A straight shot of progress with a generous allowance for chaos. And a taste of otherworldliness. 2010 is epic.
Audio recordings (particularly vinyl and CDs) were covetable souvenirs of the lives and talents of music legends. You invested in one to get a share of ownership in your idol.
The digital incarnation of audio tracks, however, dropped the tactile feedback (glossy album jackets, holographic CD art, whispered secrets between lines of lyrics, fragility) that made albums treasurable. Unlike, say, direct mail or a local paper — music did actually have something to lose (other than sound quality) in its translation to a virtual format. Intimacy and that most monetizable of all things in the music industry — the sense of shared ownership in an artist’s life and work — haven’t traveled well with pixels. How do music marketers repackage that sense of realism?
The live show, or as Lefsetz calls it ‘the event,’ is the music industry’s future.
I remember thinking this when Napster came along and the volume of chatter about music’s monetization models was at an uproar. At that time, it seemed almost too simplistic and obvious that the way for music to move dollars in the digital future was to shift the pricing burden from recordings to performances, because no one, not a soul could copy what it feels like to go to a concert and distribute that as a zip file over a P2P network. (The ubiquity of digital cameras would later challenge that.)
Well it turns out that pesky music piracy problem wasn’t “solved” by a return to concerts, but by creating robust legal digital markets (iTunes, Amazon, etc). But in validating the digital medium with these new market spaces, we increased demand for something more experiential.
Re-enter the performance (and yet to be invented variations on digitizing it) as music’s saving grace. It pre-dates simple audio recordings and it will outlast and out-monetize them, too. Scale, cost, and audience distribution will not make this an easy task. But live bands that don’t suck, streaming products and technologies, digital mashups and rich video, and the addicting quality of mass humanity coming together to experience a rock god will ensure it succeeds.
[Photo from David Byrne’s double-header at Radio City Music Hall. Great example of an impactful show — stellar performer, artsy special effects, dance and choreography, unexpected surprises. But also, see Byrne’s appearance on The Colbert Report where even his wickedly forward thinking can’t quite justify why you’d want to buy his album, virtual or otherwise.]
Within the weekends, we are most ourselves.
My unassuming sidekick: the Canon SD630. It goes with me almost everywhere, lying in wait without a case or cover as it gets bashed by keys, coins, and other odd metal instruments that I plunge into my bag. There’s also a nasty fissure down the glass viewing screen — from when the camera strap slipped off my wrist during a desert hike and the camera hit rock bottom, literally. It’s a three year old brick of beat up amateur technology, but it gives me more opportunity for reflection and introspection than anything else ever has.
Another shot of Nyugati train station in Budapest (previously). This is the ‘inland’ ticket counter for domestic trains. The international counter is just to the right, tucked away in a dark room. And then just to the right of that counter is one of the classiest McDonald’s I’ve ever been in. Like I said: old and new…
WHERE AM I GOING? It’s that damn question you either ask or avoid every day. Either way, it’s there. And occasionally, someone catches you - red-handed - in the act of trying to steal a generic sense of purpose so you can answer it.
Another way to think about what might happen if Twitter promoted some users over others. Or if some emails were delivered more quickly than others. Or if the net were not so neutral. You get my drift.
Obviously Twitter is the oddball out in that sampling of digital protocols because it is privately held and beholden to eventually turning a profit. But at the same time, it has the opportunity to set a standard and do it right. Just as has been done before.
New York City. We all come here for a reason and most of us will leave. Defeated? Triumphant? It’s yet to be determined. If you’re even pausing to ponder your fate, you’re already falling behind.
The flip side is that being constantly at the edge of failure gets us off. We’re a settlement of transplanted masochists, smug in the way we defeat our adversaries - time-sucks, distance, inconvenience, competition, economics - every day.
Over time, after many battles against these relentless everyday demons, weariness peers through your smug facade. And exhaustion - the only enemy unbeaten - weighs in your steps.
Maybe: in moving to web, value proposition of digital format is greater for newspapers than it is for magazines.*
The other day I twittered that half-baked thought and got several prods to flesh out my musing a bit further, so here you are!
As it concerns the reader, the web’s major advantages over print publishing are content accessibility and delivery speed. The web reaches more people at a faster rate than print ever could, because digital content is lightweight, shareable, and instant. Obvious, right?
Right. It follows, then, that ‘speed media,’ information that gets its importance from its timeliness, adapts better to the web than content whose currency is artistry, opinion, or depth. A publication with a daily output schedule finds better propulsion across the web’s pipes than a publication with a monthly or even weekly publishing schedule ever will. Therefore, the nature and pacing of newspaper content is better suited for web publishing than is magazine content. The same is true of audience reach. Newspapers deliver relevant information to the broadest audience (it’s news of import to everyone!), which the web has been engineered to do perfectly. It is natural then that the majority of news content sheds its paper trappings and shifts to the web.
But speed and reach are not the only barriers to magazines’ successful move to digital.
No! Who can forget the inimitable experience of magazines — the glossy luxury that is flipping idly through W or Wired and realizing the publication’s weight and texture in your hands. Magazines still convey much of their tone with the heft and polish of their pages. The same is not true with newspapers. I’ve always disdained, for instance, the newsprint ink that smudges on my fingers while paging through a newspaper. And this is to say nothing of the number of times I’ve nearly knocked someone out by trying to flip the giant pages. The web news experience is in every way an improvement over the grimy, cumbersome newsprint experience. With magazines, however, the interaction with the physical product is an important tradition of the content consumption. That makes the digital transition a downgrade for magazines.
I’m not usually so bearish on the inappropriateness and unnatural fit of the web for content, but magazines are a special case. The web is a natural habitat for the ‘need-to-know-now’ content of newspapers, but not so with the glossies as they’ve been ported to the web now. There’s much to say about what could be done to bring these traditions online, make them just as stunning, and monetize them well, perhaps later.
*I’m speaking of magazines here in the traditional sense - Vogue and Architectural Digest for instance which deliver primarily visual, photographic, experiential products. Lots of pubs like BusinessWeek are just the business section of the newspaper stuffed into a weekly magazine mailer, and these publications obviously find value on the web with their newsy/analytical/text-based content.
