Single song downloads are going away, and complete album physical CDs are coming back with a vengeance.
That seemed to be the message when I heard on the radio and in the paper that YouTube, Idol singer Susan Boyle’s debut album “I dreamed a dream” sold 701,000 copies in its first week in the US, breaking all sorts of records – but the biggest part of the news was that a staggering 94% of those sales were in physical CDs. Could it be that the download is losing steam and people want to return to the days of album covers and entire albums?
If that’s really the case, why then did The New York Times on Sunday, in a piece by Jenna Wortham, declare Apple’s App Store for downloading applications to wireless devices such as the iPod Touch and the iPhone to be the “Game Changer.” In the same paper, with an interview with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, he said that for every 100 books they sell in printed version, they sell 48 on the Kindle e-reader.
How can it be that in one area, physical albums were so wildly popular, while in articles in the same paper talked about the explosive growth of electronic versions of books and other downloads?
Easy.
This is a classic example of a “how” trap in terms of how consumers want to access, buy, and consume their goods. In this particular case, the “how” is the easy part – and it is vital (compared to most “how’s” of an organization, as I talk about in the Rethink book). The trap is the linkage of the different “how’s” to the specific “who’s” in the sense that some, often older blocks of consumers want to buy things the old fashioned way, whereas other, often younger buyers want the digital download version.
The reason that’s such a big deal for everyone from book publishers to iPhone game developers is that there is a lot of nuance in these groups, slicing by age, gender, wallet-size, geography, etc. so this now constantly moving target means that even if you have the best music or the best book or the best software, ensuring that you have it in the right form for your target audience is vital. Luckily for the downloading world, “making” another copy of a software program, book, song (or album) takes no time, for the printed book and CD world, it’s not quite so easy.
This is a big challenge for companies to stay on top of, and it’s going to require listening very carefully to their customers, and also, in many cases making decisions about which customers are most (and least valuable) to them, so if a customer asks for something (like a physical CD) should they make it, or ignore the request.
-Ric
P.S. Congratulations Susan.
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