Can Apple save the music industry again?
The rumor is that Apple is currently in secret talks with EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music Group on project “Cocktail.” The major labels are once again looking to Apple to revive the slumping industry with a full-featured tablet that’s a bit of a throwback to the golden era of record sleeves, artwork, liners, etc.
“It’s all about re-creating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork, while you listened to the music,” said one executive familiar with the plans.
The FT says the tablet will be announced alongside the content partnerships in September. Said ginormous iPod Touch will connect to the Internet but “probably without phone capability” so that still leaves a hair of possibility about Verizon scoring the rights to the tablet. But that’s highly doubtful given The Street’s record of rumors.
via FT
Here’s what Apple’s tablet computer could mean http://bit.ly/AujCa
if the labels really want to stop screwing up the music industry they should stop screwing over musicians. and i don’t mean with illegal downloads- i mean corporate music isn’t music.
Is it me, or does this alleged Apple iTablet sound a lot like a (likely) more expensive version of the CrunchPad?
“It’s all about re-creating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork, while you listened to the music,” said one executive familiar with the plans.
Wow, when was this? 1962? Maybe they’d do a better job of selling albums to young people if their executives weren’t in their 60’s and 70’s.
Personally, the premise of Apple extending its platform tools to support creation of more dynamic e-books and albums makes total sense.
Think of this pitch this way:
Steve Jobs: “Book and Music industry. You are getting commoditized because you have no differentiated platform for extending/re-inventing your product for the online age. We just so happen to have a set of tools that have proven compelling to the tune of 1.5B downloads, field-tested across 65K apps and with a current footprint of 46M devices.”
Music/Book Industry: “There is no way we can re-create that value proposition, and we already see the writing on the wall with Amazon. If they are successful, they will be telling us how much money we can make or worse, go direct to writers and musicians, and design us out of the equation. How do we get started?”
This is the consummate 1+1=3 for a segment that is otherwise facing a 1+1=<2 future.
For more fodder on this one, check out:
Old Media, New Media and Where the Rubber Meets the Road
http://bit.ly/zwTw8
Cheers,
Mark
jsk – It’s a mute point as I don’t see how any piece of technology can replace the visual impact of a real album sleeve but I would like to pick you up on the fact that anyone 30+ (not 65+) will be able to relate to the album artwork comment above. Your questioning of it only serves to highlight how the satisfaction and enjoyment gained from familiarising oneself with the visual impact of sleeve artwork and any album notes, observations, thoughts and/or acknowledgements included by the artist/band has sadly been lost through to our most recent generations with the advent of firstly CDs and latterly downloads.
The sleeves of albums like The Beatles Sgt Peppers, Bay City Rollers Wish Upon a Star, Queens News of the World, The Osmonds The Plan, Meat Loafs Bat Out of Hell, Sparks Kimono My House, New Orders Blue Monday etc. etc. were modern day works of art and, as much as I love Apple, I cannot foresee any enhancement of Cover Flow that could come close to recreating this lost pleasure.
That’s something we should both be a little sad about… me for my loss and you, let me assure you, for the enjoyable experience you never had.