Last.fm’s announcement that they will be allowing their users to listen to full-length versions of millions of music tracks is one of the final nails in the coffin of the traditional recorded-music industry. Owning music is dead. The new business model for making money in the music industry is simple: Design a better music distribution system. Or, simply put, build a better user experience for music listening.

Which, interstingly, is how the enjoyment of music has always been throughout the centuries, with the singular exception of the century recently passed. Live musical concerts and performances have always been about more than the sounds in your ears: It’s also the experience of the venue, the culture or subculture of the audience, the smells and tastes. This also applies to live radio, including satellite and internet radio. Both live performance and live radio focus on putting value on (i.e., charging money for) the experience around the music — on the curation, the immediacy, the communal feeling of listening to the same music as dozens or even millions of other listeners — not on the ownership of the recording itself.

In fact, the ownership of recorded music will someday be seen as a weird historical anomaly, born during a decades-long spasm of corporate enthusiam about — and complete control over — the production and distribution of recorded music… a phenomenon in its death throes now that, finally, the ability to record, copy, and distribute music has trickled down into the hands of everyday people.

The era in which one could buy and sell recorded music lasted only about a century, from the early days of the phonograph in the late 1800s to the emergence in the 1990’s of illegal file sharing and now, in this decade, completely legal free distribution of recorded music. We are back where we started: paying for experiences, not for artifacts.

Today’s digital music scene is about experiences. iTunes, for example, is not so much a tool for organizing your music collection as it is a complete media experience platform: It’s the tool to listen to and organize your music, of course, but with the store integration, partnership with your portable player, accessibility to other users on your network, sharing with your TV and home stereo system, it’s become far more than a simple media player.

Last.fm takes it further: Are you listening to something you really like, and you want more? Well, right there on the page, the page that is playing the music, are a dozen different ways of exploring that music further: Talk to other fans, read about the band’s history, view recommendations based on your own listening habits, listen to artists that are intimately related to the band you’re hearing, find out about new music that came out just today.

Valuing Media

Kevin Kelly recently wrote a really insightful and thought-provoking piece about how the value of copied media can be measured:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

In the case of music, the “stuff which can’t be copied” is (among other things) live, performed music. Kelly’s piece explores a few other ways that stuff can be valuable without being copyable — it’s a great read, please check it out.

Last.fm actually hits several of Kelly’s values dead-on, including Accessibility (the ability to tune in from any browser and not be tied to your own hard drive), Patronage (the artist is getting paid by Last.fm, something that many listeners want to know is happening), and Personalization and Findability (Last.fm was literally founded on the idea of making new music findable through personalized recommendations).

Rhapsody was on the right track, but their catalog lacks the kind of Web 2.0 community-generated depth and recommendation tools to make listening to and discovering new music such a delightful experience. On Rhapsody, AFAIK, you are renting access to a database that allows basic browsing by artist, genre, etc. That’s it. It’s fundamentally still about paying for temporary ownership of music.

But as I said, it’s not about owning the music any more. It’s about providing easy and fluid access to the music, exposing you to new music you will like, immersing you in a music community, and making the listening experience as entertaining and interesting as possible. Ownership is no longer an issue. Today you pay for the experience of a product which, in the peer-to-peer era, you can always get in raw form for free or nearly free.

In the future competition in the music industry, such as it is, will consist of better and better ways of competing, essentially, with old-fashioned radio, nightclubs, and concert halls. Last.fm gets this.

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In today’s Times, I read a story that included a fallacy that I’m pretty fed up of hearing: The accusation that web-based news and journalism is overly brief and shallow, that it caters too much to the short attention spans of ADD-addled youths, and that the web is ushering in a new era of crappy journalism:

[Panasonic President Toshihiro] Sakamoto said he has a “dream” of seeing a newspaper presented beautifully on a television. (I hate Internet news, he said; it’s just a series of small sound bytes and quick updates. He’d prefer to see the entire paper).

I have to ask: Exactly which InterWeb is he looking at? Certainly not the one I am used to getting my news from.

My entire experience of Internet news has been deep and substantive, the polar opposite of this stereotype. All of the major news services have moved gracefully and effectively into the Web, IMHO. The most avid news consumers, too, now voraciously consume online news, including the new citizen journalism of blogs. So why does this myth persist?

I mean, it’s not like there’s any evidence. Newspaper web sites include not only the exact same full-length stories featured in their print editions, but they usually also contain tons of deeper content than their paper counterparts, such as background information, raw reporter’s notes, news from other news services, plus more photography, audio, and video. Even TV news web sites run AP and Reuters news stories, not to mention uncut transcripts of their TV reportage, and go far, far beyond anything they show on the air.

Web news is everything print news and TV news is — and more. There’s simply no way you can argue that Internet news isn’t in every way superior in depth and quality to the news delivered in other media.

The only reasonable conclusion I can make is that people who argue this don’t actually read news on the web but want to sound like they do. Maybe they watch short videos clips of news stories now and then, or read the home pages without clicking to read the actual articles. But they can’t possibly be reading real news web sites and contend that the journalism is lacking in depth and quality compared to other media. I suppose they can’t even conceive that the real news on the web is delivered in a traditional but time-consuming medium: Words.

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A running theme here at graphpaper.com is the debunking of shoddy research methodologies and junk science used to lend authority to and help guide decisions in the design professions. I want to encourage my readers, and the industry as a whole, to (a) stop being so gullible about the research they hear about in the press, and to (b) stop performing meaningless research themselves.

Ultimately my objective is to end the cycle of requiring designers to back up their recommendations with the kind of research or data that cannot be accurately or meaningfully collected, a cycle that forces designers and consultants to produce mountains of bad research. Either do the research correctly and make decisions based on sound science, or don’t do it at all and make your key decisions based on wisdom and experience. No research is better than bad research.

Today’s episode attacks addresses the field of advertising research.

Making Up Numbers

I am a man of very little faith in most quantitative research — not because I don’t believe in numbers, but because, usually, when you scratch the surface of a quantitative research report you will find blatantly subjective or qualitative data being used as the basis for the quantitative data.

Don’t get me wrong, I love qualitative research. But for execs who seek cold, hard numbers, qualitative research is often meaningless and untrustworthy. It is seen as fluffy psychobabble or artistic/creative posturing. So when a designer or a researcher wants their insights to be taken seriously, they often feel the need to “translate” their extensive subjective insights into objective numbers, a process that I think is just another flavor of bullshitting.

Here is a simple made-up example of what I mean by “translating” qualitative research into a quantitative report:

I conducted a study on the subway this Monday morning. I examined 50 people’s faces to see if they looked happy or sad. 15 looked happy, and 35 looked sad. Can I say, then, that 30% of the commuters in my study were happy? Sure. But only if you trust my judgement in reading people’s faces. The numbers are a smokescreen — the real insight, the real magic, is occurring in my personal examinations of people’s faces. My own opinion is the linchpin of the whole “study”. If that one part of the process is unreliable — and you have no way of trusting that it isn’t — then the final numbers are also worthless.

Advertising that “Works”

So now here’s a real-world example with similar underlying flaws: An advertising industry study released recently contends that ads that “tell stories” are more effective than those that do not. Sounds interesting. The methodology sounds pretty science-y, too:

Thirty-three ads across 12 categories—from brands like Budweiser, Campbell’s Soup and MasterCard—were analyzed by 14 leading emotion and physiological research firms. The research tools varied from testing heart rate and skin conductance of the ad viewer to brain diagnostics.

The study was looking for patterns among those ads that work better than others. Here’s an example conclusion:

One such pattern was that a campaign like Bud’s iconic “Whassup” registered more powerfully with consumers than Miller Lite low-carb ads that essentially just said, “We’re better than the other guys.” Why? Because Bud told a story about friends connected by a special greeting.

There are many bells going off in my head reading this. Who is to say that “Whassup” tell more of a “story” than the Miller Lite ads? I remember those ads, and they hardly meet my definition of “story” (a story is something in which, you know, things happen). So it begs the question of “what is a story?” We have to trust the researcher’s opinion on that, I guess.

Secondly, how do they know one ad “works better” than another (this, of course, is one of the advertising industry’s biggest existential questions, right after “does advertising work at all”)? What does “registered more powerfully” mean, exactly? Is that even measurable?

This study used “heart rate and skin conductance”, presumably to mitigate the kind of subjective judgement in my face-reading example above. But what exactly do those physiological conditions have to do with the effectiveness of an ad? If my heart rate goes up, for example, does that mean that I am supposed to be more inclined to buy something? Or is it the exact opposite, that physical excitement indicates hostility to the brand while calmness indicates receptiveness to the brand’s emotionally-compatible values?

It sounds like we’re supposed to assume that there is a meaningful correlation here, but I am extremely skeptical. We must question every little aspect of the so-called scientific studies we read, because if any single part of a study is fundamentally flawed then the whole thing is worthless.

Fundamental to the advertising study is the theory that a person can watch an ad and that researchers can then determine if the ad “worked”, in the same way an opthamologist can put lenses in front of your eyes and determine if you can read the eyechart or not. This idea that an ad “works” when it makes you more inclined to buy something is called “purchase intent”, and it is an industry standard term:

In Campbell’s “Orphan” ad, it is about bringing together a mother and her foster child.

Ad research firm Gallup-Robinson, Pennington, N.J., found that the spot, which showed a little girl’s sadness and anxiety melt away into a soft smile once she was given a bowl of soup, generated 80% purchase intent. Most viewers measured said it was believable.

A similar study from Ameritest, Albuquerque, N.M., found it received 42% purchase intent compared to a category norm of 33%.

Okay, big alarm bell here: 33% is the category norm for purchase intent. WTF? Is that supposed to mean that 33% of people who watch the ad actually intend to buy the product? This defies all credulity. The ad industry, of course, loves to pat itself on the back, but 33%? (Maybe I’m just projecting, but I can’t think of more than one or two ads in my life that have ever succeeded in producing a “purchase intent” in me at all.)

What’s more, how do they determine “purchase intent”? Is it from simply asking the test subjects “Do you want to buy this”? If so, maybe the fact that an ad is funny increases the likelihood of answering the question positively, but ultimately has no effect on whether the purchase actually occurs. Is there any evidence that “purchase intent” has any bearing on “purchasing” at all?

Probably not. My favorite paragraph is the last one:

The study does not discuss the ROI of the ads for their marketers. Mark Truss, director of brand intelligence at JWT, New York, said the storytelling theory is correct, but the industry still lacks a way to prove it. “Without the tools to measure and link back to business metrics, marketers and advertisers are not going to embrace [this approach].”

In other words, it’s all crap. Cheers to Mark Truss for, in essence, openly arguing based on his own experience and wisdom instead of relying on the junk science. I’ll always put more trust in imperfect but honest people than in dishonest or meaningless numbers.

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Al Gore and Iron Eyes Cody. Go check out the original TV ads: Canoe and Horseback

Whenever I am about to do something wasteful, like throwing a plastic bottle in the trash or turning the air conditioner on when it’s 74 degrees, my wife says these words to me: “Think of Al Gore.”

The phrase, like the Christian “WWJD?” (”What would Jesus do?”), makes you look at your own actions through the eyes of someone who is working tirelessly to make the world better. The perspective forces you to make a choice. Now I ask this question to myself, too. Al Gore has become a living reminder to us all that we should constantly think about the big picture, about how our actions and decisions contribute to climate change one way or the other.

In fact, in my own mind I take my wife’s advice a little further, making it into a more vivid and visual connection. You see, despite his 2007 triumphs (Oscar and Nobel), Al Gore is still, to me, a tragic figure, not just because of his 2000 election loss, but because of the sheer magnitude of the challenge he faces in fighting environmental catastrophe. Whenever I “think of Al Gore”, it’s hard for me not to imagine him shedding a tear for my careless or lazy behavior. It invariably makes me think of the classic 1970’s TV public service announcement featuring a Native American canoeing and riding his horse through a modern and thoroughly polluted America, having trash thrown at him from a speeding car, and ending with him shedding a single gut-wrenching tear at the sheer monstrosity and callousness of the American people.

Watching those ads in the 1970s, and seeing Al Gore today, I think about how being environmentally responsible isn’t difficult so much as it merely not being a lazy brutal bastard. You don’t have to spend every day on a soapbox spreading the word and rallying your neighbors to political action — Al Gore, and hundreds of thousands of others like him, are doing that for us already. Back in the 1970’s, it was barely even uncool to throw garbage out of your car window, much less illegal. But because of the pressure against such behavior, both social and legislative, tolerance for such barbarism is plummeting.

Doing the right thing is quite often simply a matter of not doing the wrong thing. Or to put it more simply, it usually simply means “Don’t be a dick.”

(I also suspect that many people have a visceral negative reaction to Al Gore specifically because he makes them feel like dicks for their irresponsible behavior.)

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In the future of Idiocracy, Carl’s Jr.’s slogan becomes “Fuck You, I’m Eating”… which isn’t really a stretch from the attitude expressed in their current ad campaign.

David Armano’s Logic+Emotion blog today discusses a tacky new ad from Hardees & Carl’s Junior, in which a pair of smarmy white high school kids rap about their stripper/teacher’s “flat buns”, intended to introduce the world to their new “Flat Bun Burger” product. The ad really is just too stupid to describe, and I won’t even bother put the video of the ad here, since David has already (and reluctantly, by his own admission) put the ad up on his own site for you to see.

The commercial seems like a scene right out of the excellent and wildly-underrated movie Idiocracy (directed by Mike Judge, of Office Space and Beavis and Butthead fame). In the not-so-distant future in which Idiocracy is set, Carl’s Jr. is one of the dozen or so corporations who essentially control a world populated entirely by people with below-50 IQs and whose culture has devolved into shameless gluttony, juvenile sexuality, and crass violence. A professional wrestler is President, law degrees are sold at Costco, slot machines are in hospitals, and lounge chairs have food-dispensing hoses and toilets built into them.

This ad only helps to cement the movie’s profound prescience about the reality of our rapidly-dumbing culture and the overall downward trajectory we often seem to be heading towards, often hand-in-hand with corporate consumer marketing. In fact, every day I see a dozen commercials or products that seem right out of the future world of Idiocracy — but I see them right here in 2007 America. The movie is a satire, of course, but as with all the best satire it frequently and repeatedly hits shockingly close to home. (Happily, you can go ahead and view lots of hilarious scenes from Idiocracy on YouTube right now.)

On Human Dignity

I work on interactive marketing for some major consumer brands, but I am perpetually grateful that I never have to work on ads like this. Behavior’s clients are almost exclusively blue-chip brands with deep respect for their customers, users, and audiences. But many designers are sometimes presented with the option of either doing something classy or doing something crass and degrading. We have a choice between treating the customer with respect and treating them with contempt. The makers of this ad are either morons (which I doubt) or people who think of their customers as moronic assholes ripe for exploitation.

In fact, in the comments on David’s blog there is much speculation about the creative meetings in which this ad was hatched. I can only say that if I were working at a company producing ads like this, I would fight hard to do something classier, or I would quit and go work for someone a little less cynical about respecting human dignity. I don’t want to be one of the architects of the Idiocracy future.

As designers of experiences and shapers of brands, we do have a choice in this matter, even when working for clients who may have an inclination to “go negative” and tap into this poisoned well. Even if you suspect that an ad like this would actually work, that it would actually succeed in bringing millions of people into Hardees/Carls Jr. to buy these flat bun burgers, you have a responsibility to the inherent dignity of the human race to NOT produce ads like this.

Note: It’s not the sexuality of the ad I object to. I still think Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” (the obvious inspiration for this spot) is cool. The music’s kinda catchy, too. There’s just something about the whole thing, maybe it’s the over-the-top glorification of juvenileness and stupidity, that makes me sad for everyone involved with this ad and the millions of other cultural products like it that crowd our media landscape more and more.

Do you work on marketing that relies on these themes of disrespect, selfishness, immaturity, and stupidity? If so, how do you justify it? Do you have a choice in the matter, or do you feel that you have a higher obligation to give your clients or your customers what they seem to crave?

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I suppose it’s as good a time as any to admit that I’m never going to read any Harry Potter books.

I’ve got nothing against the series, actually. I’m sure they’re fine books and I’m glad so many kids, and many adults, enjoy reading them. It’s just that I can’t imagine actually sitting down to read all seven books when there are so many other books I’ve been kicking myself to read for years, books of all sorts ranging from fiction classics to history to current tech. My backlog of “must reads” is hundreds of books long — do I really want to bump 7 rather large children’s books to the top of that list? I don’t think so.

Even when I’m an old man, I am certain that I’ll still have hundreds of books to read that will be more important to me than Harry Potter. Comrade Greenfield is in the same boat, telling the world on NPR that he, too, will never be interested in Pottermania.

Same, by the way, goes for the Potter movies. I saw the first one on cable and thought it was pretty dumb and even rather poorly made. The broom-riding sequences were hamfisted and dull when compared to similar scenes in Miyazaki’s delightful Kiki’s Delivery Service, made over a decade earlier. Anyway, I’ve got plenty of other films to see, mostly old but the occasional new blockbuster — I will, for example, see The Golden Compass.

Otherwise I am fully content to miss the boat on the whole Potter thing, and occasionally feel smug that all I needed to do was randomly browse my way to Wikipedia’s “List of deaths in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” page to learn, generally, everything one needs to know to be au courant with Potter lore.

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Sartre would be proud.

The shocking (and to many viewers, utterly disappointing) ending of The Sopranos series finale was perfect. The tableau itself was a perfect jewel: the nuclear family all together, happy it seems for the moment, but completely surrounded by unknown and unseen danger. David Chase pumped the scene full of more tension than any other moment in the series’s history — is the whole family about to get whacked? — but ultimately there is no concrete evidence for the audience to be sure that any violence is about to happen.

Most of the predictions made about the finale, even the ones in our office pool, are still possible, as they always have been. The violence that surrounds the Soprano nuclear family has always been the subject of the series, and the finale simply wrapped that up into a single vignette, a microcosm of the whole 8-year series.

Consider the Seinfeld series finale, where the core cast found themselves in jail for, apparently, eternity. This ultimate predicament was a microcosm, too, of the series itself and the relationship between Seinfeld’s four core characters, the Seinfeld nuclear family, if you will. Seinfeld was often called a show about nothing, but it was always about the characters. Every episode we learned more about, and dove deeper into, the four main characters and explored a little bit about some unique and colorful secondary characters.

The Sopranos finale was similar. We’ve never asked The Sopranos for long-arc plots with carefully-planned setups, mysterious clues that come to fruition later. Generally, all that ever happens on The Sopranos is that we are drawn deeper and deeper into our understandings of the characters, particualarly Tony, and occasionally we find surprises inside of them. This is what The Sopranos is about, not plot. My wife, Peggy, noted that ultimately The Sopranos was not a “gangster movie” but a “soap opera”. And in a soap opera, ultimately, nothing ever happens. Dr. Melfi’s decision to end Tony’s therapy also reflects this realization, that despite all her efforts over eight years, Tony has not changed and will not change. The final moment of the show encapsulated this tense stasis perfectly.

The Behavior office pool got almost nothing correct, but we had one phenomenal write in winner: “Cliffhanger”. Some of us got Phil Leotardo’s hit. But that’s it. And nobody predicted that Christopher would come back from the dead as a cat.

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UPDATE 6/11: See the results of the pool, and my take on the Sopranos finale, here.

In anticipation of The Sopranos series finale this Sunday, everyone I know is making predictions about who lives, who dies, and all other kinds of plots and events. To help make the speculation even more interesting, I’ve put together this handy-dandy grid of characters and plot developments to help you keep track of how good your predictions are.

Download the Sopranos Finale Pool (33k PDF, two pages including grid and rules)

If you’d like to make all this predicting a little more interesting, I’ve also included some suggested rules that you can use if you want to turn this into a good old fashioned high-stakes office pool.

Suggested Rules

1. Choose any number of combinations of characters (along the left side) and fates (along the top), then initial each of your predictions in the corresponding cell.
2. Each prediction (each cell) will cost you ____ of play money.
3. Hand in your game sheet and play money by ____ to the game administrator, ____.
4. Winning cells will be identified by the game administrator during the final episode of the Sopranos on June 10, 2007 (ex: If Uncle Junior commits suicide, C-17 will be a winner. If Dr. Melfi has a hallucination, P-9 will be a winner). The game administrator makes the final decision regarding any plot ambiguity or dispute.
5. There will almost certainly be multiple winners, in which case the pot is divided proportionally among the winning players according to each player’s number of correct predictions. (ex: If one player makes six correct predictions, a second makes three, and a third makes one, then the pot is divided 60/30/10% among the three winners.) The game administrator is responsible for all mathematical calculations!

FAQ

Q: Where’s [missing character]?
A: Not every character is included. Whaddaya gonna do? Game administrators may, however, add additional names in the blank spaces provided along the right side of the grid (optionally, admins may also permit players to add their own characters).

Q: What about [your personal plot prediction]?
A: As above, the game administrator may add several additional plot events in the blank spaces provided along the top of the grid (and, as above, admins may extend this privilege to the players if they wish).

Q: But [character] is already dead!
A: In order to both (a) avoid spoilers for those players who may have missed a few episodes, and (b) permit flashbacks, dreams, and other alternate-reality developments to occur, a small selection of deceased characters have been scattered throughout the grid. (Predicting that a character will die who is already dead does not count as a correct prediction, smart-alec!)

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