The Creation of Joy
The biggest challenge facing the music business is not necessarily piracy or the competition of attention for fan’s money and time, it’s making an experience joyful for people.
And historically this has been the biggest miss.
A lot of what is built as a means of saving an industry is a solution in search of a problem. Or more specifically, a solution for a problem, created by those that are reliant on the survival of their industry. Rarely do you see a solution created with the goal of making a joyful experience for a fan; to address a problem they never knew they had.
There are a few companies that do this well:
Apple is one, and the entire WWDC keynote is an example of this, as is the experience of using iOS5, Lion and iCloud, even in beta. Square I view as another. Foursquare another.
In the music space, Spotify is the one that comes to mind as a key example of this. They started from the get go creating a product oriented toward a great user experience, rather than a capitulation to demands from those their product is supposed to “save.” It is an arrogant method of engineering, and one that served them well. If you look at the Spotify product, it is oriented toward creating a joyful experience, starting first and foremost in the fact that it is a native app. It leverages the joy of discovery by not obscuring inventory through marketing, and by doing so democratizes what was commonly (and endemically) held tight by the providers of the content.
For this reason, some in the music business don’t like it. The experience is too joyful, and too much power in the hands of (happy) consumers means that there is less available room for marketing and direction.
But I don’t buy that.
The non-music side of the business has always been about joy. The joy of being a fan, of being a spectator, of meeting your idols. People used to go to Tower Records on a Saturday morning, and leave with a three foot stack of LP’s. There was a visceral pleasure in that act.
The paranoia induced by Napster changed that, and forced everyone in the business to react out of fear and protection rather than enablement. You ended up with “services” which served no purpose other than to check off an item on a list. You ended up with DRM from FairPlay to Plays For Sure, which did nothing but infuriate, confuse and tire consumers.
In the end, this protectionist mentality lead to the joyful act of being a music fan only being satiated through the very means which caused the problematic mentality in the first place. It became easier to infringe and make good experiences than to play by the rules. See Muxtape and to a degree Grooveshark as an example. Being “legitimate” lead to a soulless experience. Being illicit was fun not for its illegality, but because the experiences created through unencumbered creativity were exciting.
How then do we then bring the sense of joy back while building a sustainable business?
I posit that these need to go hand in hand. An honest approach to the making of a market and ecosystem around something that which gives you enjoyment. How refreshing would that be?
If this industry is to be rebuilt, it has to start at 0. Write every thing that is wrong with record companies down (that is for another post), then move on. Focus instead on two things:
How do we being joy back?
How do we add value with what we produce?