I wasn't able to attend the newly added second day of the Leadership Music Digital Summit yesterday, but Tuesday was packed with insights and great networking. It was the fifth annual event, and once again I was proud of our community for staging a business conference with such high level people and such a great environment for trading ideas.
It seems that the event's biggest headline grabber was a collaboration between internet service providers and the RIAA to refine the process by which RIAA finds and notifies music pirates. But I was taken by the Tuesday keynote address from Rio Caraeff, VP of eLabs, an R&D unit of Universal Music Group. He's the company's top futurist, and he conceded openly that his ideas are not company policy yet and that he's doing his best to turn around a battleship from within. However, he crashed through the bewildering debate over licensing, advertising supported free music and the rent-versus-own debate with an insight that has driven me and my business ever since I quit my job as a newspaper music critic and writer.
Content is not king, he said, in diametric opposition to one of the great canards of modern media. Instead, CONTEXT IS KING.
He's absolutely right, but what does he mean?
As an example, he showed a slide of a deluxe Jimi Hendrix box set full of tactile wonders - reproductions of letters and recording session logs and a lavishly produced history with liner notes and etc. It's exactly what digital music ISN'T, he said. We've "unbundled" the music from the experience and reduced packaging and presentation to a jpeg album cover image and some puny meta-data. The iTunes interface has reduced your record collection to a "spreadsheet" thereby eliminating the difference between what you can BUY and what you can STEAL. So, Caraeff said, we need to reinvent the idea of the album and develop industry-wide standards for a form of digital packaging that can offer both the music and the experience - the story - in way that is absorbing, interactive and updatable.
I'm not saying I'm as smart as this guy, but I've been saying that context is king for two years, and the reason I got on to the idea is simple. I'm a journalist by trade. I'm a storyteller. Music and story have always gone hand in hand, whether it was DJ Dewey Phillips on Memphis radio touting the wonder of Carl Perkins and Elvis or those liner notes that kept us up late learning about the story behind the albums we were buying. The movie industry made a bundle off DVDs and I don't think that would have been nearly as successful without the extras - the making-of documentaries and the directors' commentaries. They sold their own magic and creative process. The music industry had better figure that out, and Caraeff's ideas were the first of this kind coming from inside a major label I've yet heard.
The stories may be important, but there are many, many, many more examples, so far, of failed models to (sorry!) monetize them in the digital environment, than of successful ones. (The apology is for the word, "monetize", not for the concept, which I am all for.)
When Caraeff talked about "industry-wide standards for a form of digital packaging", was his concern about cross-platform compatibility, or rights management, or critical mass in terms of user familiarity/acceptance/adoption? Because now, I don't think music has necessarily lost its stories; but the stories don't keep the consumer from "uncoupling' by buying or taking only the music, often a la carte at that, and the stories migrate online, where they are perhaps loved, but not paid for. Did more people buy an Adrienne Young CD because the package included a seed packet, an arty-book insert, a sticker, and a card with a code for a free download? That's not a rhetorical question; I don't know.
Posted by: Betty Wheeler | March 26, 2009 at 09:48 PM