists with traditional retailers (Metro, I’m looking at you). But where digital product is the norm, it doesn’t feel like that’s possible. Instead, it feels like the retailer isn’t even trying — that they just don’t care. That’s a terrible, terrible face for a major retailer to show to their customers.

As industrial production and distribution processes fade as intermediate factors between content producer and content consumer, the expectations for customer service are skyrocketing. Traditional retail spaces are being redesigned around exceptional customer service rather than stack-and-sell local warehousing. This is the wrong time to be hiding behind the walls of territorial copyright, which will only make customers feel justified in acquiring product in illegal ways. For these reasons it’s encouraging to see New Zealand effectively scrap its existing copyright laws, and Australia begin to dismantle territorial copyright.

As the ebooks revolution gathers steam, this will be critical for Amazon, Shortcovers, and other contenders to bear in mind. It’s all about availability and customer service. The customer will not forgive you for slamming the door in their face. They will not wait for copyright to catch up. They will sign out of the system.

Digital distribution won’t level the playing field. It will tilt it in the customer’s favour.

Bookstore to customer: I want you for your body

An article by Robert Scoble last month has been on our collective mind again since we attended BookNet Canada’s annual technology forum. What we’ve been wondering (with no small measure of professional interest) is what’s to be done with bookstores as digital reading grows.

For my part, I don’t go to record stores anymore. What’s the point? They sell content I want at a price I don’t want to pay and in a format that’s no longer convenient to me. Buying music now means iTunes. How then will bookstores keep from entirely losing the foot traffic of people who’ve come to prefer consuming their primary product digitally?

We Datachondrians are certainly a long way off from an answer (and so far nobody’s asked) but it does seem right off that nothing will be solved by doing anything with print books. There’s no themed table, endcap, discount promotion, or membership bonus that’s going to make people go to a store that sells a product they don’t want. That stuff is for the people who showed up.

The hardest battle in retail is just getting the bodies through the door. Once they’re in, you can let your merchandising and salesforce take over — if either is worth anything at all, you’ll make some sales (and with luck, turn a profit). But when whole segments of your customers decide they not only prefer to buy what you offer elsewhere, but in fact can’t buy what they really want in your store, how do you entice them past the lease-line?

More coffee shop space?

Free wi-fi?

Or does the key to attracting traffic lie in making people want to be around the people you’ve already got?

Then how do you make the wireless and fancy-free want to hang around the same place as a bunch of page-flipping luddites*?

To be continued…

*We happen to love page-flipping luddites.

Democracy meets party time: Apple releases iTunes 8.1

We Datachondrians have been worrying about what’s going to happen at parties now that digital media is rendering shelving obsolete and with it the joy of browsing and passing casual judgment on every party’s hosts. So far we’ve had only a bright idea or two about what might replace shelves full of CDs or books in this very strange but important social space.

We’re still coming up short of anything exactly equivalent to being interrupted while deploying the next tactic in the strategic seduction of the girl in your building who you’ve run into in the laundry room enough times to have made possible an invitation to this very happening shindig of yours by your guffawing brother-in-law waving your copy of REO Speedwagon‘s greatest hits.

Today Apple released iTunes 8.1 and with it a feature they’re calling iTunes DJ. On the surface it looks like all they’ve done is rename the Party Shuffle smart playlist but they’ve also added functionality that allows the playlist to be manipulated by anyone with the remote app for the iPhone or iPod Touch. Not only can your guests browse your entire music collection as judgmentally as ever, but they can also vote for the next song to be played — and if they really can’t stand the present state of tunage they can interrupt the song currently playing.

I’ve held off from the iPhone for a while now, but with the way Apple keeps adding fun new ways to use the device I can see it might soon be time to give in.

Touchscreen, Touchscreen, On The Wall…

Laura Miller had an interesting piece in the New York Times last year about the difficulties some people face keeping their book collections lean. It contained this observation:

When you’re young and still constructing an identity, the physical emblems of your inner life appear more essential, and if you’re single, your bookshelves provide a way of advertising your discernment to potential mates. I’ve met readers who have jettisoned whole categories of titles — theology, say, or poststructuralist theory — that they once considered desperately important.

We surround ourselves with books and other cultural objects not only because we enjoy them and may wish to enjoy them again. They also help us to moor ourselves — to remind us of the identities that we have constructed for ourselves; to delineate those identities to others; to remind us of the arduous processes we’ve undergone to create and solidify our cultural perspectives. Cultural objects actually come to embody us if we allow them to. We arrange our book collections — consciously or unconsciously — to show a side of ourselves to others and back to ourselves.

What’s true of books can be even more true of music, which is more explicitly public. Music, obviously, transforms the atmosphere around you, both figuratively and literally. Unless your sole experience of music is by headphones, your visitors and friends are exposed to your music regardless of their own preferences or interests. Music selection at a party is as critical a part of the activity as planning food and inviting the appropriate mix of people. While displaying your books — just like prominently reading Gravity’s Rainbow on the subway — is public manifestation of a (usually) private activity, listening to music is always, by default, public.

What better way to show off your superlative cultural taste than to have your guests literally stand in it?

This is why, I think, the digitization of music risks losing an important element — the ability to have one’s music collection available for the browsing of visitors. Without LP bins or CD shelves, how might a casual browser chance upon something that showcases your cultural identity?

Fortunately, we already have a model for this. It’s been around for decades, and it has served as a model for the iTunes GUI for some years.

It’s the jukebox.

So here’s what I want: a massive wall-mounted multitouch iTunes jukebox interface. It’s a big multitouch monitor that lives on your wall, displays images of your choice while you’re not using it, and would enable a coverflow interface to browse your music library. And would serve all the other touchscreen applications that we’ve been excited about for some time.

As Nathan points out:

Bolt a high end virtual surround source to the screen, and you’ve got a one-panel touch-screen media centre. Naturally, you’re already using an iPhone as the remote control, so why not employ it to calibrate the system to the room? Sync it to the unit and follow the instructions to stand a little to the left, a little to the right, hold it, point iPhone at the screen, away, got it, and voila, reflecting surround sound calibrated without employing anything as cumbersome and wasteful as a cheap single-use proprietary microphone.

Note that the virtual surround effect works best if your walls are free of clutter, i.e. shelves full of books and CDs.

It’s the perfect fusion of a classy consumer product and a cultural need. We surround ourselves with cultural works not just because they speak to us — about their authors, about our memories, about who we were when we experienced them for the first time — and because they speak to others about us. Locking all your stuff in your hard drive obscures this. But technology should enable all aspects of our relationships to culture, not only those that we think are most obvious.