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Apple rocks the music world...again

What? Isn't today's announcement from Steve Jobs just about a newly designed iPod Touch? And something about streaming TV shows and renting movies? How could this little black box change the way we get and listen to our music?

Thanks to Bob Lefsetz (I'll get to him in a sec) again for pointing out the obvious just minutes after Apple made the announcement that it had the pet rock of 2010 that everybody will want for Christmas. At only a recession-friendly $99 here in the US, this little black box hooks up to your television and allows you to tap into the cloud and stream television shows and movies. In high def.

Here's the official bla bla bla:

Everything you want to watch — movies, TV shows, photos, and more — streams wirelessly to Apple TV. That way you don’t have to worry about managing storage or syncing to your iTunes library. HD movie and TV show rentals play over the Internet to your widescreen TV, while music and photos stream from your computer.

Bob Lefsetz is a former music industry geek who ran the US division of Sanctuary Records and is an attorney as well. He is also is a prolific blogger well before a blog was ever invented. He used to send out real paper letters to his friends in the entertainment business with his thoughts on everything (mostly music related, but everything else that rolls across his mind). With connectivity, he started to deliver his missives via email and if you Google his name you'll find a website.

Now it should be said that Bob is loved by some, and hated by many. He calls it like he sees it, which is usually crystal clear but occasionally a bit foggy. His emails come a few times a week or sometimes you can get three or four a day. I don't know him personally but I imagine he spends most of his time just sitting in front of his computer at home in Santa Monica reading, thinking and writing.

About an hour after Job's announcement, Bob's email made his way to my inbox. Let me just quote him (although I'm going to cut and paste because ol' Bob rambles free form sometimes):

Rental. Streaming. Subscription.

Remember those three, they're the key to the future. Much more important than the Situation's GTL. (Gym, tan, laundry for the uninitiated.)

Music was the pretense, but this presentation was truly about television, the Apple TV. Which, priced at $99, will blow out this holiday season. That's truly a staggering price. Apple fanboys can buy one as a souvenir, like merch at a concert, to show their friends more than use.

But in introducing the new Apple TV, Steve Jobs revealed the future of music.

Steve said people don't want to store their movies. They don't want to manage them. They want them instantly, on the TV.

And casual viewers might think he's building a business renting TVs and movies, but those thinkers would believe Apple cares about selling music. No, music was a platform for selling iPods, and eventually iPhones and iPads. And the iTunes movie and TV rentals are just a demonstration, a minor business. The real key is streaming Netflix.

Have you been following this story? While Blockbuster languishes, dying a slow death like brick and mortar music retail, Netflix has gone into the streaming business. The future. They're locking in deals.

You could stream via certain TVs. A PS3. Other set-top boxes. But now it's even easier to get in on the action via Apple TV. You pay a small amount per month, and you can stream a ton of product. Just keep paying.

Rental. Streaming. Subscription.

This was the essence of today's Apple presentation. This is the future of music. Don't say people won't rent, Netflix is gigantic, incredibly fantastic and successful. Reed Hastings will tell you the future is streaming. And you've got to subscribe to participate. Oh, you can rent individual shows on iTunes, but that's like being pecked to death by ducks. Sure, you can buy music on iTunes, but don't you want to be able to play whatever you want, wherever you want, for a small sum of money per month?

It's just a matter of when we get there. When the rights holders realize that they've just got to follow Steve Jobs' model. He's given them the blueprint. He's done the research. License others before he ends up dominating the music market too.

Bob has been blasting the traditional music business model for years and as you might guess from the above, he believes that cloud technology is the future for delivery. The challenges have been working out the pricing model and coming up with the ability to place your subscription music on a mobile device. And while all the fat cat music execs try to hold onto their gigs and pad their retirement accounts under the guise of protecting their properties, technology marches forward and Apple just blew them off again.

A few more final words and suggestions from Bob directed toward the creative community:

If you're an artist, RUN from commercialism. It's your only hope. Because you pale in comparison to Steve Jobs. You can't do his job better than he can. But Steve Jobs can't play music. Can't write, can't perform. He's put his 10,000 hours in developing technology. Your only hope is to practice really hard and sell your essence...music.

Apple is no longer a music company. It's like thinking Sony is a music company. Rights holders can bitch that Apple has hijacked their business, and now with Ping, that might be more true than ever, but the future is not Apple. The future is not Live Nation. Certainly not Universal. The future is music.

And it hasn't been about music for far too long. It's been about fame. But no musician is as famous as Steve Jobs. Think about that. And think small. Intimate. Don't start trying to reach everybody, start trying to touch just a few. Think of it like love, not commercialism.

I'm off to eat an Apple.

Tags: Apple, Bob Lefsetz

Comment by Grant Alden on September 1, 2010 at 6:45pm: Oh, you knew I'd chime in, didn't you, Ed?
For generations the opinion-setters in music have been collectors. Music has been a tangible thing, much as books and magazines have been tangible things.
Now, it is argued, we'd all be better off if they weren't tangible things. If they were disposable zeros and ones which are actually owned by an enormous corporation. And the only thing we can be certain of is that the enormous corporation will want us to buy a new device on which to play the zeros and ones every 18 months or so.
Maybe that is the future. Frankly, I don't give a shit. I've got mine, and if they never made another CD I still couldn't listen to everything in this room before I died in, oh, 50 years, assuming there's still power and still some device on which I can play my CDs. Hell, I could probably go a long while on the vinyl in the back room.
But.
If you want people to CARE about the art you make, they have to buy it. They have to WANT to buy it. See, if you buy it, you invest in it. You listen to it. Read it. Absorb it. Ingest it.
If you just borrow it on a whim...well, something else will do as well.
So there are no more opinion-setters. No more record store geeks. No more people who have to own the new Wanda Jackson 7-inch simply because it exists. Or fewer of them.
I think this is a marketing disaster for the artists involved. It may be that, as a species, we will learn to turn away from the collector mentality. That the object will cease to be relevant that Thoreau's three pieces of marble will finally be cast from all our homes because they require dusting.
Maybe.
But let's remember what's on offer here: Lower quality sound, via the MP3, than we had with the CD, and the CD v. LP argument is moot, regardless where one stands. Impermanent, disposable text, if one is a writer. Fewer filters, which some people -- writers with big egos, especially -- imagine to be an improvement. (Bad filters are bad filters. Good filters are an absolute necessity, and spell-check is no substitute for Peter Blackstock watching my back.)
So now we're offered TV in some hand-held device, as if that was worth watching, more worth watching than a movie filmed on actual film and shown in an actual theater. It's not, but you can bet that actual theaters which can show film will die soon enough because it's cheaper and easier to distribute digital files than it is to print film, and digital film doesn't throw as far as real film does, so the theater will necessarily get smaller and smaller.
And the rich will get richer.
Screw it. I've got some okra to fry.

Comment by John Sandoval on September 1, 2010 at 6:52pm: I'v been stupefied and rendered! Just when one thinks one has purchase the cloud turns to rain.

Comment by TenLayers on September 1, 2010 at 8:06pm: I just got back from VMWare World. The first ever cloud computing conference taking place for the past couple days in SF. I was hired to shoot some of the displays done by my client. He was telling me in all of his years doing trade shows..20 years.. he has never seen the turnout and excitement that the first day generated. Crowds to the point of almost standstill.
Clouds have arrived, it's rise as the next big thing will be meteoric.

Comment by Kyla Fairchild on September 1, 2010 at 8:39pm: I've had Rhapsody streaming through a Sonos for about three years now and I'm listening to more music than ever before. I can easily sample new things I might not have had a chance to hear otherwise. I don't have a slew of music files littering my computer and my house is less cluttered with jewel cases. (They aren't completely gone, but I find myself looking forward to they day I don't have to match up cd's with cases and try to keep them all organized.)

That said it is a much different music listening experience than I grew up with. I don't savor each album the way I used to. I listen to many albums a time or two and move on to the next. Sometimes I'm so overwhelmed by choice that I choose to listen to nothing.

We also have a Roku where we watch Netflix and Amazon videos on demand. I love the convenience and don't miss having to remember to return videos to the store to avoid late fees.

The music industry isn't dead it's just evolving and morphing into something new and different. Clearly there are many things that remain to be seen, business models that will emerge and things that we haven't even thought of yet, but one thing I know for sure is that like it or not there is nothing that can be done to stop it.

Comment by Grant Alden on September 2, 2010 at 3:46am: Not pretending we can stop it.
But I do think we should look behind the curtain.
The changes being wrought now convey all the power to the manufacturers of devices which playback media.
I think that's dangerous. And bad for business.
But y'all do whatever you want. I'm just a spectator now.
That the techies are excited by Clouds, whatever that is (I have a dim idea) is fine. Translating that out into the real world...we'll see. At some point the dizzying changes in technology will make technology relevant only to the techies, and the rest of us just might go back to trying to do our jobs, instead of trying to master the latest and greatest.
Those who have jobs, anyhow.

Comment by Adam Sheets on September 2, 2010 at 4:13am: I have mixed feelings on this: my mp3 player is a welcome addition for long road trips and such (everything ripped directly from CDs), but in most cases I still like listening to an actual physical product with vinyl being much better than CD, in my opinion.

Comment by David Haskin on September 2, 2010 at 6:29am: What I'm hearing here is resistance to technological change of the same sort we're seeing so much of in the political arena. It isn't pretty but change .... and resistance to it .... is inevitable. I speak as somebody who was in the technology business since the mid-80s, first as a marketer at a development firm then as a journalist specializing in mobile, wireless and personal technology. Change is never, ever easy. I remember resistance to the desktop computer in the early 80s, to the Web in the mid-90s. Hell, I remember extreme backlash to voicemail systems, e-mail and on and on.

Change is never clean -- there will, indeed, be parts of this we may not like. But as I see it, there also are strong benefits. I subscribe to Mog, for instance, which is a cloud-based subscription service. There are very, very few new albums I can't listen to before I buy.

Next, consider this: We are only talking about changes in distribution here, not changes in the creative process. And the new distribution seems to foster creativity, not diminish it. The alt-whatever scene is far, far more vibrant than it ever has been. That's because the cost of creating music and distributing it is diminishing rapidly because of new technology. I don't recall a time in which there has been more out-of-the-mainstream music more readily and inexpensively available than now.

And, I believe some of the assumptions in these posts are under-informed. First, Apple was NEVER a music company. It was, is and will be only a distribution company. They don't care about the creative process -- they care about what will sell. Since it is relatively cheap to serve music from the cloud, they will continue to be more than happy to sell music by relatively unknown artists and relatively unknown labels. Even the biggest Tower Music store of the past couldn't make that claim -- they had to pay for their inventory and, as a result, had nothing like the selection you can find on-line. Bottom line: the creative process is (arguably) being supported and expanded with the new technology.

As for renting versus buying, go to an old CD and read the licensing agreement -- in reality, you didn't have nearly as many rights as you think you had. It wasn't your music on that CD -- it was the record company's music and you were granted some, but very few rights. I'm more than happy to rent access to 10 million tracks for the same cost each month as buying 12. But, even if, for some reason you don't like that calculus, there's absolutely no indication that you wont' be able to "buy" music in the future.

Finally, as I mentioned, the new technology encourages more quantity and quality since, even though quanlity doesn't sell, if it's cheap to distribute, it will be distributed, which wasn't the case until recently. But what I'm really saying is that this technology potentially puts the artists we like on a more equal footing than the big-selling artists we don't like from the Big Four music companies. Not on equal footing, perhaps, but on more equal footing because, given the cost structures of this new distribution system, the gap in NET profitability is much narrow between Lady GaGa and Ray Wylie Hubbard isn't as huge as it used to be. This can only be good news to those of us who prefer music that is relatively out of the mainstream.

What I'm saying is, let's not confuse distribution with creativity. And, in any case, a strong case could be made that this new world of music distribution will have some strong benefits.

Comment by Kim Ruehl on September 2, 2010 at 8:57am: Not caffeinated yet, but I have to comment. I say bring on the cloud. I've been using a streaming service for several months now, and almost never call up iTunes anymore. I got rid of most of my physical collection because I just don't have that kind of storage space in the house. There are parts of the old experience that I really miss - looking forward to a release date, going to a record store, putting the music on while I read through the liners, etc. I miss tooling around record stores looking for something new. But it feels like an even trade for these steps forward.

For one thing, the cloud allows you to stop buying expensive and cumbersome landfill-stuffing players that become obsolete soon after you purchase them. You can pull it straight from your computer - or, probably not to long from now, from your TV. Plug it into the good speakers, and you're good to go. It allows me to hear entire albums by artists I never would have heard had I to buy their album. Granted, that's not always a good thing - not every artist is...ready. But even mediocre albums often have one great song, and that's worth it.

Yesterday, I was talking to a pre-teen and asked him what music he's into, what artists he's listening to. He didn't really know the answer. Part of me sulked when he said that, because at his age, listening to music and buying albums, the relationship I had with the artists I was listening to, was such a huge deal to me. Rather than a relationship with the artist, he has a relationship with the song. Which is not a bad thing, and it's not even new to this era of technology.

A century or so ago, the relationship people had with music was not a relationship with musicians. It was a relationship with the song. You heard a song you liked, you brought it home and played it with your family and friends. On instruments. You sang it. The evolution of artists as commodities isn't necessarily a healthy one, and its certainly not sustainable for the people who have been transformed into a commodity. Albums as products, artists as products, has always made it less about the music and more about the face from which the music comes. Somehow I think opening it up more, bringing in the cloud, so to speak, evens the field on a song-by-song basis.

Lefsetz said: "Don't start trying to reach everybody, start trying to touch just a few. Think of it like love, not commercialism." I like that. I think it's far more sustainable, and far more realistic. And, far more conducive to the truth about what art is.

Comment by John Abrahams on September 2, 2010 at 12:54pm: I'm right there with Kayla. I have used Rhapsody for years, and I am a huge fan. I agree that it's a different music listening experience than I grew up with, but I'm also older, and my perspective on music has changed and broadened. In general, though, I listen to more, and more different kinds of things, than ever before.

I have always had a hard time with music magazines because they are rarely critical enough for me to decipher what I'll like and what I won't. (I actually remember an ND discussion about that, where some people said that they consciously didn't want to write negative things about an artist, which really depressed me. I mean, critics make value judgments. That's their job.) Anyway, now, I don't need that intermediary. I can read something that interests me and check it out in minutes. So, this latest time that someone swore that I really would like Alejandro Escovedo? OK, I've been burned before, but I queued it up and now I can say with confidence that I still really don't like Alejandro Escovedo.

As Kim Ruehl points out above me, music left the Garden of Eden a century ago, when our predecessors stopped playing piano in the living room and singing songs for entertainment. From records to radio to mix tapes to MP3s to streaming, the flavor changes. I probably wouldn't be psyched about this if I were a musician, or a record company executive, or a music magazine publisher (Sorry ND. I was a subscriber, myself.). But, as a consumer and lover of music? This is the golden age. I would have found Kathleen Edwards and Buddy Miller on my own, but I NEVER would have heard some of the contemporary classical or jazz or Afropop that I've come across. This is a really good thing.

There will always be really good musicians who will want to play and share their stuff. There will always be people like us who love it and want to drown in it. Whether it's Apple Computer or Apple Records that makes that happen -- well, that seems like quibbling to me.

Comment by TenLayers on September 2, 2010 at 1:44pm: "Whether it's Apple Computer or Apple Records that makes that happen -- well, that seems like quibbling to me."
Love this.

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