At the end of part 1, I signed off in search of a mythical final blog post by Steve Jobs. In it, he outlined his grand vision for the future creation, dissemination and consumption of digital media under the simple title, “So where’s this all going Steve?” As you might have guessed … I haven’t found it. In retrospect, it seems a bit rash to have offered to step in to his shoes and write that post, so perhaps I should add that important caveat: in my opinion (not in Steve’s). Or put another way, here’s what I think and I make no claim for my views other than as a starting point for discussion.
Let’s put a few stakes in the ground. For a start, I think most of the hardware and infrastructure elements are in place and will get incrementally better and cheaper e.g. significantly faster broadband (including 4G mobile), cheaper, lighter, lower-power consumption mobile devices. The iPad/tablet and iPhone/smartphone were hugely important pieces in the jigsaw and a way to popularise the ‘personal media device’; a consumption point for film/tv/books that doesn’t bother anyone else and can be carried with you.
What isn’t in place is a collective vision for what the global digital media marketplace can become. You might question whether or not that’s such a big deal, but in any revolution, there are winners and losers. We have a very few early winners, a few early losers and a whole lot more people really worried about where they will fit in long term. People need to understand how to become winners or at the very least, have an idea of how not to become a loser. Take the many players in the book industry as an example. As the author Richard Wright points out, ‘long tail’ sales don’t really cut it for him, nor will they ever; his concern is that fewer and fewer people will be able to write books as a full time profession. He is less sentimental about the publishers, but I’d argue that they have an important role in curation (of which more later), quality control (try reading an unedited book) and generally assisting, not hindering, the emergence of of a coherent, competitive and open market. Geographic lockout does not create an open market and the recent machinations over so-called piracy and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the USA are a case in point of what happens when uninformed legislators meet scared, entrenched interests. It’s simply not acceptable for the tech industry to say, “trust us, it’ll be okay”, because books, film, music etc; are important to a degree beyond their economic weight, partly because of the cultural importance and partly because of their role in education. The way Google handled the books project should have taught us that.
We have to start with a recognition that whilst in digital form, books, music, film and art all look the same (bits), they need to be treated in very different ways. Even putting aside the notion of their cultural or historical aspects, we have to acknowledge that the way we ‘consume’ them is very different. We don’t generally think of ourselves as consumers of a film or art, but by changing the way we think about the problem, new insights emerge.
When we think about the cost of a book, film, song etc; we normally think about buying it. That could be an outright purchase, a rental or a subscription to a streaming service. But it’s not the only cost we incur when we ‘consume’ media. Think for a moment about the following three elements:
- cost to acquire (how much to buy/subscribe to)
- time to consume (how long does it take to finish it?)
- effort to consume (read, listen to, watch)
To these, you could add a fourth, which is the time you invest to be even aware that an author/artist and their work actually exist. It’s mainly a subconscious process, but once we’re past the age of 25, you actually need to be proactive to search out new music; it takes time and effort (your friends are now too busy to tell you about a cool new band). Take a music download, where the cost to download from iTunes might be 99p, it might take less than 3 minutes to listen to the song and we might be able to go running/drive the car/ change the nappy at the same time. There’s are fairly reasonable search services and a few ‘if you like this, you might like that’ services. For a film or a tv series, the cost to acquire might be higher and it certainly takes longer to consume (watch). I also have to concentrate (in the main) to watch it. Search services are not as good for film, especially if you have a taste for overseas cinema. Finally, think about a book. The cost to buy might be lower than a film, but it takes much more effort to consume (read) and I have it require a high degree of attention. I also need to spend a few years at school to learn how to do it. Harry Potter books are between 76,944 and 257,045 words in length and the average reader can manage about 250 words a minute.
I find this revealing. First of all, it’s not hard to see why piracy is going to be more of a problem for music than it is for books (although piracy is an emerging problem with text books – ones you HAVE to read). Secondly, it indicates that if you make the wrong choice with a song, it’s less of an issue than it is if you make a bad book choice (as an aside, it’s not hard to calculate how many books you can read in your life). Thirdly, it suggest to me that one of the weakest parts of the chain is the first one: how should I be made aware of new work that I might actually like. The very best will always be found; I can’t imagine that the next Beyonce or a new Jack Kerouac wouldn’t come to people’s attention. It also works for the very worst – who cares whether we hear about a pub band that are no good or a vanity author whose only market is friends and family? But there is a huge market in between for artists and authors that appeal to my tastes and not to others. How do we match make in the digital market place. It can’t just be an algorithm – I don’t think those Facebook-like buttons will ever work for me. I’ll give you a real world example. I almost exclusively read non-fiction books related to subjects that I’m interested in: architecture, history and social justice and business. Last year I read a novel about an advertising exec from the favelas in Brazil and loved it? How did that happen? Well, I was in a book shop in Bath ( Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights) and when I was at the checkout, I got talking about books to the guy who was serving me. After about a 15 minute chat, he pulled out Heliopolis (James Scudamore) and said, “you should read this, you’d like it”. And I did – a book that was completely outside of my normal ‘scope of selection’. It came from left field. It won’t change my mainstream reading habits, but it will make me eager for more left-field opportunities.
Where does this leave us? Well, it leaves me thinking that merely supplying a bunch of popular songs and books as digital files to a nice tablet does not constitute to a complete solution. More thinking is required … in part 3.
Richard Wright’s blog posts, on the parlous state of a book publishing industry that’s being lashed by the twin storms of digital distribution and ebooks, are another reminder of the amazing revolution that’s taking place in the way we access and ‘consume’ many forms of culture in an increasingly digital age; be it books, film, music or television. Digital distribution has magnified the forces at play many-fold, but this revolution is not just an ‘internet thing’, it’s been going on for some time and to a certain extent pre-dates the commercial internet, as Richard points out. To take the book industry* as an example, the concentration of buying power created giants like Borders that become subsequently dinosaurs in an incredibly short period.
Gil Scott-Heron famously told us the revolution will not be televised. He was right (who watches tv anymore), but it is being blogged about, talked about and tweeted. What surprises me is just how one-sided the discussion is: plenty of comment documenting the problems bedevilling the existing order, but precious little regarding how this revolution will finally play out. Just what will the brave new world look like? I want to know – I’ve got home cinema decisions to be made!
Maybe this asymmetry is simply another case of our natural fascination for bad news or it could be due to the fact that thinking this through is both challenging and time consuming … I know, I’ve tried (more on that later). However, I can’t think of a single instance where I saw someone lay out a vision of the future that spanned books, film, tv and music. It’s not hard to see that they can come together in one place in our home, but how will the nuts and bolts of access and consumption actually work? Do we really think that Steve Jobs didn’t have a vague idea where this was all going, or that Jeff Bezos might somehow have an interest in it? So if someone can point me in the right direction – I’m looking for the blog post from Steve Jobs that answers the simple question, “so how will this all play out Steve?”
If it doesn’t exist, then it’s because Jobs didn’t want to give the competition the keys to the golden kingdom. The global, digital media market is going to be the mother and father of all markets in the 21st century and Apple (and to a certain extent Amazon) have first mover advantage. That map of the future is probably better guarded than the formula for Coke. Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t speculate and someone has to go first, so over the next few posts, I thought I’d step in Steve’s shoes and speculate on how that map might look ….
* Note: it seems only right that I should declare that I have a vested interest in the revolution, both as an investor and Board Member at Ebooks Corporation and as a human being with a healthy respect and appreciation of the Creative Arts.
One of the most frequent questions I get asked by people at the moment is, “how’s business?” It’s an easy conversation starter, but I also think people are worried about the economy, jobs, the future; they’re looking for data points. You just know that they’re expecting a mildly negative response, accompanied by some grumbly comments about how tough life is at the moment, but that’s not what they get. What they get is, “pretty good, actually”, followed by a smile.
The reason is simple. I live in the UK, but that’s not where I do business. When the economic statistics are compiled, they’re always done on a country basis (because only countries have offices of national statistics) and we always see league tables of countries and growth. China is currently the world’s second largest economy and growing at over 9% per year. The UK is sixth and not really growing at all.
But an increasing number of people are working in an economy that isn’t based anywhere. It’s called the Internet. I think about the Internet as an economy in it’s own right, just as I would the UK or China or the US. According to McKinsey, if it was listed as a separate place it would be bigger than the Spanish, Australian or Canadian economies and it’s growing faster than Brazil. All around me, I see armies of well educated people working really hard to build out the infrastructure, services and communities of this place called the Internet. Some of that activity will be unproductive, a lot of it will change the way we live our lives. That’s why, when asked about business, I can smile and say, “pretty good, actually”.
The launch of the Kindle Fire is another shot in the ongoing war between the big web ecosystems (Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon). The background to this war may be our rising propensity to spend money over the internet (when it comes to the web, we’re spending more money, on more things, more often), but it’s effects are being seen both on the web itself and on the world around us. It’s not just tough times that see shops closing in British High Streets; people shifting their spending to the web means less money for the local shops. In the US, it was a basic rule of retailing that each category could support three large retailers, but as we’ve seen with the closure of Borders in the books category, it’s now more typical to see one, plus the web.
The migration of spending power to the web in the space of ten years or less has created enormous incentives for the winners; just look at both the market cap and cash pile at Apple ( $370bn and $70bn respectively). Apple have created some truly ground breaking devices, but it’s easy to forget that they only work because people have become so comfortable with life and spending on the ‘net.
In order to build and maintain market share, Apple et al have reached for the oldest play in the book: the walled garden. Choose your devices from our retail/webstore, choose your apps from appstore, choose your content from iTunes. It’s a sign of how far and fast things have moved that it seems slightly clunky to be looking for film and tv shows on iTunes. I mean, iTunes? Apple have quietly and conscientiously spread the message: inside , everything works out of the box and life is easy, stylish and safe. Outside, it’s dangerous, clunky and uncool. Amazon, Google and Facebook were watching but were never going to sit by whilst Apple grabbed market share, so we now have a ‘walled garden’ arms race and a web that is more divided than ever. Amazon launches a tablet whilst Google buys Motorola.
Welcome to the (not very) brave new world. One where some are even arguing that we will see the end of the general purpose computing device (the laptop or desktop), as we prefer devices that ‘just work’ with our chosen content/software/friend provider.
A compelling story. And one, that in my humble opinion, is plain wrong.
How many times have we been here before? This is an early stage market. Of course people feel safe with the one stop shop; for the time being it makes their life easier. Expect the trend to continue for some time as the web giants deliver a seamless experience to customers in return for their super profits, but don’t expect it to last and make sure you know where you need to be when those Empires fall. Apple are annoying content providers with their excessive charges, Facebook user numbers are declining in their original markets, Google Search doesn’t seem to find what I want anymore and Amazon’s pricing practices seem to have suppliers looking for alternatives.
Empires come, empires go..
They lose the best people and the the ability to innovate quickly. People start wandering outside the walled garden. For those living on the stony ground outside, the answer is not to find a way in, but to keep our heads down and create stuff that customers love when they find it; things they want; things that solve a problem for them and work without too much aggravation across a bunch of platforms. As for those specialist devices? My house has less electronic toys than it did ten years ago. Gone are the VCR, answering machine, amplifier, CD player, telephone. My combination of laptop, smartphone, B&W Zeppelin and iMac gives me everything I need.