Alright, let’s talk about this Cocktail thing.

“Cocktail” is a codename for a new Apple product, a hybrid album concept that will certainly revolutionize the music industry and harken back to the “heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork while you listened to the music,” according to an unnamed executive.

Really?

People don’t sit around in a room and look at artwork anymore; they sit around in a room and play XBox.  The closest this could be is a Guitar Hero-styled game, a hybrid concept that actually *is* helping the music industry.

This initiative sounds like something crafted up by executives who’ve long since become obsolete, dreaming of the days when they could expense coke and women without having to use codenames on their expense reports. (These days you call them Fruit and Flowers, if anyone is keeping score.)

Ideally this new product would roll out on the new Apple Tablet device; oddly enough, it sounds like many industries are hoping this is their silver bullet.  This is the Kindle killer, the netbook decimator, and now the music industry’s saving grace.

The Cocktail concept, it sounds like, is enhanced PDFs that come alongside an album that provide extra content.  Adobe has built the PDF platform to be able to embed video, enhanced links, etc — I’m sure this is the technology they’re hoping to harness for Cocktail.  My question is, do people really care that much about PDFs and extra content?  The executive quoted above used the term “ancillary” to describe the pieces; most of the time only superfans and geeks try out ancillary concept products, and most people don’t care about a PDF.  I have a sneaking suspicion this is going to be content that most people expect to get for free on an artist website and are now being asked to pay a premium to see it on a pretty Apple screen.

Of course, Apple’s an expert at content delivery - providing an incredible experience to deliver the mediocre content of the music, film, photo, and TV industries, not to mention holding onto all the content that you and I generate all day long.  This could be really cool, assuming the music biz doesn’t muck it up.  That said, Fake Steve thinks this thing is fake and just another rumored add-on to another killer Apple product.

I’m not holding my breath that this will do anything amazing; I think it’ll just be another piece of product Apple can sell in their iTunes store.  From tracks to albums to videos to movies to apps to whatever this is, and beyond, Apple is just adding more incremental sales to what started as a track-based music store.  The best content on each platform will rise to the top and everything else is just going to compete in the noise.  This noise is already resonating all over record labels, with executives e-blasting these articles around and closed door meetings taking place to get ready for it — and we don’t even know what the product is yet!

Seriously, though — I bet the only way this “cocktail” will keep people in a room staring at it is if it’s a literal drug cocktail. Maybe Apple’s become a medical marijuana dispensary and this is their new rollout of that product line.  Elegantly packaged dimebags stamped with “Grown by Apple in California”, the iPot will revolutionize the music business; you heard it here first.

[quote via Financial Times]

There’s an awful lot of talk about mobile computing, the cloud, and streaming content and media these days.  I hear all the time how in “the future” we won’t have a hard drive in our computer, but rather a giant RAM bank that accesses a super-fast wireless internet connection and pulls content from remote servers.

Sure, I think that’s true.  However, I don’t think people (yes, even young people) are quite ready for the switch to happen.  It’s evident in the numbers: Rhapsody, the dominant leader in streaming music, boasts their 800,000 subscribers as real progress. Meanwhile iTunes is reaching for 7 billion track downloads in the lifetime of their service…. Something doesn’t add up here.

Streaming music pundits call access the future, triumphing over the concept of ownership.  At the moment I think access is overwhelming people: you have everything in the history of recorded music at your fingertips, but you can’t seem to get past the first few search terms you enter into the site. That or you build a static playlist that stagnates and becomes obsolete as you find out about new music from other sources.

On the other side, the concept of “ownership” is all around us and is far from being over.  Even a toddler, the streaming music industry’s future generation of hope, calls a toy “mine!” and understands that concept through and through. It’s going to take a major sea change to reverse this concept with streaming content, and not many have gotten it right yet.

I believe there are two problems here. The first one is oddly enough, hidden in user interface. The second is in the concept of music acquisition and choice.

First, user interface:

Companies like Rhapsody, Hulu, Zune, etc., all tout the enormous catalog beneath their collective hoods.  Zune even uses this as a marketing point against the cost of filling an iPod (a preposterous statement, but that’s not why we’re here).  The problem I see with these services is that there hasn’t been a beautifully simple option to “bind up” all the music one enjoys in the service.

Like I mentioned earlier, you give someone limitless choice and they stare at you blankly; paradoxically, let them open up their vast iTunes library and they can still find something they like.  The obvious reason? That individual loaded their library and has the ability to add, modify or delete songs or albums as they so choose.

The “library” in Rhapsody or other major streaming services only holds content that individual has purchased from that service - a la mp3 or full length download, not content being streamed in the service.

I fully believe that if a streaming provider can generate a library-style experience — one where a user knows what they likes and can corral it all together.  I’m not talking about playlists (like imeem), I’m talking a “this is what I always want nearby” section of a streaming service.  If a company can do this and get it launched globally (I’m looking at you, Spotify), the streaming nut will be cracked.

Oh — I mentioned Hulu earlier, and I also think they and Netflix have it wrong: do people really enjoy a “queue” of streaming content they can go through linearly? I surely don’t; my Netflix instant queue has a random assortment of films in it and I’m constantly jogging up and down the list to find things.  That’s another user interface mis-step that probably won’t change because the “queue” concept is Netflix’s core philsophy. Oh well.

Now, the second issue about choice.  Today music consumption is at an all-time high, despite record business declines.  The reason here is that the consumer has a nearly endless source of consumption outlets.  All these outlets - Amazon MP3, iTunes, emusic, heck, even BitTorrent - are all trying to gain users and market influence.  They often do this at their own expense, offering deals and discounts (or in BitTorrent’s case, free) on content to gain a user base.

So far what we’ve seen is a digital consumer who’s not afraid to try multiple services.  If you buy an Amazon album for $1.99, they’ve gotten you to install their downloader on your machine; their logic is, next time you’re browsing you might just hit that buy button now that the initial pain is out of the way.  That said, the digital-savvy consumer is really more of a music consumer than anything — they just want the song.  So, why isn’t Rhapsody’s limitless catalog dominating our computer speaker lifestyle?

The answer is because digital-savvy people don’t spend their life in front of one application, in front of one computer.  They often have a home computer, a work computer, a car stereo with MP3 jack, an iPod, maybe a cell phone with MP3 capabilities, a satellite radio, on and on…. There are so many places with music literally adding to the noise; how is one streaming provider supposed to cut through?

Rhapsody believes the answer is ubiquity. Not only do they have their web-enabled service and their client app-based service, but they’ve also reached into third party hardware like Sonos, TiVo, plus cable boxes from Time Warner, Comcast and Roadrunner.  They’re trying to find other places their subscriber lives and offer the experience there too; they do this because they get, 100%, that people don’t sit in front of their computers to experience their music.

They also have a major partnership with Verizon Wireless and you’d be a fool to think they’re not working on mobile applications to work on various popular smartphones.  They’re hoping for a userbase that always comes to them first for their music because Rhapsody is anywhere they might find themselves.

Honestly I think that’s the only way a streaming provider like that can claim dominance in a world where every soda cap contains a free MP3: the streaming service has to beat everyone else to the punch.

[inspired by this crunchgear article, which I don’t agree with at all]