Posts from October 2003

Check out this post on TNL.net.

It’s directly related to my two latest posts about Downloading and iTunes for Windows.

I have a friend who manages bands and musicians. He is one of the best managers in the business. And he hates downloading, even legal/paid downloading, because it encourages the consumption of singles and does not promote the purchase of albums. Its an economic issue for him and his artists, but its also a creative issue for him and his artists.

He wants Apple to take his artist’s music in album-only format. Apple won’t do that. So he keeps his artist’s music off iTunes. That’s bad for me and you because we like his artists.

So how does this issue get resolved? Well I think that albums at $9.99 and songs at $0.99 is a bad pricing model because you’d have to like 10 songs in order to justify buying the album. And I also think that you should get a credit towards an album if you buy the singles on the album. And finally, I think the hit singles should be priced at a premium.

Think about one of my favorite bands, Fountains of Wayne. They have a new album which is great. It’s called Welcome Interstate Managers. If you like alternative rock music, you should go get this album. I love songs like Hackensack and Valley Winter Song. But they aren’t the singles. The first single is Stacey’s Mom. It turns out Stacey’s Mom is the #1 downloaded song on iTunes. I bet it would still be popular at $2/download. My kids and their friends love this song. The Stacey’s Mom video should also be available on iTunes for $3. It’s available on Kazaa, so why not put it on iTunes? And there might be another single from this album, which should be priced at $2. But the songs I like which aren’t going to be singles should be $0.99. And if you buy all of that stuff, you should get the rest of the album for free. That’s the way it should work.

I’ve told my friend the manager this. He’s not so sure. So I’d like someone, maybe Apple, to start doing it this way and show him and the rest of the music busines a new way to make money with music. And then we’ll have all the music we want on these paid services and life will be great.

Apple announced the availability of iTunes for Windows at a big event in San Fransico yesterday. John Markoff wrote a nice piece on the event in today’s New York Times.

I love the Macintosh computer. All my kids use Macs. And I love the iTunes software that runs on the Macs. My kids get annoyed at me for using their computers all the time.

But I still use a Windows-based laptop. So this is a big deal for me. I went to itunes today, downloaded iTunes for Windows, and boy it is great. I got rid of Windows Media Player for music. I am on iTunes now. The interface is fantastic and the sound quality is great.

But even better, I have access to the iTunes music store now. Back when the iTunes Music Store came out for the Mac, i took all file sharing software off the computers in my house and replaced it with the iTunes music store. I wrote about this in my Downloading post.

But I didn’t have that ability on my laptop. Thus the problems with my kids. Now I am free to download, and pay for, music to my hearts content on my trusty old IBM ThinkPad. Now if the music industry would just get all their music onto iTunes, i’d be a really happy guy.

I went to see Joss Stone last night at the Beacon Theater in NYC with my wife and a couple friends. She was terrific. When you see her live, you really sense how young she is. But when she sings, it just blows me away. She’s this 16 year old kid with the voice of a 60 year old woman. Just amazing.

As I suggested in my earlier post on Joss, if you like soul music, go get her album.

What is Audience Management?

It’s the ability to track your audience and customers, know who they are, what they like, how they behave, etc. Done right, it can allow a business to improve its relationship with its customers and potential customers. Businesses have been doing audience management forever. It’s probably one of the most critical aspects of a well run business.

One of the great things about the Internet is that its turns audience management from an art into a science. If you have one or more Internet channels for your business (websites, email campaigns, etc) you can do audience managment.

You can collect data from your customers with their permission. The simplest thing you can do is collect email addresses. Back in 1996, when Seth Godin walked me through the whole concept of Permission Marketing, i was sold. I invested in his company Yoyodyne and enjoyed an early taste of Internet-based audience management.

Most businesses with an Internet channel collect email addresses and use them to talk to their customers. But an email address just isn’t a lot of information about a customer or potential customer. You can ask them to volunteer more information about themselves. One of the best ways to do that is to force them to register. Online stores can do that as part of the checkout process. Non-commerce sites can do that by requiring registration. A lot of online publishers are adding forced registration as a way to improve their audience management.

But what do you do with all of this data? That’s where audience management systems come in. These systems allow you to database all of this information and use it to do interesting things with it. It’s a new emerging market with only a couple of companies selling audience management systems today. I am an investor in one of them, Tacoda Systems, which is the leader and creator of this market space.

Over time, I expect this market will turn into a very large and profitable business. Why? Because marketing is moving from a push/stupid model (buying super bowl ads) to a pull/intelligent model (Amazon knowing i like Dave Matthews and alerting me to his new album). This move is big and its happening in real time and will change the landscape of business as we know it. And audience management is central to this change.

I am interested in Audience Management because of my investment in Tacoda, but also because its a big deal. And i am going to write more about it. There’s a lot of exciting things happening in this market. So stay tuned.

For those of you who are interested in politics, blogging, and money, the Wall Street Journal has a good front page story today about how Dean’s campaign has used email addresses and blogs to jump to the front of the pack.

I’ve been thinking all day about this looming race between Dean and Clark for the soul of the democratic party.

Clark polls much better against Bush than Dean. That’s a big deal. There’s no point in supporting someone who can’t beat Bush.

But what i’ve been mulling about is the attractiveness of the Internet-centric, inclusive campaign that Dean has run to date and whether Clark has the personality and brain trust to do the same. I badly want the Democratic candidate to be someone who understands what we all understand – that the Internet changes the game fundamentally and must be harnessed as part of a progessive forward thinking political effort like running for President.

And i finally came upon some words of wisdom, that Jim Moore, who is a great thinker, posted on his blog today.

If you are interested in this topic, i’d suggest you go read what Jim has to say.

There’s a great interview with Wesley Clark by Josh Marshall on Josh’s Talking Points Memo blog.

If you are like me and want to know more about this man Wesley Clark, i highly recommend it.

If you love 70s rock music, and you haven’t seen Jack Black in the hilarious School of Rock, i would suggest you go do that as soon as possible.

If you want some reviews, go read my wife Joanne’s review or these reader reviews at the New York Times.