One size aggregator doesn't fit all

Barry Ritholtz looks at Amazon's new "Blowout" store for deeply discounted classical music albums and wonders what the profit-maximizing price for music is. He cites a New York Times article that says Amazon's move makes sense, "since classical fans actually buy, rather than steal, their music." And targeting this market seems to be working:

Mr. May said Amazon’s classical music sales last year grew by more than 22 percent, making it one of the fastest-growing music genres on the site (Amazon does not break out separate revenue figures). The Blowout store will seek to feed that trend by offering most titles at 30 percent of regular prices.

But I was interested in Amazon's classical music store for another reason: classical is a genre that the one-size-fits-all music aggregators such as iTunes don't handle particularly well. They're oriented around pop music, with its artist, album, track data format. Meanwhile classical music organizes around composer, conductor, performer, soloist, etc.

Take these screen shots (click on them to enlarge) of the same album, on iTunes and on Amazon.

First, iTunes, where I've highlighted some problems with the pop metadata orientation applied to classical:

 

 

And here's Amazon (I've cut out the review and some other extraneous screen clutter):

 

Amazon's listing is customized for classical music, while iTunes isn't.

However, neither of them does a very good job with Jazz, where the individual musicians are often more meaningful than the band. On Amazon's Internet Movie Database you can click on practically anyone in the credits and see all their other work. Why can't you do the same for the company's music listings, too? (That's a rhetorical question--I know the problem is the bare-bones metadata that comes from the music labels. But why not open-source the data collection, the way IMDB does?)

My conclusion from all this is that there are still many opportunities for vertical aggregators to compete with the one-size-fits-all giants. Just as Amazon competes with iTunes in classical by customizing the presentation of the music to suit the genre, so others could for jazz, DJ, soundtracks and beyond. In search, we now see a multitude of "vertical search" specialists  (from real estate to blogs) competing with Google. And in DVDs, Netflix now has niche competitors for Bollywood and porn.

As in culture, so in the business of aggregation: one size doesn't fit all.

Comments

[Dan Hill]

Totally agree, and this is down to understanding that music is more than just metadata - taking advantage of digital media, yet not discarding what the various forms of physical representation of music had to offer. I've written about this many times - briefly here (http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2004/08/bad_metadata_is.html) and at length here (http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2006/01/new_musical_exp.html). In the latter, the section on specific handling of metadata for classical, jazz etc. is here, and indicates how a lazy or ignorant interpretation of music hampers most digital music experiences. This will of course apply to all other cultural forms - TV, literature, art etc. - as they also become primarily new media experiences.

[Eric Barnhill]

This is why so many classical listeners love ArkivMusic.com , which is pretty much all a classical aficionado could want in terms of interface. Unfortunately, it's hard to see how it would beat out Amazon's "blowout" pricing model - though it would be an powerful evidence in favor of your argument if it continued to flourish!

[Conrad Quilty-Harper]

Chris, with the iTunes store, you can easily see a bunch of other categories about music (including composer - but not perfomer/soloist - but I assume those would most commonly be in the artist category), simply by right clicking the bar and selecting what you want to see.

http://www.spalpeen.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/itunes-stretch-menu-bar.jpg

[Don MacLennan]

Conrad,

I feel you've confirmed Chris' point not refuted it. The fact that the main page doesn't contain data you'd otherwise want to be there (i.e. Amazon has it and i-Tunes doesn't) and that the end-user needs to "discover" an option that's not obvious to all (i.e. you knew about the right-click on i-Tunes but Chris didn't) are symptomatic of flawed user interfaces. In this case, Amazon simply got it right.

[Dan L]

I listen mostly to classical, and was frustrated with the ipod layout from the start. It's not geared towards books, dictation, speeches or really anything other than music. There's enough space to my satisfaction on my old one for music, and I put books, speeches, and dictations (much longer duration) on the newer one.

Off topic, I was thinking of another Long Tail example--marriage. The honeymoon and early years is like the Head, where you learn volumes of the usual stuff about each other: anecdotes, preferences, etc., but it takes years to experience the Tail--the quirks, rare events, long-forgotten stories, etc.

[Any Given Tuesday]

Another thing to note about classical (and jazz) fans is that they are more often much more sophisticated audiophiles than popular music fans like myself. If you go on the net to "steal" classical or jazz, you're going to get a bitrate that totally destroys the sanctity that fans are looking for in formats like SACD. I've never heard of an MP3 coming in 5.1 Surround.

[wow power leveling]

I listen mostly to classical, and was frustrated with the ipod layout from the start. It's not geared towards books, dictation, speeches or really anything other than music. There's enough space to my satisfaction on my old one for music, and I put books, speeches, and dictations (much longer duration) on the newer one.
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[asdasdas]

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[vacuum cleaners]

I think the best way to get it working for all styles of music is to make iTunes, or Amazon, or whoever a little more socially networked orientated. Some people may remember AudioGalaxy from the illegal mp3 days. They had a unique system of tagging that allowed you to find what you wanted easier, because fans would tag the music. Some sort of tagging / bookmark system will work brilliantly on iTunes.
I've probably just given away a solid idea that I could have made money out of. Oh well.

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