There is No Magic Formula For Success

The urge to believe there is a magic formula for success, and that it can be deduced from studying past hits, is powerful. Strategic Communications Group CEO Mark Hausman believes he has distilled The 3 Hallmarks of Exceptional Content. Columnist Marcel Williams is convinced he knows The Essential Features of a Hit Record. Using the so-called Nickels Paradox, we show the fallacy of such beliefs, how correlation with the past seldom predicts future success.

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You Bought It, You Own It, You Should Be Able to Do What You Want With It.

The US Supreme Court is hearing an appeal that could change your ownership rights to music.

If you purchase music as physical media or license-free downloads, you are protected by the so-called First Sale Doctrine of the US Copyright Act, which gives people the right to lend, resell, or give away the works that they’ve bought, even if those works contain copyrighted elements.

But the case of Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, currently being heard by the US Supreme Court, could undermine First Sale Doctrine, making ownership feel more like licensing. How could you be affected?

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The Social Media Bandwagon: Everybody "Likes" a Winner

Mumford & Sons released their 2nd album Babel a few weeks ago. It’s hard to know what any listeners think of it. But one thing we all seem to know — Babel sold 600,000+ copies in its first week. That statistic was re-blogged and re-tweeted thousands of times, blindly hailing “the best debut of 2012.” Everybody {likes, re-tweets, +1’s} a winner.

Does a splashy debut lose significance as media transitions from the physical to weightless digital? We’ll get to that later. In any case, debut has replaced legacy as a benchmark of worth.

Artistic works that build their audience slowly and sustain it for long periods are becoming rare. Most works live and die with their debut. Open big or enjoy staying under the radar. In music, Adele’s 21 is the most recent outlier. No one saw it coming, and then nothing could displace it for more than a year. In the back catalog, Pink Floyd’s enduring hit Dark Side of the Moon returned to the Billboard Top 200 (at #156) for the week ending 21-Oct-2012. That’s 817 (non-consecutive) weeks on the chart (more than 15 chart-years).

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An 11th Simple Truth for a Delusional Music Industry

It seems like a week doesn’t go by without new proposals for streaming music services — some real, some imagined. Most services position themselves to be more convenient than digital downloads. Few promise better quality than CD audio. Therein lies the problem with listener-paid business models, a simple truth from the software industry that should be heeded.

When I got into the commercial software business, titles were delivered in boxes containing install discs accompanied by paper user manuals. From there it became commonplace to purchase a license key to download software and soft-copy documentation. It remains to be seen whether full-feature software can now be accessed solely through the cloud.

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Forget Your Business Model. What is Your Vision?

Author Alistair MacLeod once said starting to write a story without a vision of its ending to guide him was like handing a cabdriver $20 and saying, “take me somewhere.” I was reminded of this when the largest African-American-owned bookstore in the USA abruptly announced it would close. If you are in either the music or consumer audio industry, there is a lesson here for you.

It’s not that sales are down at the Hue-Man Bookstore & Cafe in Harlem. In fact, co-owner Marva Allen said in a Marketplace Radio interview that “sales are up 37 percent.” Though currently successful, the store ceased operations because the owners recognized their business model is unsustainable in the long t

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Can the Cloud Satisfy the Streaming Audio Demands of Bit Snobs?

Pundits say music ownership is passe. But if an army of music owners demanding high-fidelity and personal choice suddenly converted to streaming audio as their only music source, could the Cloud deliver? Let’s run the numbers.

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Research Says Young Listeners May Embrace CD Quality Audio. Habit Says It Won't Be on CD.

The music industry wishes young listeners would abandon low-bit-rate compressed digital music for harder-to-pirate and more profitable CDs. Contrary to the long-held belief that young listeners think lossy compressed music is “just fine,” Harman researcher Dr. Sean Olive has published results from the first peer-reviewed scientific test showing that young listeners will in fact choose CD-quality audio over lossy alternatives when given the choice. Has the dream of a new generation embracing CDs come true? Not so fast.

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How Vinyl and iPods Ganged Up to Kill the Audio CD

NPR reported that CD sales tanked in 2010, particularly among younger buyers. The trend suggests that vinyl and iPods are sinking the audio CD into the so-called “fidelity belly,” where mediocre products go to die.

In his book Trade-Off, journalist Kevin Maney wrote that a truly successful product provides either the richest user experience (fidelity) or the greatest convenience. Less successful products fall into what he labeled the fidelity belly, “the no-man’s-land of consumer experience,” characterized by commercial apathy, insufficient fidelity, and insufficient convenience.

Apple succeeds in the consumer computer market by providing the richest pre-sales experience in its retail stores. Dell and HP succeed by providing an ultra-convenient pre-sales experience online. Who is in the belly? Everyone else.

Sinking into the fidelity belly is essentially the fast track to obsolescence. Staying out of the belly is never assured, because customer expectations for fidelity and convenience constantly evolve.

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