Media I'm Consuming

I will put a Zunetag on this site when they go external, so you'll be able to see what I'm listening to.  But for now, here's my painfully created manual list:

• Podcasts:  Lots of NPR, Lots of Network News TV, TWiT, Windows Weekly,
• Lots of Queen.  Every now and then I rediscover them, and go on a 24 hour jag.
• Lots of WWII era stuff.  Ken Burns made me do it.
• Franz Ferdinand on a recommendation.  Trying it out.
• John Mellencamp.  I'm from Bloomington, Indiana, ok?
• Kevin Gilbert
• The Killers.  Trying them out on a recommdnation
• The Rolling stones.  "What the heck, let's download their entire catalog and try them out".
• TV:  A new season!  Heroes, My Name is Earl, 30 Rock, Survivorman.  Ken Burns' The War.

There can be no doubt.  I'm not as cool as the guys in Marketing.

Dude, I'm there

Fake Steve Jobs on the Microsoft Campus.  I'm so totally going to be there.

More on subscriptions

Some folks have asked me about what the future of subscriptions might be (as opposed to simply listing the challenges).  This is a great point. 

There are several situations where subscription music can work well.

• First, music subscription can support another business.  My comments have referred to standalone music subscriptions. Music subscriptions are a huge opportunity for Zune and love using Zune Pass.  What's more, Zune Pass works economically for us because it's a differentiator that makes our devices more attractive.  Other examples would include Amazon or Walmart using it to drive shopping traffic.
• Second, the end to end issues can get better.  Zune is solving this with an integrated/end to end device to client to service offering.  This means the experience can be better, plus is means that consumers get a simple message - "Get Zune" - instead of the complex combination of service from vendor A, device from vendor B, and client from vendor C. 

Fundamentally, I strongly believe there are millions of music lovers who want the value that a well executed subscription service provides - and will prefer to buy devices that offer the option.

"File Sharing" trial.

IANAL, but interesting thread about the file sharing/piracy trial verdict at digital media thoughts.  Bottom line; woman shares 1700 songs online, gets sued for sharing 24 @ $9250 = $222,000! 

IMO the key quote:

Either file sharing is legal or this lady was guilty.

I tend to agree.  Surprising that the EFF and other libertarianarchists put this woman up as a defendant (assuming they did); it certainly drives to a clear precedent on what the law is.  Now if you really want to change things, you'll need to go change the law.

http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=71059

Thoughts on the G3 iPod Nano

in my earlier post, I said I hadn't tried out the iPod Nano yet.  Well now I have, and have some thoughts.  As usual, I'm going to say this is my opinion and you should take it as such.  I also am going to not get into any big flame wars on this - if you disagree, please post respectfully.

I think they made a strange tradeoff.  I think that for most people, the Nano has always been about music.  If you were one of the (few) users who really cared about video, you obviously went elsewhere.  Now, they've added video to the device.  This is a nice adder, but IMHO not all that compelling given the (still) small screen size.  But fine, it's got video.

The tradeoff is in designing the device around this scenario.  The "fatty" formfactor feels like a worse music device than the G2 iPod Nano in several ways:

• the scrollwheel is really small.  to fit it into the little space beneath the screen, it shrank.  this makes is quite a bit easier to miss the active surface while "wheeling".
• It is less of a one-handed device.  I could hold the tallboy Nano and use my thumb.  this one really wants one hand holding it while the other one scrolls.  This is hard to describe, so go try one and see.

Don't get me wrong - it's a beautiful little device.   But I think (hope?) there's an opening for us.  The Zune 4 and 8 are the more music-focused formfactor, but still enable video in landscape mode by turning the device. 

Remember when apple end-of-lifed the ipod mini, there was a groundswell of folks who missed it?  It didn't matter because there was no reasonable alternative.  I'd like to think this time there is one.

Ow, I bumped my head

This is astonishingly good.  Local editing/publishing into this blog, and it even figured out to go back to blogger for the source publishing.  Really amazing.

Wow, great job to the windows live team!  And really good on em for embracing a competitive service this way...

Testing posting from Windows Live Writer

Will this really work on a blogger blog redirected from blogger.com to a custom url via ftp?  If so, I'll fall over backwards...

Zune responses

Thanks all for the kind words. I'm really proud of the new offering end-to-end.

That said, I also realize there's work yet to be done. Please keep up a running line of comments as you find out more so I can feed them back into the dev teams. Top Questions so far:

Do the new zunes play 640x480 without transcoding?
Yes, if you’ve got such content the new zunes will play them, and will show them at full resolution on video out. I'll especially enjoy this one.

Do the new Zunes play the “advanced” content in aac podcasts
They will show the advanced information in the RSS feed – e.g., the cover art for the podcast. They don’t (yet) support the apple extensions in the file itself – chapters and synchronized bitmaps. We do support bookmarking your listening/viewing location in a podcast.

Can I mention that adding podcasting is huge for me? Huge. And it's an awesome feature - really well designed.

Does wifi sync work for podcasts?
Yes, in the sense that if you walk into the house and the podcasts have been downloaded onto your PC, they'll sync over. The Zunes don't (yet) have a full podcast client on them, so they won't get the content directly from the cloud.

Still, walking into the house and having your Zune sync syndicated content over is really nice.

Music subscription comments

A couple of folks have commented on my point that the price ($14.99) might be inhibiting adoption of subscription services. Some have mentioned that it is/isn't a "fair" price.

I tend to see it differently. Whether it's "fair" or not isn't really my concern; the real issue is that these aren't interesting services unless they get mass adoption by dozens of millions of users. Whether the fee is $1 or even $100 a month (both in my mind "fair") has a huge impact on adoption.

Another way to think about this is that it's a negotiation between the service provider and the users. Both need to agree on a price. When the price is high, only a small number of users agree. As it gets cheaper, more pile in.

The challenge right now is it's impossible to be profitable below (or frankly even at) $15. So prices under that point can't be part of the discussion.

Dudes, it's Zune 2.0

Now you can see some of what's been keeping us busy....

http://www.zune.net/en-us/meetzune/holiday2007.htm
http://zuneinsider.com/
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/zune2_preview.asp

enjoy!

Ongoing consolidation of $14.99 music subscriptions

..."consolidation" being perhaps a kind word...other candidates would be "collapse" and "culling".

Longer term readers will remember that I've previously posted how surprisingly difficult it is to make a music subscription offering work.

This has been the summer of long knives for subscriptions. Virgin, AOL, URGE, and now Yahoo! are all leaving the business. Napster is burning cash and will run out sometime in the next 24 months. Rhapsody appears to me to be spinning off of Real into a separate entity, perhaps to clear the books to Real can be all about technology and games.

Yet, I'm still a happy subscription user and somewhere deep inside a believer. But clearly, something is busted. The interesting question is, "what?". My list of candidates:

• pricing. $14.95 is just too high a price for the value proposition they offer. Thank you, labels and publishers. Might they be more successful at $9.99? $4.99?
• no devices or integrated end to end. Using mix-n-match Playsforsure devices with existing services has generally been pretty painful.
• experience. Building a good subscription service is harder than it sounds.
• Ownership/collecting. Do music users really, really want to own music? Do they want a feeling of owning their collection? For such users, subscription would be like coin-and-stamp rental - what's the point?
• Piracy. Are the most engaged users already getting all-you-can-eat music for free? Will they ever pay for music again?

It's almost certainly a combination of these, but you've got to pause and say "hmmmm...." at the current state of the business.