Where the Medium is King

When I was a kid, a Hollywood blockbuster would take months to come to India (if at all). Same with TV shows. Now, simultaneous worldwide releases are becoming quite common. And at times, even big name movies, like the recently released The Amazing Spider-Man 2 gets released in India before the US! TV shows are getting broadcast in India within days (or a week or two) of the US/BBC broadcast.

The reasons are easy to see: there is no longer the constraint of only so many reels; digital content can be sent almost instantly to any corner of the planet; and if they wait too long, people would have already seen the pirated version.

But with music, the digital medium has changed things in a different way. Describing Beyoncé’s last album released on 13 Dec last year, David Hepworth points out something very strange:
“The window of ballyhoo around a big album, which in the past would have lasted a couple of months, was finished in a week, leaving the rest of us wondering whether it had really happened at all.”
The hype just lasted 7 days. Imagine that! So why the ultra-short duration of the excitement?
“That's a reflection of how much the revolution in distribution has changed the game. The easier you make something to acquire the faster its mystique will decay.”

Further, digital distribution channels (aka the Net) allows for extremely niche content to find its patrons. So perhaps we are “spoiled for choice and our attention spans are getting shorter”. Hepworth says that’s not the reason (at least not all of it). He may not be exaggerating when he says that the delivery mechanism is becoming a bigger brand than the content or the traditional record labels! Case in point:
“YouTube and iTunes are just two of the brand names that were largely unknown 12 years ago but have now eclipsed all the record labels in all the world.”
Why’s that?
“The delivery mechanisms are the new stars. These are either free or they feel as if they're free, they touch us all in a way that individual products don't and they're designed by people so attuned to our inner child that they can make us hug ourselves from sheer delight.”
And perhaps we enjoy the thought of:
“Travelling endlessly along the intoxicating open highways of delivery, fervently hoping never to arrive.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why we Deceive Ourselves

In their book, The Elephant in the Brain , the authors describe this weird aspect of deception that we practice: deceiving ourselves! That is so weird: “If our minds contain maps of our worlds, what good comes from having an inaccurate version of these maps?” The Sigmund Freud school of thought treats self-deception as a defense mechanism, “a way for the ego to protect itself”. The mind seeks to protect itself from anxiety and other negative emotions. Many object to this reasoning: since accurate information is so critical to our survival, surely distorting information would be dangerous. Wouldn’t the goal of protecting our self-esteem have been better achieved by making the brain’s self-esteem mechanism stronger instead? The new school of thought explains self-deception as “primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and ultimately self-serving”. This is based on Thomas Schelling’s work on game theory: “In a variety of scenarios, limiting or sabotaging yourself is the winn...
Read more

Europe #3 - Innsbruck

The last city we visited in Europe was Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. After the cold and windy experience (at times) of Paris and Netherlands, Innsbruck was a wonderful change – it didn’t feel that cold, it was not windy all of which made it easy to walk around. Something absolutely necessary given how scenic the place is.   Since the hotel check-in time was much later in the day, we left the baggage and went to the Swarovski HQ-cum-museum about an hour by bus from Innsbruck. The crystal exhibits were brilliant – colorful, bright, shiny. Jewellery aside, it was a display of what one can do with crystals. While my wife and daughter loved the jewellery, I liked the superhero themed exhibits of Batman, Spiderman, the Hulk, and Star Wars. We didn’t buy anything there, though we did buy stuff in the Swarovski store in Innsbruck – jewellery, not the superhero stuff.   Innsbruck is a major tourist attraction during the skiing season but now in summer, we saw many groups of ...
Read more

The Thrill of the Chase

So many people complain about the difficulty in making decisions while shopping. Do you buy Brand X that gives 20% extra free? Or Brand Y that has 10% off? Or Brand Z that gives something else free with it? Do you buy that flat screen TV today or wait for the sale at Diwali? Now since the customer is king, shouldn’t companies be simplifying pricing choices? Like maybe offering consistently low prices all the time? Not so fast, as the US store, JC Penney discovered to its cost. Turns out that while people do complain about pricing choices, they are irrational. Also, they enjoy the thrill of the chase. Huh? The word “sale” acts like a siren call for many people: it lures them in to make that purchase. Consistently low prices don’t do the same. Besides, if a competitor lowers their prices just one time of the year, and Poof! Suddenly that low price claim becomes suspect in shoppers’ eyes. Then there are those sites that offer coupons: have lunch at Restaurant A on Wedne...
Read more