, 1 min read
Marketing will never be the same
Cringely points out that Apple is slowly making the normal retail and marketing process obselete.
This is the end of the RIAA and the big recording industry. Apple in the last year has signed deals with more than 300 independent record labels, most of them not big enough to do much promotion. But now they don’t have to because that promotion will be handled by mtv.com and every music web logger, now that they have a material incentive to make recommendations and print lists. If I recommend a song — IF I JUST TYPE A FEW WORDS — and a thousand people decide to download based on my recommendation, heck, I just made $50 bucks. This is like sending tens of thousands of record sales people out on the road except that they can sell anything THEY like — any of the one million iTunes songs — making them salespeople with real conviction and maybe even with good taste. Maybe.
To me, this is extremely interesting. When the dot-com era started, people began talking about the new economy. It was a catchy phrase, but it turned out to be wrong. There wasn’t a new economy, yet, but mostly an extension of the old one using new tools. However, the new economy is slowly emerging out of the burning ashes of the old one. Here is what is being transformed forever and dramatically: marketing and distribution channels. I think we are moving to a more distributed world. And I have the nagging feeling that Internet publishing will be the core element. We will buy and sell according to what we read and experience on the Web. Who controls that? Right now, the rising force are blogs. Blogs are essentially distributed publishing units. This is where the future lies, maybe.