Like many of us, the only time I read the USA Today is when I travel. We just got back from a trip to pick up our daughter from college. While in the hotel in Gaffney, SC I came across a feature that USA Today ran on the state of the entertainment industry. While much of it has been said elsewhere, it really provides a fascinating looking at where music and the rest of the entertainment industry may be headed. USA Today put together a diverse group of people who are helping to shape the industry’s future. As I read through the comments of the assembled panelists, I was struck by all of the immediate and longer term opportunities in the entertainment industry. Here are a few of the impressions I took away from their comments:
– What I am doing here this morning will soon be out of date. Blogs are just the early, archaic form of new ways to share ideas and communicate. The sprit of blogging will continue on, but its form will most certainly evolve and morph into other media.
– The market will no longer be such a “mass market”, but one that is full of product and market segmentation. The “long tail” of the market will become the focus of business development. The “long tail” refers to that part of the market that does not favor the popular choices in music and entertainment. They are made up of countless little market niches out there hungry for their specific interests to be satisfied. About half of the culture is in the very tall popular culture part of the curve, but there is an incredibly long tail of that curve that continues off to the right that contains all of the various sub-markets for entertainment. With this diverse group of consumers and new means to reach highly specialized market niches, the opportunities are limitless.
For example, there are bands making a nice living off of a very small, but loyal group of followers. They can reach them through the Internet in ways that build loyalty and intimacy that most marketers would kill for. Thousands of blogs have hundreds or even thousands of very loyal readers, who share a strong and passionate commitment to a common interest.
– New forms to catalogue, store and search through all of this media that will be at our fingertips in the soon to be wide open market will need to be developed. Think of it this way; right now I have all of my favorite CDs in a 200 disc player. I have little booklets that hold the covers of these CDs for me to look through and I have the CDs grouped in blocks by musical genres (classic rock, blues, country, folk, old jazz, new jazz, classical, and so forth). While this allows me to do some rudimentary searches for a specific song, artist or musical style, it takes time and effort for me to search through all of that. iPods have a more powerful search feature that allows you to search by title, artist, etc. Both of these are limited in space by the storage capacity and neither search feature is really satisfactory, especially when applied to an open market of music that will not be limited by or defined by any hardware that I happen to own. But how to we find and organize all of that? Certainly Google is not the answer. In fact, if the now corporate Google does not reinvent itself ten times over in the next few years it, too, will become irrelevant.
Soon you will be able to communicate your mood or the setting and artificial intelligence that has learned from your past decisions and information combined with an almost limitless database of entertainment will be able to, well, entertain you beyond anything you can now imagine.
– Advertising will need to reinvent itself as an industry, as well. Again, think of that long tail of little market niches that stretches on and on. Mass marketing techniques to a captured audience will not work in this space.
– The devices we use for music, video and other forms of entertainment in 2015 may not have even been dreamed of today in 2005. Convergence of our current devices is just an attempt to fit a bunch of round pegs into square holes. Eventually there will be a breakthrough or a series of breakthroughs. There will be another group of entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who will bring this new world of media technology to us.
– Even what forms media takes will change. Video, audio, the Internet, as we now know all them, will all seem like quaint antiques within a decade or two.
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