Cute non-threatening boys vs independent single mom. Guess who wins?

As American Idol winds down its season tonight and bids adieu to its most formidable long-running participant, this is a great opportunity to put the spotlight on the show and what it can teach us about social media. AI actually predates what we’ve come to think of as social media by several years, but its overwhelming success is founded on many of the same principles that govern brand marketers every day.

Every week the viewers of American Idol comprise the world’s largest product development focus group. While it’s easy to focus on it as a Survivor-style game show, it can easily be forgotten that AI’s real purpose each season is to discover and groom a new pop artist for the show’s owner, which just happens to be an entertainment conglomerate. Sure, the judges will try to guide audience response, but AI fans can name numerous occasions when the vote didn’t go the way the judges wanted

The audience’s buy-in is another peculiar element of the show.  By encouraging participation, the audience has an emotional stake in the winning product before it even launches. What marketer wouldn’t love that?  The product (in the form of a pop singer’s debut album) arrives mere months after the show’s finale with little risk to the record company, certainly compared to sending out A&R people meant to guess what The Next Big Thing might be.

There are also inherent danger in letting the audience take control.  For me, the ost frustrating aspect of reality competition shows is the lack of clear rules to the game.  Without standards or ideals to apply, the audience – and sometimes the judges – can become confused over what exactly they are judging, especially for something as qualitative as ‘pop stardom quotient.’

The result can be a mess: sometimes ingenious in its preferences (Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood), other times selecting dud winners that offered only short-term satisfaction (Ruben Studdard, Taylor Hicks).  It’s the noisy American polity celebrated by DeToqueville writ large.

That’s appropriate for something called American Idol.  Is it right for your product?

The performers and set spill into every corner of the theater and virtually – no, in actuality – beg for audience engagement and participation throughout.  There is even a moment in the first act in which Fela invites the crowd to storm the stage.  This moment passes quickly and is done so subtly that I think most people, including the theater-savvy group with whom I attended the show, can easily miss it.  It’s clearly a charged moment for the performers, though, as they need to wait a moment to see if the audience will respond – but also be able to play through seamlessly to keep potential awkwardness to a minimum.  The musicians keeps riffing and if nobody moves the show goes on.

At the intermission, I asked one of the ushers if the weekend night crowds respond differently.  Oh yeah, some of the audiences are there to paaarty.  My Sunday afternoon brethren were a quieter bunch for sure.  What a performing challenge for the actors & dancers in a tightly choreographed show to have such an unpredictable element built into the show!

Another way that Fela! tries to break through the traditional Broadway audience dynamic is through an insert in the program inviting audience members to drink throughout the show.  The bar in the rear stays open and you are explicitly told its OK to have beverages at your seat.  In the spirit of the show – and, well, because I can’t imagine going to a rock concert without a tasty adult beverage – I made my way to the back bar towards the end of Act I.  Not only was I the only one in the theater to do so but the bartender seemed totally baffled by my presence, ignoring me even though I was her sole customer.

I don’t blame the audience for being confused.  The marketing on the web and around town still follows the formula of most Broadway musicals; it won this many Tonys, blah blah blah.  It makes me wonder how the show has decided to target its potential customers.  Would it be better getting the startled tourists and traditional theatergoers who have been taught to sit there and passively enjoy the show; or make outreach to younger audiences – or even traditionally more participatory groups like those found in gospel churches.  (Perhaps I’m so far away from this target that I can’t see the campaign?) As John Lennon legendarily said when he performed for royalty, “Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.”

So two lessons to take away.  First, no matter how much a show gives permission, it takes a lot to get an audience out of generations of ingrained viewing habits.  It’s hard to imagine a show with more energy, intelligence and pure uplift than Fela! – and still the crowd stayed seated until the curtain call.  (Me and my friend hooted for an encore, which only seemed to confuse our section-mates.  Isn’t that what you do after the set ends?)  Second, if you’re going to see Fela!, try for a weekend night!

• Discount tickets for Fela!
• “By the end of this transporting production, you feel you have been dancing with the stars.  And I mean astral bodies, not dime-a-dozen celebrities.” – New York Times

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.

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?  Nowthat 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.

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.

The ‘hold-back’strategy is ridiculous and totally ignores how most readers actually use their books.  While E-Books only represent a small slice of total sales today (but growing fast), there’s little question that somebody willing to shell out $200-300 for a ‘reading device’ is likely to be a passionate reader.  As one of those, I would surmise that many of the sales on E-Readers are actually incremental to publishers’ income, keeping people like me away from used book stores and libraries.  That’s where the E-Books goldmine is for publishers: not in keeping existing sales but in diverting money away from long-standing secondary and ‘free’ markets.  While its true that publishers get a nice arbitrage gain from the de facto DRM of a first-edition hardback (tough to reproduce cheaply, tough to read freely in its reproductive form), that gain can in turn be picked up by the reader upon completing the book by selling it or trading it.  An E-Book edition is essentially non-transferable.  I pay less – and perhaps the publisher makes less – but its fungibility also destroys its secondary market value.

Take, for example, my current reading: Infinite Jest.  It’s been fifteen years since it was first published, so there are plenty of used copies out there for around $10 and libraries consistently stock it, while a new copy runs $16.  Because of its ease of delivery and portability, I elected to get the $10 Kindle edition with the publisher getting some profit and no incremental printing costs.  Had I purchased a used copy, I would likely have resold it later for half-price – meaning no profit for the publisher, virtual cost of only $5 to me and $10 profit to the used book store (for selling it twice at 50% profit).  So where is the advantage to the publisher in holding it back?  It’s simply ceded its ability to profit off of its back catalog.

This is one of the central mysteries of Kindle Store availability to date.  It features plenty of hot new titles, but the back catalog titles is still mysteriously empty with many major authors most famous works; Roth, Mailer, Pynchon, Heller and Updike just for starters.  Wouldn’t a great cut-rate selection be a great source of found profit with barely any incremental cost?  I understand there may be unanticipated contractual issues (a la last year’s Writer’s Strike over web royalties), but the longer they wait, the more the price will drive towards Zero (as it did for the music industry and iTunes).  Already sites like ebooksbay.org are popping up with ‘free’ back titles.  (I found a fully convertible PDF copy of Gravity’s Rainbow last weekend.  There goes a lost sale.)

On this very same day by coincidence, Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future Of A Radical Price was released for free on Kindle and immediately shot up to #1 on the Kindle sales chart.  I’ll leave his argument for other bloggers, but in Anderson’s eyes, he’s able to do this because he (and presumably his publisher and agent and c.) can use it as a platform to make money other ways: speaking fees, leverage at his job, increased opportunities generally.  This is also the direction the music industry has taken with its ‘360-degree’ contracts for its biggest artists; Live Nation taking a cut of all of an artist’s revenue streams, from ticket sales to licensing.  The book publishing industry needs to figure out its ‘Freemium’ strategy quickly.  As a post on Mashable points out this morning, not all Free business models are created equally.  People will pay (as I have done with IJ) for convenience or added value.  What can book publishers bring to the table?  Figuring this out quickly before E-Readers become commonplace – look for them to spread like wildfire among textbook-toting students – is absolutely urgent for an industry that’s lived off the same industrial-based business model for hundreds of years.

One of the things I most looked forward to in my Kindle was the magazine store.� For a fraction of the cover price in most cases, the full text of a magazine is quickly and seamlessly downloaded to your Kindle.� If you order a subscription, each new issue supposedly turns up automatically upon publishing.

For publishers, you�d think this would be a great deal: distribute a copy with no physical costs, satisfy your hungriest readers, allow inexpensive sampling and get a few more eyeballs on the advertising.� (Disclosure: I have no idea what Amazon�s deal points are with publishers.)

In its actual use, however, the Kindle Store seems to be doing everything possible to frighten away new potential readers.� The Kindle Store, from which every issue is sold, is a neglected sad piece of real estate that does little to provoke buying.

First, KS forgets the basics of single copy sales: featuring what�s actually in an issue.� Instead of that week�s cover lines and an illustration, you get a narrative of what the magazine�s history and its mission statement.� So instead of buying Newsweek with this review and that think piece and such-and-such�s guest column, you�re faced with a black box.

The review system doesn�t help either.� It appears to be entirely unmoderated.� I found one one-star review that said I love the magazine but I�m canceling to save money.� How is that a review of issue content?

On such a small screen, of course I don�t expect the full featured infographics that are the one true unimpeachable USP of magazines, but I was surprised to get no illustrations whatsoever. The New York Times is able to provide photo lead-ins for its Kindle-formatted issues, why can�t The Atlantic?

Finally, the pricing structure is bizarre.� A single issue of Newsweek at 49 cents is an awesome bargain.� But The Atlantic charges a monthly fee even though it does not publish monthly; it�s a 10x.� Worst of all, the just-added Economist has a single issue price of $5.49, which pretty much says Stay Away, Do Not Buy Me in the competitive arena of the Store.� I�d also saw the discrepancy makes its competitors also look like it does not value its content highly enough since there are no ad impressions attached at this point.� I appreciate that the pricing is probably set by the publishers, but some iTunes-style guiding hand could help a lot here.

I know the Kindle DX is supposed to amending many of these issues with its larger screen and greater graphic capabilities, but expecting me to pay $480 to get a better magazine delivery system is just not going to happen.� In the meantime, Amazon should spend a little time in the Kindle Store making the magazines and newspapers a little more enticing.� You know, with marketing.

A number of commentators have remarked that these CDs may represent the last great CD release, a tombstone for a dying format.� Based on Aerosmith�s phenomenal success with Guitar Hero, which made the band more money than any of their albums, the CDs are not the real reason we�ll be seeing this push.� In that case, why not just put out The Beatles Rock Band out this year and then create another major marketing push for the CDs (or DVDs or downloads or what have you) in 2010?

My hunch is that The Beatles currently available CDs � rushed on to the market with barely a remix in the late �80s � were too lo-fi as they stood to be released on to machines providing high-fidelity experience like Xbox 360�s or PlayStation 3�s.� All of my friends who play Rock Band-like games have their consoles hooked to their stereos, not just their tiny TV speakers.� And when played after the loud, bright, often surround mixes demanded by these environments, The Beatles recordings will sound at best mid-rangy and at their worst completely colorless.� Through 1966, all the vocals were on one channel, the instruments on the other, which means that all the new Stereo and Surround mixes to come will be 2009 inventions.

So as the sonic quality comes up to par, expect not just a Beatles marketing blitz, but perhaps a whole re-evaluation of their work and ability as musicians – not to mention, a huge online war between the purists who think the 2009 stereo remastering paints a mustache on Mona Lisa and others who feel like �we�re hearing The Beatles for the very first time.�� (Another rank unfairness against their brethren like the Rolling Stones and The Who, both of whom put out fantastic-sounding remasterings chock full of extras earlier this decade to little fanfare.)

Another prediction: expect new respect for Ringo�s contributions.

This brings up the classic collector quandary: will this set be worth more if you keep the CDs new & pristine or if you burn the limited-availability media to its proper medium? (The Residents intimate that the recorded material may disappear after December 2007) Back in the day of the Velvet Underground banana, the answer might have been obvious (save, of course, for all the confused/stoned people who peeled and lived on to regret it), but this opens up a whole new collector’s edition can of worms.

Speaking of which, the collector’s can sold for $11.7 million.

River of Crime poised for odd release plan

Marc Time, my old friend and the founder of robot dancing, swept the radio awards in the Eugene Weekly’s annual “Best Of Eugene” issue! Marc took the bowling trophies for Best Local Radio Personality and Best Radio Show. Considering he’s on at 8am on Sundays, that’s an impressive achievement. Way to motivate the voter base, Marc!

Eugene Weekly 2005 Best Of: Local Personalities (Marc is near the bottom)

Check out Marc’s award-winning radio show, The Sunday Morning Hangover, every Sunday 8am-10am.

New York Daily News – Rush & Molloy: Rockers pour out ‘Spinal Tap’ stories