The Google Trends Suicide Watch

from the well,-that's-depressing dept

Jeremy Wagstaff has done a fascinating (if morbid) little analysis using Google Trends to track the popularity of the search phrase "commit suicide painlessly." Perhaps not too surprisingly, it appears to track the economy. That is, it was relatively flat for a while, but spiked in October 2008 through March 2009 -- though, it's since come back down. As he notes, this isn't exactly a small blip -- it was over an extended period of time. He digs down a bit in the data, which suggests that while the US is a lot less suicidal these days, things are still a bit on edge over in the UK (you guys doing ok?). What would be interesting now would be to correlate that data with actual suicides. Oddly, Wagstaff notes that a similar boost is not seen in just the basic search of "how to commit suicide." That makes me wonder if the "commit suicide painlessly" search is suffering from a small sample size problem. Still, it's yet another fun little "economic indicator" found from public data, similar to the post we had recently on analyzing job trends via Facebook status. While the data might not mean much yet, the fact that there is so much more data so easily accessible is really powerful.

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When You Can Hold Every Song Ever Recorded In Your Pocket... Does $1/Song Still Make Sense?

from the think-it-forward dept

Martin Thornkvist, who runs a (very cool) indie record label in Sweden that believes in treating fans right, has written up an opinion piece where he tries to envision the role of the record label in five years. The opening is certainly right in line with my feelings of optimism for the music industry:

When it comes to the future of music I've always consider myself an optimist.

For one I'm certain that musicians and music fans have a prosperous future ahead of them. That's because music is the single most important ingredient in the music business soup and music is of course a result of artists' creative minds. And it's when musicians interact with listeners that a window for business is opening. Not before, and not just because some A&R person, marketeer or CEO open their wallet. That the relationship between musicians and fans is the foundation to the business is the single most important piece of knowledge that we all have to submissively recognize. This is the key to the future for the middle men we call record labels – we have to encourage the interaction and realize that it will live without us.

We as middle men have to remember that we always need to convince our customers (musicians and fans) why they should engage with us. Music on plastic discs or plain mp3s just ain't enough anymore. Competition is hard and consumers don't take bullshit anymore. If they love something you don't offer, they'll go create it themselves.

The whole thing is worth reading, but the final paragraph makes a really important point that we've discussed in the past, but which often gets forgotten in trying to understand trendlines and the music business. It's that storage is growing ever bigger and ever cheaper at an incredibly rapid pace -- and as such it won't be all that long until you can carry every song ever recorded on a device in your pocket:

In five years a hard drive available to ordinary consumers will carry 35 TB of data. Data = music. 35 TB = 2.5 million songs. Watch this development closely. It's easy to get blinded by Spotify, but imagine when file sharing on the street means transferring the entire music history. At least it is a wild card. Anyhow it seems that we will have to work on better ways of charging for music than 1 dollar a song. Don't you think?

Indeed. When you can carry every song ever... do people really think that $1/song is going to make sense?

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Are Teens Listening To More Radio?

from the might-ask-them-to-define-radio-first dept

Here's a surprising study. A survey from a company called Paragon Media Strategies claims that people between the ages of 14 and 24 are listening to more radio than they were a year or two ago. This greatly contradicts the findings of Arbitron, which famously tracks radio listeners. Paragon suggests that radio stations may be doing a better job connecting with people and that "the music may simply be more interesting." Of course, all of this might depend on how you define "radio." I wouldn't be surprised if many folks in that age range are listening to streaming radio online or downloadable podcasts -- that they might consider to be radio. But that's quite different than actually listening to terrestrial radio.

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Things I Was Wrong About

from the fun-stuff dept

A friend just sent me a great blog post by Kevin Kelly where he talks about some online things he was completely wrong about -- including products or companies he thought would flop that succeeded, as well as those he thought would succeed which went nowhere. He starts with the example of The Sims, which he thought would flop, but which just sold its 100 millionth copy. In looking through his list he notes:

Sadly I can detect no pattern to my mis-predictions. In some cases, I did not anticipate improvements and advances that would remake a pathetic first version into a truly cool tool. In others I anticipated advances that never came.

It got me thinking about which predictions or trends I totally missed on, and thought it might be fun to post some of them here. In Silicon Valley, people are so focused on the future, they don't look back often enough. Besides, it's healthy (and a bit cathartic) to review your mistakes every once in a while. I'll admit that on some of these it took some serious thinking to remember my initial feelings about them, as my opinions have changed. Anyway, feel free to think through some of your own in the comments.

• Google. Now, to be fair, I always thought that Google was a great offering, and I was one of the early adopters and users of the search engine. What I didn't understand was how the company would make money -- and why Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia would put $25 million into a company that had no revenue and no clear path to revenue. Given the founders rather vehement claims that advertising on a search engine was bad (and, yes, they were vehement about this early on), I thought the company would struggle to find a business model. In fact, it did struggle for a little while... but once the company figured it out....
• RSS. While we at Techdirt were a somewhat early adopter in providing an RSS feed, I wasn't much of a believer in the technology for a while. I had been using various "multibrowser" systems that would load up a bunch of websites in a huge long list -- and that seemed like a perfectly efficient system for me to use. I was on the record saying I thought RSS was too confusing for most people -- and I still think it suffers from some of those problems, but it's become tremendously successful -- due, in large part, to the user-friendliness of various RSS readers, starting with Bloglines and moving on to Google Reader and the various customizable home page solutions.
• Skype: It launched to a ton of hype and I wasn't buying any of it. There were already a bunch of voicechat products on the market, and there had been for years. I just didn't see what was all that different about Skype. To be honest, I'm still not sure what was so different about it -- but it got users, and for the most part "it just worked." Never underestimate the power of those two things.
• The web itself: I first heard about "the world wide web" in early 1994. I had been using email, usenet and gopher for a while before that. While I knew that the web was something special, as soon as I first tried out Mosaic in 1994, I didn't think it would become this big of a deal. In fact, I just assumed that the world would move on to something else after a few years. After all, after the web came along, gopher pretty much died out, and I assumed that some new offering would come along and make the web obsolete, just as the web did to gopher.
• The original Napster: While I actually only played around with Napster briefly (at the time I had no broadband connection), I thought that it would revolutionize the music industry. In a way, it did, but not the way I expected it to. I honestly thought that (1) Napster would be found legal and that (2) the recording industry would quickly realize what a useful tool it would be for distribution and promotion of music. Boy, was I wrong on that one.... Though, to be fair, at the time, there were plenty of others who felt the same way. It's only in retrospect that people now say that Napster was obviously illegal.
• Intelligent Agents. I had done a research project in college about some of the work being done on intelligent computer agents, and I really thought the technology had a lot of promise. I figured that well before now, there would be virtual assistants everywhere, doing things and making people's lives more efficient. Turns out the technology never really worked all that well, and at best, most of the early efforts in the space moved on to things like collaborative filtering.

Well, that's the quick list I came up with. Like Kelly, I'm not sure there's a real pattern there, but it doesn't mean I can't learn from my mistakes.

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40,000 Explanations For Why The Recording Industry Is Wrong About Business Models

from the start-counting dept

Among Apple's new iPod announcements was the inclusion of a 160Gb iPod Classic. As Steve Jobs noted, that means you could carry around 40,000 songs in your pocket. Forty thousand songs. Leave it to Bob Lefsetz to use this fact to point out how wrong the recording industry has been about music business models. He points out that this highlights how people want music -- in fact, they want lots of music -- and they want it conveniently and reasonably priced. That means at much cheaper prices (are you going to carry around $40,000 worth of music purchases in your pocket?) and without DRM.

He also highlights how the idiotic focus on getting more per song just as everything else about music and technology gets cheaper is hurting the record labels much more than it helps them. He compares the situation to how expensive it was to use mobile phones a dozen years ago. People were scared to use mobile phones because the charges were ridiculously high. You only used it in special circumstances. Today, however, the rates are much, much lower and that's massively grown the market for mobile services. Do you think the mobile operators would prefer to go back to $1/minute charges? Yet, why does the recording industry insist on $1/song charges when the infrastructure can support an entirely different model. Instead, make the music cheap and easily accessible. Take advantage of the infrastructure that allows people to carry around 40,000 songs in their pocket. Sell iPods that are pre-loaded with all kinds of music and watch them fly off the shelves. The record labels (and their supporters) will claim that it doesn't make sense to sell music for less when people are clearly willing to pay $1/song, but that's misunderstanding the market potential. People were willing to pay $1/minute for mobile phone calls too. And they were willing to pay $150/month for broadband access. But as all of those things got much, much cheaper it opened the markets up much wider, provided all sorts of new applications and services that made them more and more valuable -- and helped make the companies much richer by providing better services at cheaper prices. Why can't the recording industry understand that?

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