Just one post this week, it is again the busy period in Vince’s house. This last week, I’ve read two predictions, both, by coincidence, based on the role-model of Apple. The first was David Carr’s, who asked for an iTunes for news in the New York Times. The second was Ian Betteridge’s, who predicted an iPhone-style app-store, controlled by Apple, for all of the Mac. Let me address them both here.

News… what has that looked like over the years? We had print, which lead to books and perhaps pamphlets. Let’s just jump to the 20th century. We’ve had the onslaught of the marketing age, which also made newspapers big. People have never paid for news really, they pay a minimal fee for the price of the paper, the rest of which is covered by advertisers. Then came the internet and it all went down the toilet. You, me, everyone imagined they could be a journalist, even if it meant just copying the text word-by-word of what someone else had written.

Compare that with music. It started with the production of sound, live performances, then the reproduction of sound across various media. The business-model was 90% of the time a straight sale. Music speaks to our brain, differently from the way news does (it’s all drama anyway, right?), and we are hooked on it, like a drug. So we pay and we pay and we pay. Then comes the internet and the magic of painless reproduction and distribution. The power-houses that are media-companies were slow to catch on and it’s pirate-city all round. CD sales go down! In comes smart Apple with their silly little white box with one button and saves the whole damn industry! We think, oh my god, Apple saved retail! What Apple in fact did was close the loop again. Instead of artist -> CD -> shop -> CD -> consumer, we now have artist -> mp3/4/5 -> iTunes -> iPod -> consumer. Everyone wins, though most of all, Apple.

What is the key here?

• For one, music isn’t news. As I pointed out, music is a drug, while news is a duty. Music is fun, while news is … interesting? We can live without the news, believe me, we can’t live without music.
• Two, news was never a powerful business model to begin with. Since the days of Soap-operas, all media has been owned by advertisers, who somehow have made this industry survive, even though no one was really willing to pay for it. Yes, we can also live without television, but we can’t live without music.
• Music is also a tightly controlled product, it’s expensive to make music and to get it into your ears. News, on the other hand, the media has long learned how easy it is to copy-paste.

The internet has shaken both industries and much more so news. Because its sugar-daddies, the advertisers, suddenly realised that they could get away with no longer paying for the expensive process of print and distribution, as well as having many more options to advertise online. The power-position, which was already unbalanced in the first place, has shifted even more in the direction of the advertisers.

For music, the power of supply continued to be in the hands of the media-companies. In case you haven’t noticed, those are some powerful companies and the world of music and other entertainment media is locked down with some big nails—Pandora, Hulu, Joost, iTunes, take your pick, chances are that most of these are not in your country. The internet has had an effect, to be sure, but they control the supply and they have lot’s of money to change things. They finally got iTunes to succumb as well, with their now variable pricing.

There is no analogy here and no matter the superficial similarities and the coming of the “iReader,” there never will be. News will never be something that we want to pay for. Who wants to pay to hear that Hurricane XX has killed millions, or Region YY is filled with starving children, or that Region ZZ has weapons of mass destruction? Because, that, unlike the stories we may read on the internet, is what news really is: making us aware that our planet isn’t all that. Give me a good song any day over having to hear that!

Just briefly, the iPhone store translated to Macs. Why it’s different: it’s i…Phone, the most locked-down technology on this planet. Vs. the PC, which is the most unlocked technology on the planet. Need I spell it out?

The greater point I’m making is that frequently “visionaries” and “entrepreneurs” write their business plan or manifesto stating that because X is so, my business will work that way too. Analogies, taken too loosely, will kill your business and rather than taking the words of visionaries at their face value, we should work it out: Was X like that really, and is your business like that really too? Chances are… it’s not.

Vincent

(man, I love it when I can pump out all this text in 15 min. or less)

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