Apple and the rise of online music sales

There was a brief moment in the not too distant past when music was distributed for free on the Internet somewhat like news is today. Napster was the place where listeners downloaded and "shared" digital versions of their favorite music with other fans. The music industry took notice of all this free traffic and when to court to shut down Napster. iTunes rose Phoenix-like from Napsters' ashes to become the dominant music distribution system.

For newspapers grappling with a way to put the genie back in the bottle and figure out a way to get folks to start paying for their product again, the rise of iTunes may offer some hope: Maybe we can get people used to getting something for free to start paying for it again?

But were interested in the music story here, and from the business side of things, iTunes has been an unqualified success. Still, there are detractors. Jon Bon Jovi seems to think the move toward digital has diminished the discovery experience of music, going so far as to claim Steve Jobs (when he was still with us) was killing the music business. I wonder sometimes. Certainly my teenage daughters experience music far differently from how I did when I was their age. I hung out in record stores, thumbing through racks of 12-inch vinyl, admiring the cover art and wondering how it represented the music inside. No need for that (either the record store or the experience of hanging out in one) when you have iTunes. My kids gather round the computer with friends, sample songs and buy the ones they like. I'm not sure my kids have ever put on the headphones and listened to an album from start to finish the way I did.

There are other criticisms of the digital model. For instance, does it give industry leaders, some of whom have "control" issues, too much influence over music they way they once did during the payola days? Or does the Long Tail Effect level the playing field, allowing more artists to get their music to their fans?

So here our question for the week: How much is there to Bon Jovi's claim that digital killed the music industry? We've talked about the tactile experience of ink-on-paper media. Is there a similar experience that the old album cover and liner notes, as well as being grounded to a fixed-site device like a turntable, that changes music forever? Is that really a change, and if so, is it necessarily a bad thing?

I'll look for your comments by Friday when I will open the Sound Media quiz is open and ready for your test-taking pleasure.

Daily drops to three editions

A move like this at the Daily Inter Lake wouldn't surprise me a bit.

Paywalls work for some

Some newspapers are making paywalls pay.

The New York Times and the Missoulian both went to similar metered paywall models this year, meaning they allow a certain number of free views, and once you hit the limit you have to start paying.

Driving readers back to print

A small community daily in Rhode Island made the decision a few years back to create an expensive paywall to its Web site to deliberately drive readers back to its print product.

Two years later, how's that working out?

The Long Tail

This graphic illustrates the Long Tail Effect. The y axis (that's the line the runs up and down) shows how popular a product is, or how great its sales. The x axis (the horizontal line) shows the distribution of sales of all of the products in a category. If we were considering movie ticket sales last weekend, "The Vow," which was the No. 1 movie in theaters last week, would be represented by a place on the x axis very near its intersection with the y axis. In other words, "Vow" ticket sales are in the red area designated as the "Head," as ticket sales for that movie are quite high. Some art house movie only showing on a few screens, primarily in big cities near universities with a concentrated population of pretentious intellectuals, would be represented by a point on the x axis far to the right of the Head. Our art house movie, let's call it "Jacques Confronts the Meaninglessness of Existence While Drinking Pinot," would be placed somewhere out on the orange "Long Tail."

Why is this Long Tail important? Consider for a moment a different type of product: music. When I was a young lad in college I worked at a record store, Licorice Pizza (Get it? if you've never seen a vinyl record you might not, so check this out). Record stores were the place where everyone purchased their music back in the prehistoric 1980s. Record stores were a great place for distributing music, but they had a significant limitation: space. That limitation meant that we could only carry the best sellers, or records that sold well enough to fall in the Head section of the x axis.

What that meant was that if you were looking for the latest Phil Collins album (he was big back in the day) we had plenty on hand. But if your tastes ran more in the direction of "Echo and the Bunnymen," an arty New Wave act of that era, we might have had a copy stuck in a bin with the latest releases by "The Jam," "X" and "Magazine," other New Wave/Punk bands with considerable talent but sales that never climbed beyond the Long Tail into the Head.

But today my 17-year-old daughters have never purchased music in a record store, and have only been in Rockin Rudy's in Missoula a time or two. They purchase all of their music online in iTunes and load it directly on their iPods.

Your assignment is to write a 1,200 word essay examining the Long Tail and its impact on Mass Media. Your essay should answer to the best of your opinion, an opinion formed by research of course, the five questions listed below.

Before you try answering these questions a little research is in order. I'd start here if I were you.

You may also find this helpful.

Your questions:

1 — Music on iTunes is distributed digitally. As the cost of digital storage space (memory) has declined, how has this affected digital music distribution?

2 — Retailers once focused their efforts on the few top products in the Head. What are the implications for profit making when products in the Long Tail can be distributed at virtually no cost?

3 — It you were an independent producer of low volume product, be it music, video or a manuscript, how would you seek to exploit the Long Tail to maximize sales and exposure?

4 — Has the distribution of intellectual property changed permanently, and if so is this good or bad ? If we lose the communal space of bookstores and record shops forever have we lost something of value?

5 — Do you expect the forces of the Long Tail to play out for books the way it did for music, or do you expect something different to happen?

Dead tree media

In Chapter 4 we examine Ink on Paper. You’ll notice that there are three PowerPoints for this chapter rather than the one I prepared for you to review in earlier chapters. Well, there’s a reason for that.

Once, a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, our beloved “Media of Mass Communication” text had three chapters devoted to Dead Tree Media. Alas, much has changed since I started teaching this class four short, short years ago. For starters, when the 10th edition was released the author condensed books, newspapers and magazines down to a single chapter. This may be an acknowledgment of reality, but it remains a little troubling for a guy like me who spent a lot of years with ink-stained fingers trying to produce timely, meaningful — dare I say relevant — newspapers. I miss my morning newspaper, but I can’t say I dislike the thing that has replaced it, namely a handheld computer better known as an iPhone. If we didn’t receive free copies of the "Missoulian" and "Daily Inter Lake" at work I would probably read 99 percent of my news on either this device or my home computer. As it stands I’m still getting more than 80 percent of my “print” news electronically.

I’m not really complaining. The news on my iPhone is updated 24/7. If I watch FC Barcelona pummel some hapless Spanish football club on TV, within minutes of its conclusion I can usually read a short, 500-word game story on my iPhone. And I can do this without even having to haul my lazy butt off the couch. That’s of course a major shift from the way sports information used to be distributed. Most of you are probably not old enough to remember this, but back in 1990 there was a short-lived venture called “The National,” which was an attempt at creating a national all-sports daily newspaper. All-sports dailies are common in Europe where national boundaries are smaller and tend not to stretch across four time zones. "The National" was well written and had a top-notch editor in “Sports Illustrated” writer Frank Deford (he can still be heard Wednesday mornings offering sports commentary on NPR) and it of course failed miserably in less than a year and a half. They even tried to get "The National" online before it folded using an early Internet service provider called Compuserve (that’s also probably before your time).

It seems kind of quaint now, a national sports newspaper, but that’s the way we used to roll. Today we’re wondering if there’s even a place in the future for things like books and newspapers. We shall see.

The "Books" Powerpoint is short. There are a number of names included. Make sure to take time to note the significance of each. I’ll give you a preview of "Newspapers" and "Magazines" later this week or next. There will also be some supplemental readings with prompts for blog posts from all of you. This is a two-week section so there will not be a quiz this week. Take this opportunity to start plugging away on your Long Tail paper which is due in a little more than a month.

And if you’re behind on Quizzes 1 through 3, you’ve got another 48 hours to get caught up. Do it!

Super Bowl Ad reaction

Here's a link to a NY Times story about this year's underwhelming crop of Super Bowl ads. A decade or so ago the ads were often more entertaining than the game, but they've been on the decline for a awhile now. I don't know if it's a result of the declining role of mass audience television advertising, or if the Super Bowl ad hype is just an idea whose time has passed — kind of like watching a 50-something Madonna trying to reprise her hyper sexy persona of the 1990s when she really should be at home working on her AARP application.

I really liked Madonna once too. But that seemed really sad tonight. It's been all downhill since Lucky Star.

Chapter 3 preview

This week we embark on a fairly important chapter, media economics. While there was a bit of economic discussion in chapter 1, the rubber meets the road in chapter three. Read the chapter and then take a look at the PowerPoint I prepared. Be forewarned, the PowerPoint for this chapter is only loosely linked to the text, and represents the kind of get-on-my-soapbox rant I occasionally unload on my face-to-face classrooms.

I'd apologize, but I actually think this stuff is really important. Good newspapers (or TV or radio or online) that do real journalism are really a key part of maintaining a healthy, thriving nation. But there isn't much good journalism left. Instead we're left with a lot of nonsense such as this:

Media ignores the news to focus on manufactured conflict.

Another sad commentary on the state of American media. The Washington press corps, the elite of the journalistic elite, lobbing 23 questions about a faux controversy about when the president would speak, and only nine about what he intended to speak about. Whether you love the president, or hate him, or if you fall somewhere in between, I think you'd all agree that since he wanted to talk about his proposal to create jobs, while we are in the midst of the worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression, that the substance of his speech should matter to these knuckleheads.

I suspect contemporary media economics has something to do with this dumbing down of our discourse (to the degree that we allow it to continue, we share some blame). That's my theory at least. Let me know if you agree, or disagree. I will post additional readings on Media economics throughout the week.

Let me hear from you by Wednesday.

Chapter 2 extra

See my post below. We'll be exploring the question of what is gained and lost in the conversion to digital throughout the semester. Chapter 2 is all about reminding ourselves of the history of the analog formats digital models are built on. So treat the chapter as if it's a history lesson. The questions on the quiz are backward looking, but that's OK this early in the semester as we're still just trying to make sure we're all on the same page.

Some of you haven't completed your assignment by responding to the previous post. Get on it!