iTunes has announced a new initiative titled “Cocktail” that aims to add value to digital albums sold on the iTunes Store. In hopes to get consumers to spend more, iTunes will offer a package that includes liner notes, artwork, ringtones, and music videos. Apple will be collaborating with EMI, Sony Music, Warner, and Universal, hoping for a September launch date.
“It’s all about recreating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork, while you listened to the music,” said an executive cited by the Financial Times.
This will not work!! People are not going to pay just to get artwork. You can still get that when you download a torrent. Bottom line is if you can get something for free, you will take it for free. Having an image of liner notes will not justify someone to spend money.
Music die-hards and a few randoms might be into this… but people will either download songs as they like to, or they will buy what physical product is left. I don’t see how this will win any of either one over.
Of course this will work. People will pay for artwork for artists that impact their lives. It won’t work for the majority artists, because the majority are one-hit wonders. It will work for Coldplay, classic rock artists, and artists like Imogen Heap.
This is not what digital music is supposed to be. The reason the music industry is going to fail again & again is that it keeps trying to recreate something. But really it’s not even that. This is about charging more. This is about trying to revive growth in a plateaued ringtone market. This is just something they can charge more for.
A successful digital music strategy involves looking at what’s possible. It involves interconnectivity & exploration. It involves a rich, searchable information base. It involves documentation of the recording process. It involves things that were never before possible. It involves artwork & linear notes. And it involves music videos, but not at a premium… that’s like charging people for commercials.
This is just another half-assed attempt at spiking revenues without having to put in any real effort. It won’t have any traction because they’re not approaching this from the consumer perspective. They’re not meeting the expectations of consumers. They’re not surprising or exciting consumers in any way. If anything, this is more likely to draw people who purchase physical product into purchasing digital product.
This aging boomer says: We used to sit around reading the album notes with our friends because that was the only home multimedia experience, controlled by us, that was available.
There were no home videos. (There were only 3 TV networks.) There were no computer games. There was no Internet, and no home computers.
If you wanted to pick your media experience at home, you had (1) music, and (2) books and magazines. That was all. No wonder we pored over the albums.
A good MP3 blog post in 2009 contains the sort of information that we would spend weeks or months trying to assemble, in the old days.
A good MP3 blog post in 2009 contains the sort of information that we would spend weeks or months trying to assemble, in the old days.
Wow! What a great point. No mystery, no mystique anymore. Everythings right in front of you.
Great observation wallow-T,
didn’t quite think of it like that.
I like the idea of having especially the artwork available. Sure, it isn´t quite the same as in actual CD, but it´s better than nothing. The artwork plays big part of the whole enjoyment I get from albums and it would be shame if it ceased to exist anymore.
In a perfect world it would be included in the normal price, but record companies have to come up with something to earn with. I´m all for adding value to digital products, since I am not satisfied with how things are right now: albums losing their meaning, lack of career development for artists, etc.
If I´m not able to get full-lenght albums anymore, I sure do want something extra for my digital downloads then.