PledgeMusic, Janet Devlin and Reinventing Scarcity in the Post-Scarcity Age

The analogue-era music business traded on scarcity.  It was the record labels and retailers’ absolute control of supply that created scarcity of music product.  If you wanted a high quality version of a song or album you had to buy it, when, where and for how much the labels and retailers decided.  In June 1999 Shawn Fanning launched Napster and in an instant scarcity was not only thrown out of the window, the window was instantaneously bricked up behind it.  The contagion of free has now reached epidemic proportions (due to both licensed and unlicensed sources).  Consequently we are now in the post-scarcity age, which has made music buying a lifestyle choice.  It has changed music buying from opt-out to opt-in.

If there is to be a mainstream future for music products, it will come from creating new scarcity that people want to pay for.  Of course it is no longer possible to ensure the music itself remains scarce, but it is possible to build scarce experiences around music and additional assets.  This is exactly what the guys at PledgeMusic have done in conjunction with former X Factor contestant Janet Devlin.

I’ve been a long term admirer of PledgeMusic’s model and approach, but I am particularly impressed with this release.  Firstly, fans get the option to select music from a typical Pledge menu of products ranging from the standard CD, through to highly personalized products like a Skype chat with the artist, a personally dedicated video performance and even appearing on the album.  Though the unit prices go high (£500 to appear on the album) these are scarce experiences that simply cannot be got on a torrent.  Of course many of these options don’t scale too well, but some of the intermediate products like exclusive concerts and signed albums most certainly do.  Also, all pledgers also get the download of the album before it is released anywhere else, a semi-scarce commodity, but nonetheless a great way to communicate value and exclusivity to fans.

What I like most about this release though, is the clever use of the pre-release cycle as an artist subscription. Anyone who pledges will get a steady stream of content from Devlin as she progresses on her work with the album.  She will release exclusive (i.e. scarce) content such as video, audio and photo blogs to these pledgers, giving them a window into the creative process, deepening their engagement with her and most importantly, building up interest and demand for the release of the album.  In many respects Devlin is taking a leaf out of the X Factor’s book, recognizing the immeasurable value of creating a community of fans and building their interest and engagement with exclusive content right up to a final release.

One of the reasons I like this release so much is of course because it ticks so many of the boxes of my Music Format Bill of Rights report (which you can download for free here).  But make no mistake, creating scarce experiences and seeding fan communities with scarce content is going to be at the centre of future music products.  Not everything here is entirely new or unique of course, but the unifying vision is most certainly that of the future. Janet Devlin and PledgeMusic are assuming the role of pioneers here and their peers will do well to pay heed.

Spotify Artist Apps and the Road to Relevance

Spotify yesterday announced the launch of Artist apps for four artists, namely Quincy Jones, Tiësto, Rancid and Disturbed.  This is another important step in Spotify’s music strategy, and one that is more important than may first appear.

Spotify’s App and API strategy (of which I have gone on record as being something of a fan of) may not have had anywhere near as much momentum as hoped, but it is making solid progress and the artist apps will give it a much needed boost.  The artist apps though are part of a bigger bid for relevance and mass market appeal.

When there is So Much Choice that there is No Choice At All

One major problem with streaming music services lies in the fact they provide unlimited access to all the music in the world: there is so much choice that there is no choice at all.  Though Spotify has started work on improving its discovery story – much of it through 3^rd party apps – discovery remains problematic.  Another problem in streaming services the artist’s brand is inherently subjugated to the service’s brand: consumers pay for access to all the music, not for an artist or two.  In the analogue era the artist brand dominated with singles and artist albums.  In the age of the playlist, a la carte cherry picking and unlimited on-demand access, the artist brand often struggles for voice in a sea of discovery noise and clutter. Artist apps though kill the two proverbial birds with the same stone: simultaneously enhancing the artist brand and music discovery.

The Need for the Tangible

A key dynamic of the ownership-to-access transition has been the difficulty of communicating a sense of permanence and tangibility in music service experiences. Playlists may be one of the early defining characteristics of the consumption-era and may deliver great user benefits, but the very fact that they are so easy to create and to delete contributes both to a sense of transience and of having little monetary value.  Thus playlists do not effectively communicate enough tangible value over the CD, which is an illustration of why the majority of digital consumers still buy CDs.  For streaming services – and indeed digital as a whole – to come of age and to appeal to the mass market, they need to develop features that go beyond the excel spreadsheet-music-service approach.  This doesn’t mean a need to deliver ownership but instead to meet some of the fundamental consumer needs and tangibility that physical music experiences deliver.

Artist Apps are a Solid First Step

Spotify artist apps are a step in this direction, delivering an audio visual and curated artist experience.  It is fair to say that the current iteration of artist apps are far from the finished article, the first step on the journey, but at least that journey has been started.  The digital music marketplace more broadly needs to rise to the challenge of ensuring that artist specific experiences like these become a standard feature of digital music experiences.  Spotify artist apps , when set alongside the theoretical music product prototype I sketched out in my ‘Music Format Bill of Rights’ report (see figure) and viewed in the context of the longer term music product and format evolution, are a glimpse into the future.  Spotify needs to kick on from here with full integration of multimedia assets such as video and games, and of course it needs many many more artists, long before which it will also need to have hit upon an elegant means of filing and navigating the apps.  But for now, Spotify artist apps are welcome early step on the road to mass market relevance and digital music product tangibility.

Finally Someone Builds a Digital Music Service the Way It’s Meant to be Built!

Regular readers will know that I’ve been a long-term and vocal advocate of radical music product innovation.  There have been modest encouraging steps from a diverse mix of places, such as iTunes Pass, Topspin, Open EMI, Björk’s ‘Biophilia’ app, Swedish House Mafia’s ‘One’ app, Pledge Music etc.  All have edged forward disparate aspects of music product strategy but they have also all lacked a unifying framework to pull them together.  Today comes the first stab at a music service that pulls together many of those parts.  But it doesn’t come from one of digital music’s big players, nor from a major record label, but instead New York dance label Fools’ Gold Records with their Fools Gold: The Goldmine subscription service.

[EDIT: The Goldmine is powered by Drip.FM]

Subscribers get new and old music, curated content, remixes, DJ sets, extras, merchandize discounts, priority access to events and more.    This is almost exactly the list of product features that I laid out for the Music Product Manifesto back in 2009 so it should come as no surprise as quite how enthusiastic I am about the offering.

The reason I listed those attributes three years ago was that this broad selection of multimedia assets truly reflect what an artist is in the 21^st century, so much more so than a CD or a download does.  They are also the assets which labels (majors in particular with their 360 deals) are increasingly becoming active in.  It is little short of a travesty that more has not been done until now.  Hopefully Fools Gold’s innovation bravery will help nudge the industry wide needle forward.

Of course it is much easier for a small label like Fools Gold to pull together the disparate artist assets necessary to create the holistic offering, but as I argued in my presentation to Midem in 2011, “the scale of the potential rewards is more than big enough to justify the sizeable effort: what is at stake is the entire future of premium music products.”

The Goldmine also ticks most of the boxes of my DISC principles that I laid out in my Music Format Bill of Rights (see figure):

Dynamic:  One of the things I like most about the service is its guarantee to deliver every new release on the label automatically to the user.  This is what music products need to do in the digital age, pushing relevant content to the consumer rather than relying on them to pull.

Interactive.  The service includes accapellas and remix stems for users to step out of passive listening into active creation.  This of course works perfectly for the dance music audience where a large share of the audience are aspiring DJs and producers.  A great next step would be some in built functionality that allows even the most novice user to play around with stems, perhaps  in the context of a social gaming environment.

Social. This seems to be the only key DISC element not catered for by the Goldmine, but they certainly have the building blocks to deliver on this, most notably the membership base.

Curated.  Fools Gold curate tracks from the archive as part of the service and in addition deliver exclusive content and extra content.

The Goldmine isn’t the full package, nor does it signify a turning point in music product strategy (because that requires major record labels to jump on board), but it does represent the bravest innovation step yet taken.

Fools Gold just set the standard for the rest to follow.

The Tale of the CD, the Digital Refusnik and the Charitable Collector

Earlier this year I raised the question of whether the music industry was going the way of the newspaper industry, whether its core audience was aging, stuck on its physical format while the younger generation feasted on free content.  It is becoming increasingly clear to me that this dynamic is arguably the most sizeable challenge facing the recorded music industry.  Product innovation (my hobby horse) is of course crucial, but its remit will be drastically reduced unless the ‘CD Problem’ is fixed in tandem.  Indeed, the two are intertwined.

The CD is polarizing the music buying marketplace

The importance of the CD is at serious risk of becoming a hindrance to innovation, particularly as its core customer base becomes more entrenched:

• The CD as fossil fuel. I have often argued that the CD is the record labels’ heroin, a habit which they simply cannot kick and which is hindering their ability to move on in life.  The analogy is probably a little unfair, as it implies the relationship is a purely destructive one.  A fairer metaphor is the world’s dependency on fossil fuels: we all know that they should run out some time in the not so distant future.  But we also know that we have been hearing about their imminent depletion for decades and yet they are still here, thus far at least.
• Digital is creating a fault line across the music buyer landscape. With all of focus on digital strategy it is sometimes easy to forget that the CD is still the beating heart of music revenues and the most widespread music purchasing behavior, even in the US, that most digital of western music markets (see figure one).  What is of concern is that a very large proportion of those CD buyers only buy CDs and what is more, they buy them offline in high street shops, malls and supermarkets.  The industry used to view these consumers as the next wave of digital customers, the buyers who would naturally transition to digital.  Unfortunately it is becoming increasingly clear that many of these consumers are better viewed as ‘Digital Refusniks’, consumers who have either actively chosen not to go digital (e.g. vinyl junkies) or see no appeal (mass market middle America, Mr Main Street, Mondeo Man etc).  But these consumers are getting older (see figure one) and unless a transition strategy is implemented they will just carry on getting older until they are with us no longer, just as is happening with newspaper readers.
• CDs work fine while we all still have CD players.  The problem with CDs is that you need somewhere to play them.  That might not feel like a problem now but it is going to become one.  Technology expenditure in the living room has shifted from audio to video.  Our TVs have got bigger, as has the size of the piles of boxes underneath them (which for some reason are still called ‘set-top’ boxes even though most TVs don’t actually have ‘tops’ anymore).  Meanwhile the Hi-Fi has become the second class citizen of the living room. People used to change their Hi-Fi’s simply because manufacturers changed the colour they made them in, now the average living room either has a dusty old midi system or an iPod docking station.  For the Digital Refusniks – most of whom of course don’t have docking stations – there will come a time, not so far from now, when that dusty old Hi-Fi looks just too old and will be put away in storage.  At which point the CD will have disappeared out of the living room and there will be little reason for buying CDs anymore, which will actually mean just not buying music anymore for these consumers.  The TV, radio and the CD player in the car –as long as there still is one – will sate their music appetites instead.

A physical-to-digital transition strategy must start with a keener understanding of what makes CD buyers tick

The Digital Refusniks need bringing into the digital realm with hybrid physical-digital products before they simply fall out of the music buying population.  The case for a physical-to-digital transition product strategy is clear, but it needs basing upon a clear understanding of why people value CDs. Across the music industry, consumer research projects must create a detailed and nuanced picture of CD buyers’ wants and needs.

To this end, but in an entirely non-scientific, not statistically significant and largely subjective manner, I yesterday canvassed my Twitter followers with this question: Do you still buy CDs, and if so why?  The results, as long as they are considered in a purely directional and illustrative sense, present some interesting trends (see figure two):

• 77% of my tech-savvy music aficionado skewed base of Twitter followers still buy CDs
• A fifth of those CD buyers also buy vinyl
• Ownership, supporting favourite artists and artwork are the top three reasons for buying CDs
• Just over a fifth only buy CDs for ‘special’ albums and just under a fifth only buy CDs rarely
• 14% said they had either stopped buying CDs altogether or were buying fewer because of streaming music (in most cases they were paying for 9.99 subscriptions)
• 12% buy CDs because they are scared of their PC and / or cloud services crashing and losing all their music

Say hello to a new music buyer segment: the Charitable Collector

The broad picture is one of the CD as a hybrid of a collector’s item and an honesty box: people buying CDs to support their favourite artists and to own something tangiable and visual.  Perhaps the best label for describing this very specific group of conscientious CD Buyers is Charitable Collectors. Of course the music industry cannot afford for the CD to become relegated to a role as the picture disc of the 21^st century.  Also artists should be working out ways to deliver much greater value to their dedicated fans than just a plastic disc which they often don’t even see much income from.  But challenges aside, there is a rich seam of value for music product strategy to tap and to test.

It is important to consider that my Twitter followers skew towards tech-savvy music aficionados so this is more of an insight into the minds of digital music fans who also still value CDs rather than the Digital Refusniks.  Nonetheless there are some key learnings here which translate across both groups and which, if nothing else, provide some solid foundations for exploring just what the industry should be asking about to truly understand the diverse priorities of CD buyers.

Without fixing the CD problem revenues will decline in the long run

Finally, the revenue case for a physical-to-digital transition product strategy is simple: unless it happens music revenues will decline.  Figure three shows a scenario forecast for global music sales that assumes that things stay the same as they are now i.e. that digital growth remains around the 7 to 8 percent mark and that CD revenue decline slows, as sales consolidate around the hardcore of Digital Refusniks and Charitable Collectors.  In this scenario we will most likely see some modest growth by 2012 and 2013 but after that the market will enter steady decline despite continued digital growth.  The reason for this is twofold:

• Digital needs a new generation of music formats to drive stronger growth (see my D.I.S.C. post for more on this)
• CD revenues will start to decline at a steady CAGR of 5% or so due to natural wastage among the remaining CD buyers due to all the various reasons highlighted above

The CD remains one of the music industry’s most valuable assets, second only to those consumers who are still its loyal buyers.  Now those consumers need a new generation of music products that meet their needs in a way that downloads and streams clearly do not.