There are any number of people highlighting pop music superstar Madonna's jilting of her contract with Warner Bros. Records in favor of events producer Live Nation, the loudest of recent label signoffs that include pop bands Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails. Music publishers have been squirming desperately to keep consumers from dropping their habit of purchasing copyrighted content from them with lawsuits, DRM and any other types of mechanism they can manage, but sadly they have been unable to overcome the key factor in today's media: distribution is dead and relationships in the right venues rule.

To me the key factor leading up to this move was no doubt the bellweather Rolling Stones tour that recently completed with a record USD 500 million-plus in the bank. When creaking, croaking rock stars can pocket half an extra-large by filling arenas with little more than name recognition, why do they need allegiances to plastic disk distributors to reach people who love them?

I am reminded of our definition of content posted on Wikipedia in this regard: "Information and experiences created by individuals, institutions and technology to benefit audiences in contexts that they value." Events are content by any measure under this definition. We are seeing artists whose primary value comes to life in venues in which they can develop relationships with audiences discovering that music publishers are failing to help them build those relationships effectively in an era of Web-based content distribution. By focusing on protecting the unit sales of copyrighted materials music publishers lost the opportunity to negotiate a compelling position for themselves in the relationship building business that is at the heart of today's Web-powered content industry. Events producers know how to build a crowd and work it for maximum profit in the venues that matter most to an artist's audience.

This contextual approach to profiting from content is as old as artistic performance itself and one that is the dominant factor in the music industry yet again. Online venues such as social media sites that help artists to merchandise themselves to their fan base through videos and downloads and sponsored appearances help them to profit from relationships in valuable contexts as well. While the labels crow aoout six-figure copyright infringement suit awards and try to sue people for listening to someone else's radio at work these punitive actions only seem to decrease the value of their brands as credible venue sponsors that could build the marketable value for their artists.

Relationship marketing is all the rage on many levels of the publishing industry, including B2B trade publishing. B2B publishers are discovering that where once their events marketing was the tail on their revenue dogs increasingly events marketing and marketing through Cost-Per-Action pricing is putting more emphasis on conversational content and collaborative marketing efforts. Social media venues that are becoming increasingly popular in publishing add to the mix of content-as-a-marketable-venue plays that have little to do with yesterday's mass production publishing culture. It takes a different kind of producer to succeed in producing this kind of revenue mix - a factor that both music publishers and other publishers need to adapt to as quickly as possible. You can always make money selling copyrighted content, but today's money is in marketing what cannot be copied - the unique venues and the relationships that they foster built around valuable content.

Labels: CDs, downloads, events, labels, madonna, music, publishers

I've been waiting so long for eBooks to take off that it's begining to feel like a scene from a comedy sketch or an existential play, but current sales trends offer some moderate optimism that the medium may be building steam. While USD 8 million for eBooks sales in July is still a rounding error for the book trade as a whole it's double what it was a year ago, and showing strong movement towards cracking USD 100 million in eBook sales next year. Helping along eBooks will be improving players such as Sony's new PRS-505 platform, which Engadget indicates is
now available at a USD 299 sticker price.

The 505 features improved paper-like image resolution from eInk technology and perhaps most importantly a USB port to allow uploads and downloads between the reader and one's PC - at last simplifying the process to snatching content off the Web and transferrring it to the reader. That content can include MP3 files, but with ultra-low power consumption - you could go weeks between needing extra juice for this unit - the main appeal is to the monochrome text world of readers.

Yet for all of the niceties added to this improved model it's still a far cry away from what is likely to be adopted as a mass-market device for book consumption. One significant barrier remains the price point - with communications companies subsidizing the cost of mobile phones heavily to promote usage, why hasn't the book industry considered the same for devices that would promote eBook growth? The answer comes in part from the tradition of booksellers working with balkanized networks of distributors - they're comfortable with retailers who want to lock in their own comfy margins with book products, each with their own quirks and formats.

In the process of helping their vendors remain proprietary, though, the industry is slipping away rapidly from any real opportunities for eBooks to take off in a big way any time soon. Amazon's Kindle platform, slated for a launch (of sorts) this month, will do hardly better than Sony in making people love yet another device to clutter their world - and in fact may do worse, given the device's positively retro look: think of a cross between an IBM PCjr and an early Star Trek Tricorder. Then again, for those attached to print perhaps this is flashy enough.

The real problem with eBook readers lies with their inability to provide any sort of useful reading experience beyond simple book pages. With Adobe PDFs still the widely used standard for premium eBook materials, too many publishers are trying to format information with print-like rendition in mind and leaving eBook readers to try to figure out how to scroll through or otherwise make sense of materials not well adapted for the relatively low resolution of eBook displays. There's a long ways to go before we can even begin to think of this medium as truly "electronic paper."

Mobile devices such as phones are the real portable eBook and eMagazine platform of choice, but even here displays can disappoint. I was watching an iPhone enthusiast demonstrate recently how "easy" it was to read a magazine through the slick new device - a magazine that was formatted for print reading and utterly unnavigable on the tiny iPhone screen. Publishers born of the print world just cannot, cannot give up the notion that print-formatted materials will work great on anything that's smaller than their original format.

With all this said, there may be a niche for eBook readers amongst people who want to make sure that they have something to grab when their mobile phone needs a recharge. In the meantime eBooks are thriving on phones and in online venues where printable formatting is considered a plus. eBooks will do particularly well as materials that can encourage previewing a title that someone would like to consider for on-demand printing. But still, even at this highly developed stage in the electronic publishing era, it's hard for most publishers and technologist to think of books as anything other than a relic that will be accomodated reluctantly by new technologies. This leaves plenty of room for people to reinvent what a book really is - but that's for another post, perhaps.

Labels: downloads, eBooks, mobile, Sony