From MTV to iTunes/Bebo…Music Often Leads Commerce Innovation

June 13th, 2007

I have finally started to get my act together around online music. Ever since Quincy Smith and CBS announced their purchase of Last.fm, I’ve been digging into the site (listening to a station they created for me based on my love of DJ Tiesto right now) and trying to understand the lessons. I’ve also been trying to figure out Pandora and iLike, but finding them a bit more complex (it’s me, not them). And while I’d be the last person to argue that the music business is an easy one, there is one huge advantage relative to some other consumer products businesses….namely, people are wildly, sickly passionate about the product. So passionate that you might have even stumbled over my describing it as a consumer products business. It’s not a product…it’s a lifestyle, it’s who I am, it helps define me.

That passion means that consumers will put up with - won’t even SEE - a lot of marketing that would be inexcusable in other industries. As hinted at in my Honeyshed post, MTV (regardless of what the labels may have thought at the time) was an enormous commercial for the music industry. From working in the cable industry, I can tell you that the cable operators saw right through it and thought it was the stupidest idea they had ever heard. I can also tell you that as a 12-year old in 1981, it never, ever, ever occurred to me that I was watching infomercials. It was simply the most fabulous content I had ever been exposed to.

And while he even admits that it took him a few minutes, Om Malik figured it out today while reading about Apple and Bebo working together….commerce is infiltrating social networks. We barely even recognize it as such because music is the form it most commonly takes and it’s so invisible as commerce not only because it is media itself but since we WANT the content (for another use case see here for a book review that I wrote on Amazon’s Facebook app promoting a book that talks about using social media for marketing - commerce - purposes. Twisted, isn’t it?).

It may seem that the lessons here for other industries are few and far between, but I don’t think so. Reread that phrase I used about music….it’s a lifestyle, it’s who I am, it helps define me. What brand doesn’t aspire to this? And in a world of consumer generated media, what brand isn’t representable by ‘media’? The key is to package and deliver this content back to consumers in a way that they perceive as programming, as value, as identity enhancing. The answers, as they say, are out there.

Entry Filed under: Collison of Media & Commerce