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.

What values can digital music service provide for its users? : Social value(2/3)

In analog era before music is fully digitalized from the stage of its creation like now, music had been very personal content for a long time. People used to purchase albums of artists they liked as a type of cassette or LP or CD and listen to them in personal space with home audio system or portable music player like Walkman. The only way of getting information about other people's musical taste is to watch or listen to tradition media channel like TV or radio. In addition, music-related magazine like Billboard could provide chart information only as statistical output of listening-behaviour of the masses.

As web 2.0 world is coming up, which usually brings with some keywords like participation and openness, digital music space starts to make meaningful turn-around in terms of 'socialization'. That is, we came to be able to see and even have experience of other people's musical tastes on the web with the help of tagging.

Most of web 1.0 sites have so-called hierarchy for site visitors to browse and navigate. Music sites have had usually 3-depth or more of hierarchy for its vast catalogue.( 1st depth is genre, 2nd depth is style and the 3rd is sub-style or first is artist and second is album and the third is track) iTunes still has this kind of classification - its own taxonomy. Of course this has some merits like clear edges by expert and predictability. But as active users with their own tastes get in and tagging system is added for supporting them, new user-centric hierarchy, so-called folksonomy, comes up and users are able to give multiple facets to the music according to their own preference and categorize their own music collection for themselves as well.



On top of that, tags( or tag cloud) give another way of browsing and make people have serendipity. Also tags can make users experience new social connectivity to other people linked with certain tag.



Just think about it! If you have special interests in the niche like Korean pop or Buena Vista Social Club in Cuba, you could meet somebody with similar tastes from the other side of the world. Isn't it amazing?

What values can digital music service provide for its users? : Personal value(1/3)

Not only traditional(?) online music service providers like iTunes but new music 2.0 sites like Last.fm are competing with each other in terms of giving more values and greater user experiences to the customers than ever before. I think there are basically three types of values all the music services should focus on.

First of them is personal value. Unlike offline cd store, online music store is supposed to have no physical limitation for archiving its catalog and in iTune's case it has over 6 million tracks. So in customer's perspective he/she can now browse and search any music content he/she want to listen to in online store. Consequently very 'Long-tail' can be seen, which has never been expected in offline. But users came to feel it not so easy to find out new music and even certain type of music they prefer among vast catalog.

That is, very important value proposition on this area comes up : personalized recommendation for target users. I know this is not a new story. Some big players like Amazon.com in products or contents recommendation area has been already out there. But the thing is how elaborately product or content could be recommended for target user.

To do that I think we need three components like well-organized product or content data set and user preference information in data perspective and recommender, a sort of recommendation algorithm or engine, which can effectively combine those two data sets.


(source : ChoiceSteam's Technology Brief)

Moving forward, how to balance these three components could be important factor in designing recommendation system. Each music service provider has its own recommendation system geared to its business model. iTunes and Pandora has adopted content-based recommendation system and Last.fm, on the other hand, is well-known for user-based collaborative-filtering recommendation by capturing massive users' behaviour. Well, in the long run a sort of hybrid system of those two would be final winner, I think. Who will run for it?