VEVO vs Playing for Change

Looking at VEVO in the 1st hour of Dec 9th, 2009 … I have these thoughts:

• Nice quality video and excellent sound (as expected)
• HD coming in 2010 (why not now ?)
• Advertisements and a playlist from AT&T (a little disappointing)
• Blog claiming that Music Videos from the major labels will be on VEVO while user generated content will be on YouTube ( What will happen to MTV? )
• Content promoted is more of the same old “top artists”
• Share your favorite music on Social Networks (as expected)
• “Sign-up” link gets me “This Web page is not Available” (Ooops … or maybe 5,000 users are trying to create an account simultaneously?)
• Me … spending hours listening to Music Videos right now because of the new service offering? (not going to happen … no compelling new content to keep me interested)
• Me … writing a blog post about this (Of course, how could I not blog about this major launch)

Now, to put it in perspective, last week I watched a TV show on NPR about Playing for Change .

• After the TV show, I spent hours at my computer listening to and watching the videos. Stayed up too late.
• I posted a link on Facebook and joined the Playing for Change Fan page
• I was thoroughly engaged with the story behind it. The “largely unknown” but very talented musicians.
• I was not surprised to find Bono here (He seems to be everywhere … including the VEVO launch)
• Me … wondering how it is that we have missed such great music from so many people in so many places until now.
• Me … thinking “here is an expression of a truly inspired vision and the real power of social media to share it and make a difference “.

5 thoughts on Apple’s interest in Lala

Hearing about Apple’s interest in acquiring Lala, I have these thoughts as to why Lala is a great value to Apple.

1. The 10 cents per song music streaming price

I’ve previously posted a blog post on Lala titled ‘10 cents a song is pretty tempting‘ .  Maybe Steve Jobs read my blog post. How many times do customers not follow through with an iTune purchase because “they like the song, but maybe not enough to buy it … just yet”.  Paying 10 cents a song to essentially bookmark the song for internet streaming rights to play back, in my mind, is the unique thing Lala offers that is a very nice feature…. and one that may lead to a  further sale. Note; this #1 reason influences all the other reasons, in my mind.

2. User music interest data mining – adding the 10 cent streaming purchases to purchases gives two levels of indication of user interest. Plus the conversions of 10 cent to full mp3 purchase is yet another data point to measure.

3. Playlists – User created playlists can feed recommendation engines. What if this were channeled into crowd-sourced online radio station programming ?

4. Home Theater play ? –  I don’t hear that Apple TV has been a huge success. What if your music library (including streaming only purchases) were added to an Apple home theater system offering? That may be more attractive to consumers. Roku just added Pandora to their Roku box (which I purchased awhile back to stream Netflix movies … for free …  since I have a Netflix account).

5. Response to Google – Google’s music search addition announce October 28 2009 brings up Lala as one of several matches to searches for  music at the top of the search page. Frankly, I was expecting to hear something from Facebook as a response. Apple’s response is pretty impressive considering their dominance in the digital music already with iTunes. And with the launch of Vevo.com (powered by Youtube), maybe Apple’s Lala acquisition is a counter attack in the making.

Will Facebook respond to Google’s Oct 28 Music announcement?

I saw on Techcrunch that Google will launch a music service on October 28th that combines some services from Lala and iLike  (no details yet …).

Screenshots

Some suggested listening on Lala while you read on.

I’ve previously posted an article on Lala titled ‘10 cents a song is pretty tempting‘ . Now if Google turns that into billions of songs, this adds up to real money.  So while no details are available yet, if I were to guess, I like Lala’s player and 10 cents per song online price for purchasing rights to internet plays.  I like iLikes ticketing/concert information. All they need now is a great recommendation engine like Last.fm or Pandora (I slightly prefer Last.fm), but then Google likely has the talent in house to develop a great recommendation engine. The hard part of starting from scratch would be doing the licensing deals. Lala and iLike have that.

So will Facebook respond ? I would be very surprised if Facebook does not announce something (at least an intention) either prior to or within a week of Google’s October 28 roll out. There were rumors just a few weeks ago that Mark Zuckerberg likes Spotify . I was unable to check that music service out as it is not available in the US … probably licensing … the hard part.

If both Google and Facebook partner up with just a few of the multitude of music players out there, there will likely be some other music services that just end up fading away.  One thing is certain. Most people are pretty attached to their music. An awesome music service coupled with broad music licensing can make for some very loyal customers, perhaps even loyal enough to follow their preference with a compatible phone service.

How will Google Wave impact online Music?

Google showed a preview of Wave at Google I/O last month. A few of my friends were able to attend the event, but I was only able to watch the video playback of the Google Wave rollout. The key takeaway I would describe for the technology is “Real Time”.  Real time chat; it displays as you type (no waiting to type into a chat window and hot ‘enter’). Real time spelling correction is context sensitive.  If you can integrate Google Voice into the Google Wave framework, you’d have a powerful Unified Communications platform, but that would be the topic of another blog on another site entirely. Google rolled out the technology partly to encourage developers to begin creating gadgets and robots. A gadget is a program application similar to a facebook application.  A music player or video player would be good examples of gadgets.  A robot could be an automated conversation participant (like a character in a game).

So how will Google Wave impact the way we socialize around Music? To hypothesize around the possibilities, focus on ‘real time’. I would imagine that someone will create an internet radio or internet video widget that would allow real time chat among the listening audience. Imagine a fan page for a popular artist with over a million fans pre-announcing the release of a new single exclusively on a Google Wave-powered fan page? Do you think this would instantly draw the fan base over to a waves-powered social media site? I do. This would be a very good test of the platform’s scalability. Imagine a hundred thousand fans furiously typing away “Love the new song!” and similar messages all at the same time. Will it scale? It likely will. Google’s app engine technology allows for multiple processors in a cloud computing environment.

Google Wave could also be a viable platform for social media game development. So take the previous example and take it a step further adding some robots. Imagine playing a virtual reality game that you 1^st must reach the end of the game to play the newest music video release of your favorite recording artist. Follow the clues. What was the lyric from the 2^nd song in the 1^st album that opens that the door to the final stage of the game? Imagine the buzz created on the social media web site(s) that will have fans teaming up to solve the problem. What? The game new I was playing from the SF bay area and I just stumbled across two tickets to the next concert in my area? Fans chasing Avatars of the recording artists for a free poster? The possibilities are endless.  Could Google Wave be the basis of a social media and gaming platform that could seriously undo MySpace and possibly even Facebook? The potential is there. It will be very interesting to watch the Google Wave story unfold. It could significantly change the way fans socialize around music on the internet.