The Entroporium

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The words every man dreads hearing: “You’re getting a little thin up there.”  And with that – no fanfare, no drama, no time for a neurotic outbreak – my barber Daniel snipped off the strands of my faux combover.  ”It’s 2010,” he went on.  ”Time for a fresh start.”

It was true.   One always wonders about the guy who has that one strand of hair carefully arranged over an obviously bald head.  How does he do that?  How does he face his loved ones when he gets wet?  Isn’t he worried it might be windy today?  For the last year, I was well down the road to becoming one of those guys.

What I learned over the last few years is that nobody plans for a combover.  They’re insidious.  They are the product of years of attrition, denial, compensation and the simple refusal to adapt to new ways of brushing your hair.

SF Chronicle: Carlos Avila Gonzalez

There’s something comforting about the No BS treatment at traditional men’s barber shops, a fading breed, run for the most part by old guys who have been doing nothing but giving no-BS quick & dirty haircuts for eons.  San Francisco has a couple of fancy locations – Mister and The Barber Lounge – which say they are barber shops but are in reality more like ultra-masculine salons.  More memorable, though, is Original Palace Barber Shop at 2nd and Mission.  Basically a bunch of chairs pushed together in a mound of the eccentric absentee owner’s garbage (must be seen to be believed), Original Palace is staffed by a crew of several 50+ men, all foreign with indeterminate nationalities, and one terribly unlucky woman. Never a wait and never out of there in more than 20 minutes.

My local barber shop is the simply-named Montclair Barber Shop.  Its proprietor, Rocky Becker, a near-silent character I see all the time on Mountain Boulevard smoking and sucking down coffee, was recently profiled in the San Francisco Chronicle.   To be in Rocky’s chair is to be transported somewhere into the early 1970s.  He’s got his Raiders calendar, a few shots of his Harley – and that’s all you get to see because after 5 minutes you are done, $20 and a pile of hair lighter. Not the greatest haircut, but that’s not what you were there for – nothing some pomade and an encore in four weeks can’t fix.

Al Davis, early 1960s, current hairstyle

The Chronicle was principally interested in the shop because of its longtime relationship with Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis, who’s been getting his hair cut by Rocky for 49 years.  The Raiders of the 70s were known for their hard partying, rebellious personae and straight-up intimidation of their opponents.  ”Just win, baby” was their mantra. And of course they were one of the most successful franchises, a regular visitor to the playoffs and winner of three Super Bowls.  Al Davis is one of the founders of the modern NFL, one of the world’s great business growth stories, and a member of its Hall Of Fame.

Davis may not be loved, but the media and Raider Nation remains entranced by the Davis mystique.  They are fascinated by Davis for never changing, a throwback – and for almost 40 years one of the cleverest, most influential men in football.  They also lay his lack of success in the last decade – the Raiders now officially own the worst 7-year run in NFL history – for never changing.  ”He still likes to maintain his look,” Becker told the Chronicle. “You’ve got to maintain what you have. Al’s a big believer in that.”

Change is hard work.   Sometimes it needs to be tough love, other times it’s letting someone or something just go to town on you.  You gotta cut off those old strands flying in the wind and move on.

Hurrah for traditional barber shops!  Thank you for letting me stay the same as long as I could and then making me change when it was the right thing to do.  Long may you wave.

It could well be that I’ve missed this analysis – goodness knows there are a few newsies and bloggers that follow Apple – but the main point of the Lala acquisition may have gone over their heads for one key reason: the folks initially reporting the story haven’t actually tried to use Lala.

One of the key reasons to register with Lala is the right to stream music that you own to any computer: a great service and potentially world-beating if you can make it happen on portable devices as well.  (‘Ownership’ is defined as having a copy, regardless of how you might have acquired it.)  The catch – and it’s a big one – is that you have to download a program from Lala that reads your MP3 library and uploads ID information from each of your files.  If you have a large library, it’s an absurdly long process – I gave up in an hour with less than 5% of my collection read.  Even for a modestly-sized library, the upload routine is still odious, time-consuming and puts the onus on the user to do too much work.

(Aside: Why is this legal now for Lala but when the original MP3.com had a similar service back in the early years of the decade it was immediately sued out of existence?  That was even worse for the user; you had to download software and then insert all of your CDs for identification. At least in that model you had to prove you actually owned a physical – and presumably ‘real’ – CD. Puzzling.)

Apple, however, via its Genius feature in iTunes already knows what MP3s are in its users’ collections, which means it could be just a flip of a switch to allow users access to their music anywhere on any connected device.  If the purchase price really is as little as $17mm (as Techcrunch reported today), this is a total bargain to bring down one of the chief barriers to quick leadership in the “Stream Music Everywhere” market – not to mention avoiding all the negotiations Apple would have needed to go through with the copyright holders.

Pandora, Mog, Spotify, Last,fm and everyone else in the market may have just been trumped.  Lala’s current feature set added to iTunes takes Apple from nowhere to everywhere in single update for software that’s already ubiquitous. Small wonder that today’s gossip sees Pandora running like hell to expand its business into the car stereo market.

Last night I attended an author event in San Francisco where Nick Hornby was interviewed by Dave Eggers.  Towards the end of the evening, an audience member asked Hornby’s opinion of E-readers.  A palpable shudder went through the crowd; you could feel the room waiting and rooting for the bash to come.  Hornby went one better, bringing up the new ‘Vook’ debuted by Simon & Schuster earlier this week.  The crowd hissed, groaned, booed.  It was the kind of reaction that San Franciscans usually reserves for Republican party leaders.

Essentially what the crowd and the speakers agreed on was that there is something negated from the reading experience when you move from a book, which is singularly dedicated to the content at hand, to an electronic device, a more promiscuous format for lack of a better term.  Think for example – as Hornby did – of the difference in experience between playing a record and selecting an album to play on an iPod.

Even as a Kindle user, I’ll be the first to agree that consuming content on a Kindle is a much different experience than from reading an actual physical book.  In my mind, carrying a book around is the last stand for analog content; I long ago came to think of music and movies as files or folders, but until recently I had never thought that way about books.  In a discussion led by Eggers, the founder of an imprint that publishes some of the world’s most physically beautiful books, there is bound to be some bias towards the aesthetic experience of buying, holding and reading a book.

The most striking thing about the Kindle Bestseller list about it is its utter dominance by serial fiction – the stuff you find in supermarkets by popular authors like Janet Evanovich, Richard North Patterson and so forth, plus right-wing screeds by the likes of Glenn Beck and cohorts.  What the [ahem] cultural elites fail to understand about these books – the actual physical books – is that they are produced to be the very worst of aesthetic experiences in publishing: poorly bound, grey-papered budget paperbacks.  For devotees of these kinds of books, the Kindle actually represents an enormous step up from what they’re given today.  It’s not for nothing that Goodwills and St Vincent De Pauls are piled high with mass-market paperbacks selling for a dime each.  Nobody wants these when they’re done and there’s no meaningful secondary market.  They’re consumed and then they’re trash.

So when a San Francisco crowd starts booing a delivery device for popular fiction because it’s some kind of lowering of their standard of what a book should be, I can’t help but compare it to the same ‘cultural elitism’ that makes it impossible for them to understand the appeal of a George Bush, Fox News, or any mysteriously popular icon of so-called Red State America. E-readers are the most democratic of devices, moving the words and ideas in books out of their hallowed packaging and leveling them for all readers.  As Hornby himself discussed, there’s nothing wrong with having books be easy to read and fun for all; it’s the very cornerstone of his considerable success both as novelist and frequent Hollywood adaptee.

There will always be a market for books so long as people crave them as a key aesthetic element of their reading experience. Boutique houses like McSweeney’s may be well prepared where publishing is going: beautiful editions for those who need that experience, just as there continues to be a market for vinyl records for a certain kind of collector.  But “Democracy In America,” the kind you find in supermarkets, will increasingly go electronic.  Deal with it.

I’m a music obsessive with over 200GBs of MP3s in my iTunes library.  I use a 16GB iPhone and had been loading it principally with my ‘New’ finds and stuck with a few ‘No Deletes,’ leading to a selection of music that rarely suited my moods and provided very few safe old favorites.  All too often, I found myself flummoxed by carrying hundreds of records, but totally sick of everything I had on it.

Shuffle play has its place, but I still love to listen to albums start to finish, letting the artist present their music in their own context.  After playing around a bit last week with Smart Playlists, I’m pleased to offer this post on filling your iPod/iPhone with random albums.  Doing this has brought up a lot of forgotten favorites and released space on my portable device from newer albums that I liked, was tired of but couldn’t bring myself to delete.  It’s entirely refreshed my whole portable listening experience by digging out records I haven’t thought about in years.

Here is an easy step-by-step for getting it done:

1)    In the Control Menu, set Shuffle to “by Album”

2)    Create a new Playlist Folder for your iPod or iPhone.  (For the rest of this post, I’m just going to call it an iPod, OK?)

3)    Create a regular Playlist for your “Musts,” the albums that you still feel like you absolutely must have handy – or perhaps albums you’ve recently acquired.

4)    Drag your Musts into that list and note at the bottom of the iTunes screen how much hard drive space they take up.

5)    This is the critical step. Create a Smart Playlist.  Use the three setting shown in the illustration below: Artist contains [press Space Bar once], Media Kind is Music (to keep out pesky Audiobooks and Podcasts) and Playlist is not [the name of your Musts Playlist], which prevents duplicates.  Use the “Limit” line at the bottom to be however many GBs are remaining on your iPod after you subtract the amount of space reserved for your Musts from Step 4 plus anything else you keep on your iPod (Podcasts, Photos, Videos, etc).  You can add on more lines to fine-tune it for your needs by adding lines like “Last Played is more than 90 days ago,” excluding certain artists or genres, or whatever you fancy.

6)    Now plug in your iPod and select it from the left sidebar.  On the Music tab, select Sync Music: Selected Playlists and deselect the “Automatically fill free space with songs” button.  Down below select the Folder that has your Musts and Random playlists.

7)    Sync and be happily surprised next time you’re out & about with your iPod.

You likely wound up with a few dud albums on your Random Smart Playlist.  Use the Grid View to delete it.  The list will automatically refill to your level of GBs.  Sync again and you’re set.

An important note about maintaining your Random Smart Playlist:  Because you are filling with Albums to some level of GBs, you will inevitably have an incomplete album at the bottom of the playlist.  My suggestion is to never sort the random playlist in List View.  That way you can always go into List View to delete those fragments from the bottom of the list.  If you don’t do this, after refilling your Random Playlist you will wind up with a number of incomplete albums, obviously an undesirable situation.  Of course you can always Go Nuclear and delete everything in your Random Smart Playlist to refill from scratch, too.  Happy listening!

Originally released in 1967, The Who Sell Out received the Deluxe Edition reissue treatment earlier this year –  and it could not have come at a more prescient moment.  As the music industry’s revenue continues to fall and fall and fall, some of the cleverer music marketers are seeking new ways to promote their artists and even create new revenue streams from them.  Who knew that a psychedelic classic from 1967 would provide the template?

Sell Out was The Who’s fourth LP and the band’s first attempt at a full-length concept album.  The schtick was that the album was really a radio show complete with interruptions for station IDs and commercials.  (This also made for a clever way to gloss over the production problem of the album’s schizophrenic body of songs – everything from Beach Boys pop to proto-metal.)  Underlining the “sell out” concept, many of the ads were for brands they loved with the hopes that Premier Drums and [ahem] Jaguar would shower the boys in the band with free product.

The album’s conceptual centerpiece is the track where it all comes together.  “Odorono” sounds like a sweet if overdone Byrds-y pop track with a curious narrative about a female singer’s big debut.  It’s not until the last line of the song that the curtain is pulled back to reveal that the whole 2+ minute song is an advert for deodorant.

Listen: The Who – The Who Sell Out

Of course that’s all performed as a sly joke.  But recent events have brought product placement in pop songs into the spotlight as a legitimate brand-builder.  Most notably Chris Brown’s “Forever” was revealed to be a jingle for Wrigley Doublemint Gum only after the track had already launched into the Top 10.  (Perhaps we should have noticed earlier because of the chorus: “Double your pleasure/double your fun”). “Forever” also shows in the most dramatic way possible the pitfalls and opportunities inherent in latching your brand to a pop song.  As anyone who has passed through a supermarket checkout lane in the last five months would have seen, Brown’s reputation is now tattered following a domestic violence incident with his then-girlfriend, Rihanna, and Wrigley subsequently pulled his spots out of rotation.

Out of the blue, “Forever” was hijacked by a viral video that has become one of 2009’s biggest hits, “JK Wedding Entrance Dance,” now standing at over 25 million views and providing Brown’s song an unexpected return to the iTunes Top 10 singles chart.  Reflecting on how the private lives of artists impact their professional output is often a fool’s game, so we should probably look past using a love song by a convicted girlfriend-beater for a wedding.  But one wonders if Jill & Kevin were aware how much of a role Wrigley played at their (now very public) nuptials and how much free publicity they would be giving the gum.  (Or do they work for Wrigley?  Now that would be brand dedication: product placement at your wedding.)  One thing’s for sure: Google noticed – and turned “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” into a case study for monetizing YouTube content.

Def Jam, meanwhile, is taking a different tack by reminding publishers that its products often have many more eyeballs than famous magazine and web brands.  To that end, Mariah Carey’s new album will include a 34-page mini-Elle magazine – while Elle will feature a 14-page spread about the album.  “We sell millions of records, so you should advertise with us,’ ” said Antonio “L.A.” Reid, IDJ’s chairman. “My artists have substantial circulation–when you sell 2 million, 5 million, 8 million, that’s a lot of eyeballs. Most magazines aren’t as successful as those records.” And, he might add, hit records have a lot more shelf life.  Just ask Chris Brown.  Or The Who.

In an earlier post, I went into detail on the problems with the Kindle’s magazine store.  In spending a little more time in the books section, easily solved problems are present there as well.   It’s so compulsively simple and fun to buy books in the store that this represents a massive opportunity.  I’d say conservatively that Amazon could easily double its on-Kindle revenue with a few tweaks.

One big surprise right off the bat is the loss of Amazon’s Recommendations engine. My Kindle account is linked to my main account, where I have literally ten years of purchase and browse history stored.  My Kindle recommendations appear on the Kindle Store home page, as can be seen in the picture at right.  At best, I would regard these as ‘generic’ recommendations that have little to do with what I’ve ordered either in the past or over the Kindle. I also have 25 books stored in my “Save For Later” tab as well as a number of samples I’ve ordered.  Many of these are books about media & marketing, yet not one single business book recommendation.  Clearly these aren’t playing into the recommendation intelligence.

The Kindle Top Sellers proves to be pretty much useless as well as a discovery engine.  As you can see in the screen shot, the Top Sellers are a pretty weird bunch with little relation to today’s accepted Bestseller lists like those in the USA Today or New York Times.  What’s going on here?  With the exception of the Glenn Beck book, all of these are free.  While this certainly shows the power of price elasticity in the store (and again supports Chris Anderson’s Free, dammit), it also supports my earlier point: if you make it fun & easy to shop, people will buy books in droves – even titles they might not want that much. Sherlock Holmes making the Kindle Top Sellers list shows that people will ‘buy’ pretty much anything if it’s free.  At minimum, you’d hope that Amazon could separate out backlist or classics from the true contemporary bestsellers.

This goes to show an easy fix that should go on each line – there’s no easy access to price information! I have to open a link to each book to find out what I’m going to pay.  While the Kindle is advertised as having most books at $9.99, I can tell you after a few months of ownership that most of the books I’ve been interested in – many of which are true Bestsellers – are not $9.99.  I’d be curious to see a price distribution graph if anyone’s done the work.

The Sample Chapters program is half-baked. Their easy availability ois a great idea but in practice gives unsatisfactory results with no apparent rational oversight of content selection.  On Amazon proper, you can select a “random page” in most books just as you would in a bookstore; when you pick up a physical book to browse it, you naturally open to the middle not the Foreword.   All of the Sample Chapters I’ve received have been just the Forewords, not the ‘guts’ of the book, which is what I’m really interested in.  Worse, in many cases half or more of the sample is just the credits at the front of the book!

Finally there’s no linking from reviews and other sources, a longtime basic function of hyperlinking which Amazon supports with its open affiliates program.  Every Sunday I read the New York Times Book Review in search of ideas for things to read.  You’d think that the NYT on Kindle could at least have links into the store.  Even if that’s not feasible, there could at least be a menu on the home page (or even within) for “Recently Reviewed” by newspaper or magazine.  Instead I’m left to search, with each click making it a little less likely that I’ll make a purchase.  And then of course there’s the issue – key for all E-books – of whether all books will even be available when they’re reviewed.

All of these are solvable problems.  If even one of these can be fixed, I predict a huge increase in the vitality of the Kindle.  One wonders if these will be better addressed in the upcoming competitive devices from PlasticLogic and others – and if Amazon’s strength online will be an Achilles heel for its E-books business.

Several weeks after casting my dutiful homer “Vote For Pablo” to make the NL All-Star Team, I received an E-mail invitation from Major League Baseball inviting me to subscribe to MLB Insiders Club.  Baseball has always had backwards-looking marketing overly reliant on its heritage, but debuting a dubiously Official Magazine in the era of social networking and 24/7 sports news shows baseball’s marketing at its worst.

Baseball-dedicated magazines have been around since time immemorial and – like every other magazine segment – they aren’t exactly killing it these days.  Baseball Digest, founded in 1942, recently downshifted to an 8x schedule from monthly, while the baseball-heavy Sporting News showed a 39% decline in ad pages for the first half of 2009.  The biggest players in sports magazines, Sports Illustrated and ESPN: The Magazine, saw ad pages down 28% and 31% respectively in Q1 2009.  (Curiously SI for Kids is one of only 11 magazines that showed an ad page increase so far this year.)

MLB Insiders Club would need to bring something different to the table in order to succeed and what it promises is attractive: “Behind The Scenes looks into the clubhouse and front office of MLB teams” and “MLB Insiders Club Fantasy League Tips!”  First off, it’s surprising to hear that a major league would directly support fantasy leagues.  It would be a lucrative opportunity for a major sport league to get involved in fantasy leagues, but it’s also tantamount to supporting gambling – which has a history, especially in baseball, of being the worst crime a player or manager can commit.  One wonders if the MLB Powers That Be is aware that an official licensed product of this tacit endorsement.

As for “Behind The Scenes,” a review on Baseball Reflection reveals that the magazine practically begs for user-generated content.  The official license may get some access, but it certainly doesn’t guarantee more or better; the premiere issue features an interview with Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane, but he’s probably MLB’s most open GM, frequently giving long interviews to blogs like Athletics Nation.  And if UGC is the majority of content, you can be pretty sure the fans mailing it in don’t have any special access.

MLB Insiders Club is published by North American Media Group, a company that specializes in niche media with a few key licenses, including the Professional Golf Association and History Channel.  In addition to magazines, it also pumps out expensive coffee table books.  So for $24/year, you get some indeterminate number of baseball magazines (they don’t say whether its monthly or what) and the opportunity to buy more books (or as the come-on says “Preview Great Books and DVD’s”).  Ouch.

Baseball’s marketing and media sophistication continue to be disappointing and well behind its rivals for attention in the NBA and NFL.  Few of MLB’s teams or players are involved in social networking, while Shaquille O’Neal is the world’s ninth most-followed twitterer (as of this writing) and the NFL has so many tweeters that it had to conjure a “No tweeting during games” policy.  When these other leagues and their team are putting together their communications strategies, they are way past trying to sell magazines to their best customers. With overall attendance down nearly 6% so far this year, MLB needs to do something to make itself more compelling – more necessary – to its fans.  A clever coordinated social networking policy would be an inexpensive, low-risk way to go, especially in light of the vitality of fantasy baseball – one of the original pre-Internet social networks.

More on point: yesterday the Giants E-mailed me an offer for $5 tickets for next week’s Pirates series for my “vote for Pablo.”  Now that’s something I can use.

Traffic reports from the newly-online-only Seattle Post-Intelligence placed its April readership at 4.3 million unique visitors, up from 4.2 million in the same month last year. That’s a modest gain, but considering the population of Seattle-Tacoma metro is 3.3 million, it starts to look like a magnificent achievement.

The catch is that despite this impressive performance, the monetization is not happening. Each time I’ve reviewed the site over the last couple of weeks, I’ve found a bare few national campaigns and a whole lot of ad network inventory. Sure, the latter can be ‘optimized’ (maybe) and sold for slightly-better-than-rock-bottom rates, but it’s still a long way away from charging premium rates to reach a highly targeted local audience.

Name-brand sites still want maximum reach, but this may be a situation that calls for a wildly different tack. With uniques handily exceeding population, there’s no way an ad team could claim its delivering a ‘uniquely Seattle’ audience to a local advertiser, much less one with certain desired attributes. On a local site with a local target audience, visitors from the rest of the web are not valuable. A restaurant in Seattle should not have to pay for an ad shown to a visitor from Schenectady. And this in turn drives content strategy: no longer should a newspaper site aspire to be the central hub of everything, but merely the central hub of its metro area. Leave the national news to the national sites.

Earlier today I picked up this year’s “Best Of” edition of Oakland’s East Bay Express. It’s chock-fat with useful content and ads from all over the East Bay, from sandwich shops to bakeries to beauty parlors. Long reliant on ads from big retailers, banks and real estate (among others)heyhe holy grail for SeattlePI and other MSM newspaper sites is to get these advertisers into their ecosystem and away from Google AdWords. And the way to` do that may be antithetical to everything they’ve ever wanted to achieve: get smaller.

In fact, under the radar (and probably not on purpose), the ‘getting small’ strategy is already well in use. According to the Inland Press Association (via Newsosaur), the newspapers with the smallest circulations have actually had the least impact on their bottom lines. That’s because they were never reliant on the big retail, bank and real estate ads that drove old newspaper profits. The weekly independent papers actually stand to recover well and retain these ads because of their long-standing relationships with local businesses.

So, yes, I see a future where the San Francisco Chronicle is no longer the dominant player in its metro area, but independents like the Bay Guardian and SF Weekly stand tall. These smaller papers with distinctive editorial voices and tighter relationships with local advertisers may be the future of the newspaper.

The question for the reputable MSM big-city dailies is how they can get true local businesses – the restaurants, nightlife, storefront businesses and so forth – to advertise. In these narrow margin times, that means putting out a marketing solution they can afford. So long as CPM remains the measuring stick, newspapers will need to reduce readership to make it truly affordable and guarantee they can reach the audience they need. Starting point: the number of uniques is something less than the metropolitan population.

In an era of worries about media and business homogenization – the ‘Walmart effect’ and c. – going small may be the best defense for keeping local media, attitudes and businesses flourishing.