A few things stick out about apple’s announcements yesterday.
The lala.com acquisition gave Apple two things: a novel way to monetize streaming music from the cloud and an interesting structure for an online music-appreciation community. My money was on Apple building up the cloud streaming infrastructure into a digital locker for iTunes but instead they choose to take the general structure of lala’s community model and throw it into itunes and call it Ping.
Ping builds upon lala’s “following” model where I can follow the listening (really, purchasing) habits of people and be followed such that I can learn about new music and provide guidance to others. That’s great if I really dig Thievery Corporation and want to be turned on to Nicola Costa’s latest album but I think classical and jazz listeners are different.
I’m interested in cloud streaming and community as they relate to the classical and jazz listening communities. I believe classical and jazz communities are different than the pop community that is being cultivated via Ping. At the most basic level, what differentiates classical and jazz listeners from pop music listeners is that the “collector” mentality dominates in classical and jazz. This has a slew of repercussions that I should like to explore at some point down the road.
What was especially interesting to me yesterday regarding the future of digital music was Apple’s discussion about video and their new TV appliance. When talking about video, Jobs mentioned that people don’t want to know about “syncing” or being hassled with managing the storage of videos. That sounds a lot like streaming from the cloud if you ask me and I wonder why in the first half of the presentation “buying downloads” and “syncing” and “managing downloads” were perfectly acceptable when talking about audio but by the time we got to apple tv and talking about shows and movies Apple changes its tune w/r/t buying downloads and syncing and now “rentals” are the only way to go.
I think there are a few things going on here. Apple has a good thing going with its iTMS and selling downloads. I don’t think they have figured out how to monetize streaming from the cloud and digital lockers yet and since they don’t have any viable competition to their store that’s offering streaming/lockers they are not in any rush to roll the dice on streaming. Not that there isn’t money to be made on streaming and digital lockers, I'm just guessing that it’s going to be less predictable than the margin on 99cent tracks. Secondly, I don’t think apple has the deals with the labels yet to do digital lockers. My guess is that many of the labels want to get into the CDN business and rather than have a bunch of different companies offering their content via digital lockers, the labels themselves will want to get into the digital locker business. Or at least delivering their content to a third party digital locker.
In transitioning from the CD to digital downloads the labels really got hammered. As we move from downloads to streaming-from-the-cloud, I think the labels are going to be much more cautious in not letting a guy in black turtleneck define the future of their industry for them.
Ping builds upon lala’s “following” model where I can follow the listening (really, purchasing) habits of people and be followed such that I can learn about new music and provide guidance to others. That’s great if I really dig Thievery Corporation and want to be turned on to Nicola Costa’s latest album but I think classical and jazz listeners are different.
I’m interested in cloud streaming and community as they relate to the classical and jazz listening communities. I believe classical and jazz communities are different than the pop community that is being cultivated via Ping. At the most basic level, what differentiates classical and jazz listeners from pop music listeners is that the “collector” mentality dominates in classical and jazz. This has a slew of repercussions that I should like to explore at some point down the road.
What was especially interesting to me yesterday regarding the future of digital music was Apple’s discussion about video and their new TV appliance. When talking about video, Jobs mentioned that people don’t want to know about “syncing” or being hassled with managing the storage of videos. That sounds a lot like streaming from the cloud if you ask me and I wonder why in the first half of the presentation “buying downloads” and “syncing” and “managing downloads” were perfectly acceptable when talking about audio but by the time we got to apple tv and talking about shows and movies Apple changes its tune w/r/t buying downloads and syncing and now “rentals” are the only way to go.
I think there are a few things going on here. Apple has a good thing going with its iTMS and selling downloads. I don’t think they have figured out how to monetize streaming from the cloud and digital lockers yet and since they don’t have any viable competition to their store that’s offering streaming/lockers they are not in any rush to roll the dice on streaming. Not that there isn’t money to be made on streaming and digital lockers, I'm just guessing that it’s going to be less predictable than the margin on 99cent tracks. Secondly, I don’t think apple has the deals with the labels yet to do digital lockers. My guess is that many of the labels want to get into the CDN business and rather than have a bunch of different companies offering their content via digital lockers, the labels themselves will want to get into the digital locker business. Or at least delivering their content to a third party digital locker.
In transitioning from the CD to digital downloads the labels really got hammered. As we move from downloads to streaming-from-the-cloud, I think the labels are going to be much more cautious in not letting a guy in black turtleneck define the future of their industry for them.
