What values can digital music service provide for its users? : Network value(3/3)

There was a time when the traffic to the site was one of the most critical factors for almost every dot com companies. So-called category killer sites like Amazon(book), eBay(e-commerce) used to try to gather as much page views or unique visitors to the site as possible, by expanding its own product catalogue or developing the affiliate programs with partners. But as the rule of game on the internet has changed and the initiative in value chain has been transitioned from service provider to the customer, the ultimate goal becomes something more than just traffic. That is attention from users. In the economic sense, the supply side on the internet is getting abundant, but the demand side-attention from customer is getting more difficult to secure.

So in order to gather the scarce resource of attention, the service providers start to feel they themselves don't need to be final destination and instead it is good enough to let as many users have only the path to the site. I think that's why widget and rss, which give the capability of networking with the outside of the site, come up.



In the customer perspective, current users want to express themselves effectively instead of having their identities locked in the sites they visit. So major players start to focus on this Network Value. iTunes, which has been well-known for its closed eco-system(iTunes-iPod), recently launched widget service, My iTunes Widget, allowing iTunes users to publish their purchase history and artist preference to the outside. Basically the sites want to make everything managed inside their own service domain under their control. But giving network value to users seems against this. Let's see how big players would tackle this dilemma.