I downloaded the new Radiohead album yesterday. This is not noteworthy in itself, but perhaps you have heard about how Radiohead is letting fans download it off an independent website and decide the price for themselves. (fwiw, I paid $10, and this was before Andrew informed me that the audio was substandard. Still sounded good to me.)
Downloading the album on an arcane, user-unfriendly, stark web site made me think about the experience of buying music--what it used to be, and what it has become. Do you remember when music could only be purchased at record stores? When I was growing up, the sole outlet in our burg for music was the Musicland store at Kennedy Mall.
I spent many hours in that store (a lot of it pining for things they didn't have) and there were some albums that I bought simply because they were available and marketed nicely in the store (like the original 3-disc soundtrack to Thank God It's Friday--what was I thinking, and how did I have enough money to buy that as a 9 year old?!?)
Ahem. Anyway, even today, iTunes has an online ambiance of its own. Entering the iTunes store is not unlike visiting the Musicland of my youth (except it has more music and no shag carpeting or earth-toned walls.) It was a little disconcerting to buy the Radiohead album in a veritable vacuum, throw it into my iTunes, and upload the album onto my iPod, all by my lonesome self. Perhaps I am so used to having my marketing with my music that completely disconnecting that part of it takes some getting used to? Maybe so.
When it comes to the consumer experience, there are parallels between buying music and finding information. Back when you only had your local library as a resource, it was use what they had (and what your librarians could find for you) and forget about the rest of it. (Not unlike me pining for Rapper's Delight back in 1979 but knowing there was no way a Musicland in Iowa would regularly carry it.) From the mid-90's until just a few years ago, it was use the library web site as a central portal, and hope it connects you to what you need. Now, content is distributed everywhere. Access points are everywhere. And everything is miscellaneous.
With use of the traditional library web site dwindling, it seems we might yet again be like the Musicland store owner back in the mid-90s. User behaviors change as access points increase. But do we lose something when content becomes so disconnected that there is no atmosphere or environment to connect the users? Do we depend on social connectors like Facebook to wholly supply that environment now?
Thanks for letting me share these questions. And now back to what I am really supposed to be working on.
Things definitely have changed, but I think there are some great advantages. In particular, I don't have to buy an album blindly now... I can now sample it and decide if it's worthy of my $10.
Plus, I love finding all the other things connected to an album I like, such as the recommendations and the nice little listings of a band's other works, etc...the bonus tracks! If that's not marketing, I don't know what is!
I think the whole idea of the long tail is a fascinating one. I love that now it's so much easier to find obscure artists that I might never have known existed before. Now, we (libraries) just need to get on that train. ;)
p.s. The sole outlets for music in my town were at the Schuylkill Mall. I can remember getting a rush off of passing for 18 and getting away with buying the Jane's Addiction album (censored for explicit lyrics...silly Tipper Gore). I guess that experience might be slightly harder to recreate online...or would it?
I like these music store memories!
I forgot about the PMRC restrictions---I was too old to be affected by those. ;) That would have kept me from buying Motely Crue's Shout at the Devil on vinyl when I was in junior high (and maybe that would have been a good thing, as far as developing my musical tastes in a better direction, now that I think of it!)