You know, history has a habit of cheating us. Rarely are historic moments anything but moments in an otherwise uneventful week. It’s only when retrospect gets out its nifty little marker pen that we realise how head-slappingly naïve we’ve been in completely failing to recognise just how significant the moment was.
Like last Friday’s launch of the new Kaiser Chiefs album. Pardon? Yes. Are you mad? No, really, hear me out on this one.
Marginally obnoxious as it might seem today, give it a few months and the fittingly entitled “The Future is Medieval” could be seen as one of those moments that became the catalyst for a whole library-full of retrospectives.
Now I’m no music aficionado, but I doubt that all the fabulousness of the Kaiser Chiefs will make this album THE soporific goose-bump inducer of the 21st century. It’s good in a “couple-of-top-five-hits” kind of way. But that’s not really the point.
Take a look at this particular album through the prism of purchase rather than content and it suddenly becomes a very different proposition indeed. In fact, it could well be the “oh yes, of course, that’s how you do it” moment that the music industry and anyone who does not believe the online environment is a charity-based free-for-all, has been hoping for. And, you could argue, it’s something the cosmetics industry has been doing in the real world for donkey’s years.
The Chiefs have published 20 new songs on their websites. Fans are invited to download their favourite ten and to create an album of those songs in any order they like. They’re also given a box full of artwork to choose, each of which forms the template for their own personalised album cover. Once they’ve personalised it, they then get to download and purchase it for $12.
All of which is nice but not really enough to convince he who wants it for free. So there’s more.
The site encourages fans to then share their personalised album online and, if they post a link to their version of it to Twitter or Facebook, they can sell further downloads for $12 and take a $1 in commission every time they do it. And it’s unlikely they’ll be duplication. With 20 tracks available there are (according to my six year old) more than half a trillion possible combinations.
All of this begs the question why a secondary buyer would pay $12 for something they could otherwise personalise themselves for the same price. But somewhere in all of this there’s a logic that could shed new light on a commercial model for an industry that is otherwise short on commercial ideas.
There are other wallet-stretching incentives for the pondering music exec too. The punter’s decision on which tracks to go for gives a rather accurate pointer to the record label as to which of those 20 tracks they should be releasing as a single. Which is equivalent to a very welcome cheat-sheet in the midst of an otherwise pretty testing exam.
The purists might baulk at the idea of the artiste capitulating to a needy market, of course. But they only need to track the deceleration of those who have built empires on the production of CD players to know that the future has binary numbers written all over it. And history has a habit of telling us that purity is more intellectual vanity than it is valid moral standing, anyway.
It will take a while to know whether the Kaiser Chiefs’ little commercial adventure turns out to be one flabby, misplaced musical belly-flop or, in fact, the Model T Ford of its time. But the music industry will not be alone in watching carefully for any signs of the potential it might have.
It seems to be the model of the future
Maha
There are flaws. But there’s an encouraging commercial long-termism view about the “if you can’t beat them, join them” principle rather than the “if you can’t beat them, hit them harder” approach.
I tend to take that approach too . . . lovely blog Ian!
I think this approach is definitely in the right direction – but the music and film industry still have a long way to go before they use the online industry to their full advantage.
Another standout that I have seen is ‘The Tunnel’ movie http://www.thetunnelmovie.net/ – who encouraged everyone to buy a frame from the movie for $1 to cover production costs.
… which means that the democratisation of media really should be a hybrid of the socialisation and capitalisation of media i.e. contained content + low cost ownership = capital expansion potential. A kind of stock market with creative zeal. Scary. Thx Ellie.
At first I thought this was another alternative payment scheme (remember Radiohead?). But upon second inspection, it’s more of an alternative marketing scheme.
Marketing should make consumers choices easier. So the only way this can work is by making a distinction between hard-core fans (who welcome more choice) and casual listeners. Hard-core fans are vocal about their love of Kaiser Chiefs, and the custom album art will give them another outlet to share the love. These fans are also going to want all 20 songs, so they will end up creating multiple albums. Most importantly, they don’t mind spending their precious decision-making time on behalf of their favorite band. Casual listeners, on the other hand, are more inclined to be influenced by their friends’ suggestions anyway. So Kaiser Chiefs connects with the hard-core fans and lets those fans do the dirty work of connecting with casual listeners (i.e. marketing).
This should prove to be a really good test of Advocacy: will casual listeners trust their friend’s mix tapes more than Big Music’s compilations? Or will all the extra choice just muddy the waters, driving away casual listeners? Another factor to consider is the increase in people purchasing single tracks from iTunes rather than buying complete albums. This trend may make Kaiser Chief’s experiment a mute point or, at best, just a clever marketing ploy.
I’m really interested in the title of the album itself, “The Future is Medieval.” Are we going backward to a time before marketing, when consumers made their own choices (or had no choices to make)? Has the economic crisis erased the last vestiges of that post-WWII assumption in the Western world that one’s future would necessarily present better choices than the past? Has our collective idea of the future shifting from utopia to dystopia? For more on this, I must reference a review for another album – Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs,” which describes lyrics like “all of the houses they built in the 70s” as suggesting that “the future offers us nothing but a decaying, hopeless version of the present.”
Let’s not throw away your typewriters just yet.