Listening to music is great, and in the past I used to spend a lot of time hanging out in online communities, forums and real world record stores, buying music. The challenge for me is that my tastes don’t align with the tastes of most people – I like an eclectic but fairly specialised range of electronic, dance, reggae hip-hop and similar genres. Whatever the distribution of musical tastes is, I’m at the thin end of it. That’s great when you have a lot of time to dedicate to finding the music – a lot of the enjoyment comes from the time spend trying to find something. But as my time has become increasingly pressured by work and other professional commitments, I just don’t have the time to search for music to fit my tastes.
I’ve always believed that people will consume media through the most convenient channel available to them. The success of iTunes, Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader, Last FM or torrent communities like Oink is all to do with providing people with content which is relevant to them in a convenient form.
Personalization, Relevancy and Convenience
iTunes tackles relevancy and convenience by attacking the mainstream market. They deal with relevancy by offering choices that most people want. Somewhere on a wall at Apple’s HQ are 8 personas of music buying consumers whose needs are addressed by the offerings of the iTunes store. The offerings are relevant to most of the consumers who contribute to the $2.9 billion per year digital music sales market.
Convenience is what Apple have really got right – its so simple to buy music and add it to your Apple device its not worth going into.
What Apple have not been great at is personalisation. The recently added Genius Sidebar is supposed to make personalised recommendations based on your listening habits. The feature has met with mixed reviews from consumers. One of the problems with Apple’s Genius Sidebar, when compared to Last FM’s recommendation system is that the recommendations are tied to the user’s own library. The system does not aid discovery to the extent that Last FM does, and most download sites like Amazon MP3 or JunoDownload do, by letting consumers preview tracks before buying.
Discovering New Things
Illegal download sites like Oink were popular because they allowed users to discover new music in a low friction atmosphere. To the users of sites like this, they really weren’t about piracy: they were about hanging out in a friendly community of people with aligned musical tastes and discovering new things. To Oink members, the free download was the icing on the cake. It was not the secret sauce.
Bring Together Relevancy, Customization, Discovery and Community
There is space in the still growing, emergent digital music market for a new kind of music store. The front-end stores would be highly customised by musical taste. A consumer could go to a website and give that site their musical taste history – maybe by uploading their iTunes library listing, or connecting to their Last FM profile, or by answering a short questionairre. The central site could then spawn a customised store-front for that user. It would offer tracks for download that were relevant to the user’s taste in music. It would aggregate forums, blogs, events and other community elements that were relevant to the user. It would produce podcasts that were customised to the user’s tastes and then push them to the user. The 30 minute, low quality podcast is free, but if you want the full album, or the unmixed singles in higher quality, click through to the store front.
The system would further facilitate discovery of music through a Last FM style live recommendations system and an Amazon like “customers who bought this” system. Better yet, the system could simply plug into Amazon and Last FM – there may be no need for anything other than a meta-network – a customisation and aggregation layer that takes the offerings of people like Last FM and Amazon MP3 and delivers it to consumers in a relevant, easy to use way, whilst skimming off the top of sales.
There are lots of ways to achieve a system like this, and no-doubt Amazon (the kings of customization) are looking at this kind of thing right now. For me, a member of a desirable demographic that marketeers are desperate to attract, the sooner this happens the better. I’d happily increase my spending on music by 500% per week – if only someone would make it as friction free and effortless as possible. I’m sure I’m not alone.