Looking at the 2 stories that interested me over the last few days - Radiohead - In Rainbow stats and Tap Tap downloads...
First Radiohead - in one month October to November in 2007 In Rainbows was downloaded a staggering 2.3 million times across Torrent sites. That is a huge figure that stunned the industry when the figures were finally revealed by Big Champagne, even though the users could download it for free - without the worry of poor quality copies, virus infected copies or whatever - from Radiohead's own site. Was it the fear of putting your email into a site to get the link URL? The conspiracy theorists around would like to think so - email + IP + £0.00 would have some kind of consequence - therefore anonymous downloading from torrents were the best option for these 2.3million file sharers. This figure however is global - and of the 2.3million - how many would have purchased it anyway, how many download anything new - and how many were tempted to download their first file from torrents due to the hype and peer pressure??? Radiohead have said that they will not repeat the experience - but how many first-timers have now carried on the tradition of downloading this way - seeing as how easy it was for them to get the Radiohead album, and while they were on there - there was the entire Radiohead back catalogue, as well as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Beatles... So in essence was an experiment turned into an introduction to the world of filesharing?
I doubt it a global downloading market of 2.3million in one month = 76,000 downloads a day - may cover the University campuses around the world if you're lucky. Did it introduce kids to the wonders of torrents - maybe, but the key point is that the users could have had the music for free in the first place if they only supplied an email address. Takes 2mins to set up a dummy email address and bingo a free download of the album!
Tap Tap - in stark contrast here is another story that has been bubbling under for a few days. A little free application on Apple's Apps store - a bit like Guitar Hero / Rock Band - where you tap to the beats of tracks that are pre-loaded (and you can download more tracks) music trying to get 100% and the best score!! The stats were quite staggering that it reached over 1million downloads and with all the tracks that were available to download - and additional 2.5million tracks were downloaded!! All for FREE!! as well as you had to have either an iPhone or iTouch plus an iTunes account! This has been a great success story for the creators of Tap Tap, as well as Apple's App store that small addictive games can be sold and used on their devices - which opens up the handheld games market beyond Nintendo & DS and ensure that Apple have done it again in creating continuing the convergence device that was an iPod - now is + iPhone + iGames + iSoftware...
All good - great thinking - how about playing Tap Tap with your own music library - you could tap tap to the Tings Tings?? NO!!! One of the requirements of building apps is that you can not touch the music on the library - unless playing it or recommending based on your tracks (Last FM / Pandora) to start using the library in this way would breach a licence agreement between Apple, labels, developers and YOU!!!
Instead - labels are now sniffing around Tap Tap with nice big juicy $$$$$ in their eyes thinking about how much mileage they could gain from including Tap Tap'ing along to Madonna? And if we agree a licence fee per download then they can charge $x per additional premium to be able to Tap along to Madge & co!
Following my last blog - anything that the labels can do to stimulate their sales - they will jump on - regardless of the essence of why or what made the proposition exciting in the first place. The labels totally missed the boat on ringtones and have vowed never to miss a single trick again. They did however think that the Guitar Hero idea was of course flawed and that it would never work - until they saw the immediate success of the very first Guitar Hero - and now we have artists such as Aerosmith & Metallica licencing their content to this franchise now and get their music infont of a whole new audience.
Final Games thought: You can not deny the power of the games industry - even now it worth more than the Movie industry - but always seen as nice or geek like - that kids would be locked away in their bedrooms getting square eyes and shooting anything and everything!
Think again... the 3 key players Playstation3, X Box 360 and the wonderful Wii are becoming more and more part of the digital lifestyle of families more than the geek - the Wii being the most family friendly with its mix of games and education - but with family games being played on the main TV and less in the bedroom - there is now access to that all important mass audience TV set where the games machine sits comfortably and not at all out of place beside the DVD player and SKY box. This indeed is another channel for not only games, but all types of entertainment media - but the next battle just beginning is to see where, just as the iPhone turned out to be a phone, camera, ipod, web browser and now portable games device - the adoption of a "living room" device that can deliver games, TV, film, music and so much more has only just begun....