Small Fish, Big Pond

Gizmodo is announcing Time of Death for the iTunes LP.

Everything I said when it was announced still holds true as much as it did half a year ago.
iTunes LP (possibly Cocktail) fails

The final reason this won’t work is that it doesn’t solve the core reason that people online only buy music a track at a time. People are sick of 2-3 good tracks and 10 “filler tracks” that are unwanted.

For getting people to buy LP’s instead of individual tracks EVERY full album purchase on iTunes should come like this by default at the normal album price. This is what iTunes should have been doing from the get-go to entice us into putting up with those 10 filler tracks. As a more expensive version of an normal track only album it’s not worth it.

The digital world opens up some awesome potential for making a simple format like audio into a more interactive and dynamic format. The iTunes LP is an idea that while honorable, falls flat. First off if you’re like me and you think iTunes needs to die by fire, here’s a rundown primer of how it works.

The good:

1. DRM free, high quality tracks.

2. Music videos (however, not sure how many).

The Bad:

1. No DRM but iTunes only. It might as well be DRM if you can’t play with anything but iTunes.

2. 256kbps AAC is good but not lossless. If it costs more and its meant to be a full LP it should have all the same benefits as buying a physical LP.
3. Costs more for the same things you get free through other sources like last.fm.
4. Not portable.
5. Bad implementation. Hijacks your iTunes.

While the digital world opens a lot of doors almost nobody listening to music ever bothers to invest this much time into music ONLY. Let’s face it; music is basically a background soundtrack to our lives. We listen in the car while driving or have music play while we surf the net, play video games, while you cook, clean house, or run in the park. Apart from watching music videos on youtube, people rarely stare at the screen watching music related videos and music related pictures while you listen to said music. You may listen to a lot of music but how much time do you spend listening and watching the virtualizer make pretty images on your screen?

Even with physical media I only look at the liner notes and read lyrics the first time I listen to an album. I’m not against add-ons to albums, I think it’s a great way to enrich the music purchase but this is a poor way of doing it. The problems is that digitally people aren’t as interested in the add-ons.

In the physical realm I like that I can get a limited edition CD with bonus features the normal CD doesn’t have (actually this is still uncommon in the US market but common overseas). In most cases the bonus consists of more tracks, and usually a companion DVD. To total package of a physical “Limited Edition” is: music, lyrics, liner notes, pictures, music videos, “making of” videos, bonus tracks, and often posters or even t-shirts in some cases.

For this Digital version they’re treating the lyrics and pictures like they’re bonus material even though they’re standard on a normal CD. The addition of music videos is good. But the visualizers and flashy screens are just fluff. And we still don’t get bonus tracks. Plus it’s not a lossless copy, if it was FLAC I could buy the LP online and burn it to Disc for those times I do want a physical copy. We can go Physical -> Digital without loss, why not Digital -> Physical?

Then there is the portability issue. If I buy tracks on iTunes I can take them on the bus with an iPod, but the fancy additions stay on the computer. While the tracks are DRM free and can be converted to non-apple formats for other players the additional features are locked to iTunes or Safari (no WMP WinAmp, Firefox, or Amarok). Although Jay says you can hack the videos out, that shouldn’t be necessary. The labels should sell the tracks so that I can play them on any player, the videos should be a standard file type that can be played on any player as well. Then all of our video capable media players can be filled with a video playlist, not just an audio playlist. So long as everything is Apple proprietary this isn’t possible.

The final reason this won’t work is that it doesn’t solve the core reason that people online only buy music a track at a time. People are sick of 2-3 good tracks and 10 “filler tracks” that are unwanted.

For getting people to buy LP’s instead of individual tracks EVERY full album purchase on iTunes should come like this by default at the normal album price. This is what iTunes should have been doing from the get-go to entice us into putting up with those 10 filler tracks. As a more expensive version of an normal track only album it’s not worth it.

6 months from now I’m sure Apple will tout how this has revolutionized music and now the new tablet will make more use of it; and people will eat it up. But in reality labels will be rumbling that it’s not making a noticeable difference and while many iTunes LPs will have been sold it will still pale in comparison to normal track sales. 2-3 years from now they will fade away and be forgotten as another failed experiment to change with the times.

Polishing a turd” sounds like an odd euphemism, like “Pinching a loaf”.

Reuters just published some additional info on “Cocktail” the new music agreement between Apple and the Big record labels. They verify my fears from the end of my previous post, they’re just going to polish the latest Blink182 turd with some pictures and digital content and expect us to think it’s better music. Oh, and charge you more for it than a traditional album, let’s not forget that.

Plus TechCrunch is musing that “Cocktails” may be small apps that are the albums themselves, that create a package of music and album related comment. This is almost exactly like my fears that they will be like those shitty Shockwave apps that are sometimes bundled with CDs as “Interactive content”. The very name makes me think that TechCrunch is onto something; I wouldn’t doubt this all a way to start marketing musical “Cocktails” to people. I can hear Jobs keynote speech already, “First we revolutionized music by making it portable with the iPod. Then we discovered a new feature to help you sort music called “Shuffle”. Then we gave you a way to carry music on your phone and still charge you $0.99 for an additional 30 second ringtone. Now we will revolutionize music again by turning music into an app that can’t use that archaic shuffle feature some moron came up with.”

Anyway, Cocktail smells. Smells bad. Smells real bad.

From Reuters via TechCrunch.

Yes, it’s probably going to fail just as hard as you think it will. Album sales are sucking in the physical format, how will they survive in the digital format where the individual track is king?

It won’t. This is the same tired dream that has been talked about and failed before.

While I totally support the Album format it just isn’t well balanced for online sales. The problem is that nobody trusts albums anymore; so many years of selling albums with 2 good tracks and 10 filler tracks has lead people to distrust the big labels when it comes to music. The only reason albums still sell in America is that they don’t market singles here.

Too bad too, an album that is 90% filler isn’t the album format’s fault, it’s the fault of the producers and labels that crank out BS. I’ve talked a few times about how physical sales could become more attractive to consumers (that old post reminds me I need to get that “Switch” single.) It’s easy to find good albums that are full of great content from start to finish that even flow from song to create a real musical experience. They usually just come from smaller independent bands who have to rely on good music to make sales. One reason “cocktail” will fail is that it’s a collaboration between Apple and those big labels that crank out crap, only now it will be digital crap.

The main reason this is a bad idea is that online digital liner notes and images don’t have any appeal. I can goto last.fm for all the bios and images I need, and a plugin that feeds lyrics gets the rest of the liner notes. Besides when I’m on my computer listening I don’t want desktop real-estate taken up with static images or text, it’s just a background soundtrack for my actions. And if you cram this stuff into an iPod screen there will be no room to really see anything.
When people listen to music they don’t stare at the album art while they listen; they just queue up the track and pop the iPod back in their pocket while the stare wistfully out the window of the bus.

Digital format can only really be enhanced by adding video, and it can excel at this as I’ve mentioned in other writings I’ve made. But this can be done just as easily with singles, so it’s not really going to help the online album format any more. All the efforts the big labels are working on would work better in the physical format. In fact that YesAsia link I put above for the limited edition of “Switch” proves the point, it already has the lyrics and typical liner notes, adds in additional promotional photo shoot pictures, a DVD with the song’s music video and “making of” video, plus the commercial advertising the song. Suddenly having a physical copy seems a lot more interesting than a song with DRM locked flash programs attached.

Which is another big point, many CDs have been enriched with digital content that comes in the form of a DRM laden, bloated, adobe flash or shockwave piece-o-crap. Or worse some proprietary program that is nothing more than legal malware screwing up your computer. And you know that whatever way they use to display all this additional content it will be locked down with DRM just like those “enhanced content” CDs.

The idea of enriching music is a good one, but big labels aren’t smart enough to make it happen in a meaningful or useful way. Online all the things you can add are usually already available through other sources, the only appeal is to give you something you can keep on your hard-drive for offline use. If the big labels want to revive the album, make albums that aren’t 90% filler; make them so that when listened to as a whole the album becomes more than the sum of their parts. Songs that lead well into other songs, or songs that through the album tell a story or take the listener through a series of emotional experiences. It takes more work and talent but that is what they need to increase sales; don’t just polish the latest Blink182 turd with some pictures and expect us to think it’s better.

Thanks to Ars Technica and the many other blogs reporting this.

BTW: I’m planning on addressing the Apple tablet issue in another post.