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The Incorrigible Iconoclast
It’s often been said that what’s been happening in the music biz for the past 1o (15?) years is the “canary in the coal mine” for other media businesses. Already we’re seeing the challenges facing print media, as their business moves online and they try to figure out howthehell to monetize “free.”
Television and film have been (somewhat) immune from those changes, if only because the much larger data requirements of visual information requires much more bandwidth than has been available… until now:
Cable TV was always a bad model for the consumer because, in a sense, you’re paying twice. When you watch The Daily Show, for example, you pay the cable company to bring Comedy Central’s programming into your home. But you also contribute to Comedy Central’s bottom line by watching its ads. However, the Internet allows you to connect directly to Comedy Central without the cable company go-between. You only pay once — either with your eyeballs on ComedyCentral.com, or with your wallet on iTunes….
It’s not hard to foresee a day when Americans come home and, using an Internet TV system that would probably look a lot like your DVR menu, queue up the latest situation comedy or key in to a live news broadcast.
So it’s probably a good thing that companies like Comcast had the good sense some years ago to start offering “high-speed internet” through their coaxial pipes, because pretty soon, that’s going to be their entire business.
With 24-some hours remaining before introducing the newest world-transforming, life saving, cancer-curing gizmo, the iWhatever, Apple's recent acquisition of Lala.com looms ever more intriguing.
The Internets are rife with speculation about what that merger means. Will iTunes be moving to the cloud? Will Apple start offering streaming music for a fraction of the cost of downloads? Will there be an "all your ears can eat" subscription service? Will Michael Robertson's head explode? (Michael came up with a cloud-based music delivery scenario ten years before people started talking about "cloud computing" — and the music industry promptly clubbed him into oblivion. And they're still clubbing him. Another case of "the second mouse gets the cheese" ?)
Whatever the plans for Lala, you can bet it figures tightly into Apple's plans for its new gizmo, which conceivably offers the potential to completely alter how people use digital technologies. That it will a) not have a hard drive and b) have all kinds of wireless capabilities pretty well dictates that whatever content it does deliver will not likely be stored on the device itself.
Now we're starting to see all kinds of speculation about the "content" deals that Apple has been quietly making as it gets ready for tomorrow's big announcement:
According to various rumors, Apple has been in contact with a variety of media outlets ranging from magazine publishers like Condé Nast to newspaper vendors like the New York Times to book publishers like McGraw-Hill Education to bring a variety of publications to the tablet. And this I think represents one of the key pillars to Apple's successful business strategy–marrying devices with content.
What's more, Apple appears poised to dramatically expand the capabilities of its already capable iTunes platform. Via its acquisition of Lala.com, Apple will be able to sell music, and perhaps other content, through a streaming scenario–and may be able to charge less for the stream than for the straight download. The company also is rumored to be planned a Web-based version of iTunes, which would make the platform more user friendly and nimble than its current 100-or-so megabytes. Couple these advances with the addition of newspapers, magazines and books to iTunes and the platform becomes a one-stop content shop for iPhones, iTablets and the rest.
via www.fiercemobilecontent.com
As I already mentioned on that other blog post yesterday, my iPhone has already become my content delivery device of choice. It has pretty much displaced my Kindle because it not only delivers more stuff, but I can do more with that stuff from the iPhone than the Kindle. The iWhatever promises to put all that iPhone capability into a more Kindle-size package. I can hardly f'ing wait.
It's the combination of content and technology that makes the iPhone more valuable to me than the Kindle. So I think you can pretty well bet that music is going to be a big part of the content that iWhatever delivers.
Cloud storage? Streaming delivery? Lower prices? Subscription service? My bet is on all of the above. And exploding heads to boot.
What with all the speculation about what Apple’s acquistion of Lala.com means for the future of iTunes and digital music in general, here comes the closest indication yet that Apple understands that music storage and delivery are moving into “the cloud.”
But (drum roll please) Apple has changed tack and is now offering browser-based song previews of 30 seconds of the music. This means you can sample a song from an iTunes Preview link using a Web browser.
If you like a track you can then hit the button to purchase it through the Apple music service.
via 9to5mac.com
I spent about a half hour recently chatting with Nashville based blogger and podcaster Dave Beronja and music journalist Lucas Hendrickson about Apple's acquisition of Lala for the latest edition of Dave's "Nashville Feed" podcast. Tune in here.
Mental Health Break
This latest send-up of the “Downfall” parody that has been in circulation on the Interwebs for a couple of years now neatly sums up a lot of the issues around new media -v- old, social media and audience participation, and the copyright issues around satire and parody:
It also performs the neat trick — if you’re any kind of McLuhanist, new-media, please-let-the-fucking-dinosaurs-DIE already advocate – of actually making you feel empathy for “Hitler.”