Can someone school me on what happened to the music industry?

It's about having good ideas and implementing them well by hiring smart people. @chervokas explained it better than I did, but the reason they succeeded was not because they were selling books, but because their tech expertise allowed them to create the best, easiest to use, and most reliable website for selling books, and that same tech expertise allowed them to branch out into developing tablets, cloud computing platforms, etc.

 

So you're arguing that web design counts as "tech expertise" that equates to engineering devices, etc., but manufacturing LPs, CDs, etc. doesn't?

 

I can't. I don't have a clue.

But I could probably endlessly, and boringly, explain what music and artists move me.

 

Yeah, but the company always had ambitions beyond being a website that sold books. Books were just the first step, as an etailer the company started with a list of 20 product categorized that Bezos thought could be successfully sold online, not just books, and looked to its own platform development as the differentiator -- I don't know if you remember the whole battle at the time over Amazon's 1-click buying patent. Bezos came out of DE Shaw and he knew that one of the big value drivers in an internet business was not selling books but developing proprietary tech, and, as was commonly discussed in those days, having a kind of natural monopoly because once you had the sales platform with barriers to customer exit, you could sell the more different things.

 

That's kind of the point though. You need ambitions beyond just being a company that does one thing as if you're frozen in time and you're not going to respond to cultural changes. The latter is shooting yourself in the foot eventually. Because things are going to change, and if you don't change with the times, you're going to go out of business. The record industry did well keeping up with changes through the early 90s. Then they dropped the ball by not adapting to the Internet well.

 

To be fair, even when Walmart did have a substantial CD section, it was generally in the same section as the cameras!

I’m almost surprised Walmart still sells cameras, honestly. Nearly everybody seems content to just take pictures with a phone...

 

The idea of launching something like Patronet on a large scale, for artists who aren't as engaged or technologically-savvy as Todd Rundgren, is ridiculous. A lot of artists tried to do something similar in the late 90s, where joining their "online fan club" gave you access to exclusive content or whatnot, but once the novelty wore off, they mostly faded away, because most music fans aren't interested in looking "behind the scenes" and would rather just buy the music and listen to it.

Again, @chervokas has done a much better job than I of explaining the barriers in place to prevent the record industry from making any kind of major technological advance in the 1990s. Anybody with any talent in that area was being hired at large salaries by venture-capital-funded startups who were operating at a loss. There's no way any established company that had to turn a profit could invest the kind of money that was required to be the next Amazon or whatever, unless they had a hot piece of hardware like the iPod to help subsidize the expense (and that kind of hot, game-changing technological product comes along once in a generation, if that).

 

Well, in 1995, yes. It was fast moving and rapidly changing -- more rapidly changing than LP manufacturing ever changed -- and not many people had the expertise and the people who did -- not just web designers but there's a lot more to making a searchable, algorithm driven, internet based streaming system work -- were highly sought after and were doing things like fleeing Wall Street where they had been writing trading algorithms for internet start ups with stock grants and IPOs in their eyes. And record companies were never consumer facing businesses. The didn't own retailers, jukebox companies, radio stations (and of course their might have been anti-trust issue if they had, which certainly would have been raised had they all gotten together and started a streaming service, in fact, there's no chance that wouldn't have been squashed by regulators in the US and Europe).

 

Yes. That's exactly what I'm arguing. There's a lot more to amazon.com (even in the early days) than simple "web design." Every online retailer in the late 90s had "web design" but Amazon succeeded because they had smart engineers working for them. Very few of the engineers who invented the processes for manufacturing LPs and CDs were actually working for the major record labels by the late 90s.

 

What? You're arguing that web design is the same skill set as engineering products?

 

Sure. So you wanted evidence earlier. What's the evidence that product design engineers was the skill set that early Amazon employees had?

 

So, I'm saying launching a streaming service calls involves a much wider array of tech needs than just web design.

 

Yes. Succinct and very well put.

 

The quality of their product (an ecommerce platform) and the success of that product.

 

And you're arguing that initial Amazon employees had that skill set? Evidence if so?

 

lol

C'mon, man. Be serious. (And don't say you are, because you can't be. That would indicate something worse.)

 

60 year-old men commenting authoritatively on the demise of "youth culture" is exactly why the "OK BOOMER" meme exists.

I can guarantee that "youth culture" is alive and well, just as it was in the 1950's/60's/70's/etc. The fact that old people don't understand or recognize its current form (hint: NOT based on network TV shows and corporate radio) is kinda the point.

 

I'm close to 60 - I still buy the occasional CD, but it seems to make less and less sense. I recently ordered the deluxe version of The Who's "WHO", to get the bonus live acoustic track. It showed up on Spotify a few days earlier than it arrived in the mail, I played the heck out of it on my desktop PC (I have a very good subwoofer, speakers) and also downloaded to my phone to play in the car. A few days later it came in the mail and there was basically no point to opening it and I felt a bit stupid buying it. It will likely sit in a pile and will be one more thing my kids will have to deal with when I'm dead LOL.

 

I'm saying Amazon.com was an internet start up with the ambition to build an internet platform and go public and was willing and able to burn through tens of millions of dollars in early stage investment without a profit for 10 or 15 years to get there with it's focus on developing the necessary tech, and protecting that tech. Bertlesmann, for example, was a 150 year old publishing company with a bunch of business units it bought and sold over the years including RCA records and the like. It was already a public company with shareholders having certain expectations for revenue and profit growth and lines of business generating tens of millions of dollars in profits and maybe some profit sharing that after a lot of years you might have some dinky stock options vest that weren't going to make anyone by the C-suite employees rich. It actually was ahead of the curve among media companies in that it DID invest in the internet, partnering with AOL in AOL Europe, investing in Barnes & Noble's online operation. None of those things paid off in the long run, because Bertlesmann wasn't an internet company focused on building not only a network centric business, but also on building the tech platform that could not only run it but could be patented (or sold as a service) to run even competing companies' internet businesses. Amazon was.

 

Re the Patronet thing, by the way, the idea wasn't that it would have to be identical to it, and only that, but you could incorporate ideas similar to that, where, for example, certain sorts/levels of subscribers to the streaming service have access to exclusive works, made for/catered to those subscribers.

Again, you have to be CREATIVE and proactive. Not unimaginative and just come up with reasons why something can't be done, why changes can't be made, etc. The latter is how you go out of business.

 

To what do you attribute their success, if it wasn't that they had a better product than their hundreds of competitors?

 

It amazes, utterly amazes me that so many people are indifferent to music now.

 

Sure. And the record industry couldn't have been willing to burn through tens of millions of dollars and make the moves to adapt to a changing culture for greater future success because?

 

What in the world is this supposed to have to do with whether it's an empirical fact that early Amazon employees had product/industrial design engineering skill sets?

 

And you need artists who are engaged and technologically-savvy, which is a small percentage of the artists on any major record label. Can you imagine trying to roll out a similar product for an artist like Celine Dion or Creed?

And even for artists with obsessive fans (like Todd), there's a limit to how much they're willing to pay for "exclusive bonus content". Again, most music fans just want a way to listen to the music.