Last week I posted an item here citing Glenn Peoples’ analysis from Billboard.biz that concluded that the music business could learn a lot from a subscription-based service like Netflix.

Since those items appeared, I’ve been monitoring the industry reactions.  And frankly, what I glean from the coverage is “habits change… but not easily or readily.”  Some people are just determined to maintain the status quo, regardless of how antiquated that status has become.

Of particular interest was this convoluted analysis by Ethan Kaplan, the former Senior VP of Emerging Technology for some now bankrupt enterprise called “Warner Music Group.”  Maybe the previous affiliation offers some kind of clue re: the perspective when Kaplan starts out by saying…

Today I was driven insane by an article implying that Netflix could serve as a model for the music industry. The article was written by Glenn Peoples, an otherwise upstanding journalist who fell for an associative fallacy that seems to befall everyone when thinking about media. For some reason, when it comes to the monetization of content, a half century or more of media theory discourse seems to not matter, and people feel comfortable applying strategies applicable to one modality of media to all others. Because the modes are similar, so must be the means of monetization.
Wrong.

What follows is Kaplan’s own McLuhanesque (i.e. hard to follow) discourse on media theory that takes issue with Glenn Peoples’ conclusion that “Netflix consumers have proven they will rent content – even re-run content – and stream it from the cloud.”  Kaplan counters with…

With Netflix customers have not proven they will rent content. They have proven they will rent visual content. Visual content is a subset of the macro concept of content, and consumer behaviors in relation to such has no intrinsic corollary to aural, printed or other forms of content such as games. To put it another way, in the hierarchy of content, what applies to a sub-type does not necessarily apply to its siblings. This article uses this fallacy as a way to call for emulation of Netflix by music services.

Actually, as I re-read both Peoples’ and Kaplan’s pieces, it becomes increasing clear to me that Kaplan is the one who misses the point, and now he’s driving me crazy with his verbose, theoretical assertions re: why subscription models won’t work for music.  It sounds every bit like a discourse written by somebody from a record label – precisely the people who expect us to keep buying and storing individual “units” of content when it is all already stored for us elsewhere (and the access improves daily). Continue reading →

Yeah, two posts in two days… how’d that happen?

I saw Kim Richey at the Belcourt Theater in Nashville.  I discovered Kim kinda late in the game – well after her 3-record tenure at Mercury Records in the late 90s/early aughts (which I contend was over-shadowed by the more photogenic, less musically authentic Shania Twain, but that’s a whole different blog post…) – but now I marvel at her songs and her singing every time one rolls around on my iPod.   I have all her records now, and purchased her newest, Wreck Your Wheels, from her after the show last night.

I saw this video for the firs time and found it rather compelling, but like it even more after Kim told the story of its making from the stage last night.  First the video:

And now the story: Continue reading →

Last month, I had occasion to spend an evening with Ken Bonfield and Steve Davison, two world-class finger style instrumentalists who travel and perform as “Artistry of the Guitar.”

Click this photo to see a slide show of Ken and Steve performing at the Third Street Coffee House in Roanoke, Virginia. Click the “play” button in the lower right corner of the player to listen to Ken’s recording Zephyr and start the slide show.

Ken Bonfield and Steve Davison = "Artistry of the Guitar"