Culture

Daring Fireball does a good job of covering the problems with iTunes ringtones, particularly in how Apple failed to make the “format” truly user-friendly, even while making them much friendlier than they are in most places:

Apple’s own special way of doing ringtones is this: You can only use songs purchased from the iTunes Store; you must pay an additional 99 cents on top of the price of the song itself; only a small subset of the songs at the iTunes Store are eligible; and, if you decide to create a second ringtone using a different segment of the same song which you’ve already paid for twice, you must pay for it again. But you do get to pick which segment of the song to use.

This “special way” seems fair only when compared to the ringtones offered by competitors, which, as Jobs pointed out in his keynote, typically sell for $2.50, which price includes only the ringtone snippet, not the entire original song itself.

Having worked with the record industry for several years here and there, I would pin the pressure on ringtones on two unfortunate realities of the business.

The music industry is a marketing industry

Even if you are an indie-label who claims to be doing it “for the music,” at best your job is still to tell people about those artists. To say “any person who plays music has the right to earn a living doing it” is a very noble thing to say (and why people always go to labels with the idea of “fixing” them) but that doesn’t map to talent. A lot of people know how to play musical instruments, and marketing is very expensive, so you must either be a) sellable or b) sellable and a Genius. Making something sellable is always about working supply and demand into your favor as much as possible, and geniuses are hard to come by. If you’re going to survive as a business, you’re going to have to get very good at actively selling artists.

The thing is, ringtones are the labels’ only opportunity to bring the market dynamics of singles back. Currently you can lead into an album with a pre-release and a few key tracks, but once that album is out, it’s out, and all the tracks with it. But carefully timed releases of singles, with the right marketing behind it, was the stuff that kept an old album fresh and up on the charts for longer than the average consumer’s attention would allow it to be. Done right, they are events.

More importantly, like singles, they are additional purchases on top of the album. Once Apple and iTunes made buying one track a part of the purchase of the album as a whole (particularly with “Complete My Album”), that extra revenue was lost. But sustaining an artificial barrier between a track and a ringtone of the track keeps that model alive.

Creating an artificial scarcity of a product, combined with big press when that scarcity is alleviated, is often what marketing is all about.

The music industry was built around performances, not recordings

Much of what the industry does is still rooted in what it was doing when it was formed — being a representative for live musicians in a new industrial age where mechanical reproduction threatened their livelihood. If you were a song writer and your sheet music was being turned into player piano rolls, or you were the piano player who was being replaced by said player piano, the industry and its representatives were meant to protect your interests and give you fair compensation when that machine was installed, its rolls were sold, etc. etc..

Today, the idea that a ringtone is a separate performance can be true in a certain conceptual sense, but it’s not in a modern sense, not in the way that the average person thinks about music today. (It’s not like we could have had a live band play follow us and play music when the phone rang.) But to the industry, the music is the attraction — it’s what draws you into the store, it’s what makes you tune in to that internet radio station, it’s what keeps you in the bar, it’s what makes you buy that phone even. They are performances that other businesses are using to make money, so hey, where’s their cut already?

(While the iTunes license should specifically cover the performance rights of the tracks, the question is did the previous license cover playback on phones, or did they have to change the terms to add ringtones, possibly to incent the labels to renew their contracts?)

Problem is, the music industry spent decades trying to get people to consume music as a ubiquitous commodity — The newest release! The exclusive remix! In your car, at the diner or from the movies! — but now it’s paying the price as technology has finally gotten to the point where their product really can be bought and consumed like a commodity — massive repositories, instant access, playable anywhere and in practically anything.

The ringtone, like many other RIAA products, is an attempt to keep the status-quo as long as possible, even though most analysts might say those days are already over.

It seems like my idea of the personal aggregator is finally being built as a full service by a few companies out there. Both Jaiku and Mugshot allow you to enter in basic information about your accounts on other services like Delicious and Flickr, and the systems create unified feeds for all these activities, plus a nice-looking landing page that lets you add more context from there.

They both take things one step further from the browser: Mugshot adds a desktop application that allows you to read your friends’ activity and immediately interact with their updates. (A Mugshot screenshot shows a “chat” link on one item. Once I sign up and play with it I’ll be able to talk more about the actual features — the “tour” is not as detailed as I would like.) Jaiku, on the other hand, adds a custom Nokia Series 60 mobile app for modifying your feed and reading your friends’. And being the Scandinavians they are, there doesn’t seem to be any plans to make an app that is for some phone other than Nokia in the near future.

There’s still a few features and use cases that I’ve been thinking about that neither have implemented yet, so if anyone is developing a similar service, drop me a line and we’ll chat. wink wink.

Quoth Danah:

I’m part of the generation caught between email and IM where IM feels more natural but most of the folks just a little older than me refuse to use IM so i’m stuck dealing with email. Today’s teens are stuck between IM, MySpace/Facebook, and SMS. There’s another transition going on which is why there’s no clean one place. IM replaced email for quite a few years but now things are in flux again. Still, no matter what, email is not regaining beloved ground.

I totally hear that. I’m in the same place — I know a wide swath of people who will plan last-minute events over email. Not necessarily because it’s familiar, but because the majority of the recipients have only bought in to email and haven’t gone further by using IM more frequently, or something more elaborate/specific (such as broadcast SMS services).

I’m still an early adopter in general, which is why I have so many fracking web 2.0 accounts — take my recent integration of Twitter on the home page as a point of reference — so for each service I try, I have maybe zero-to-one legitimate friends on average that use it or are even slightly interested in it.

A certain aspect of this shift has to do with choice overload, which is what the market is currently applying. It’s gotten to the point that the differentiations between the online services and the web services are so small and so niche that in many cases people don’t choose to migrate to a new system because they clearly don’t know which one to switch to. In addition, the network effect is necessary for any one system to be useful, and new services don’t have that benefit because all systems so far, aside from these older executions like email and SMS, have been terribly closed.

And yet let’s remember that there are still many email addresses that are not true email accounts, and that cross-carrier SMS is still only a recent development (around 2002 or so).

When service providers (phone, web, it doesn’t matter) choose interoperability over walled gardens, it’s usually a win for everyone. If there was one wish I could have in this field, it’s that some sort of interoperability layer could be developed for friend-networks — some sort of XFN + RDF + RPC on steroids — so that perhaps using either MySpace or Friendster would analogous to using either Yahoo! Mail or Gmail. They’d both have their positives and negatives, and I can still send messages to people who don’t use the same domain names.

One can dream, can’t one?

Wow, Andrew’s additional thoughts around an article on how teens use MySpace in lieu of email reminded me of my last post about RSS usage.

People are goal-oriented. When people face an application (or any object), these things immediate take a personal context. What is this for? What can I do with this? Providing clear and unobstructed uses that fulfill goals is what makes something “intuitive.” The more thought required to how it works or how to apply it in daily life is what makes it “hard to use.”

When we pit MySpace vs. email, the governing user goal is “I want to follow what my friends are up to.” So why turn down email and choose a social network instead?

• Email addresses are technical and hard to remember. Social networks are visual and based on directories — nothing to remember and easy ways to find things when you need to.
• Email is a protocol and sometimes requires local clients to communicate with a server. Social networks are accessible whereever there is a browser.
• Email is open and can be intercepted and spammed. Social networks are based on permissions and you must be somehow related to a sender to see his/her message.
• Email is stateless, and only represents the message at hand. Social networks offer gobs of data about the user’s activites that don’t have to be awkwardly crammed into an single message to share.
• Email has annoying limitations such as file sizes and attachments. Social networks are designed to help share audio, video and other rich content in one place.
• Email requires you to remember your relationships and include everyone that is necessary for a message in the To: line. Social networks manage relationships for you, and messages can be freely broadcasted.
• Email is a catch-all by nature and puts everything in one spot. Social networks allow people to view particular facets of their communications — by following individual users or groups.

I’m just scratching the surface here.

Coming back to the RSS comparison: The problem with RSS is that it is a more a format than it is a model of communication. Talking about “providing RSS” is just as obtuse as talking about “providing HTML” — it doesn’t really mean anything to the average person. People talk about end uses. “Read about”, “learn about”, etc..

But email isn’t a robust system for those things either, and for average users it isn’t that far off from RSS, as every little email that drops in somehow serves a different end — the latest newspaper headlines, a banking alert, a reminder from your spouse. It is a means to get a message from one point to the next… however, it provides only a message and very little context.

Technically, even a simple task like “share this photo with Joe” isn’t easy. Not until you become an expert, entrenched in the subtleties of image filetypes, attachments and HTML composition. That is, unless you use a “send to a friend” link on a photo site to do all that crap for you. But then… what if that person regularly visited the same photo site? Why bother with email at all?

So what’s the goal of email? I suppose it is “I want to see if I have any email.” Not that attractive, is it? That doesn’t mean email goes away for good, but it does mean it’s weak enough to be overtaken by something more specific to a user’s needs.

And when you’re a teen, and your only need is to stay in contact with your friends… well, you get the picture. Social networks and IM rule.