20th Century Media. The encore

(photo credit)
So Rupert Murdoch has finally made the announcement that the rest of the newspaper industry has been waiting for: online news content will be hidden behind a big paywall from sometime in 2010. This was always going to be a game of who blinked first; who would take the plunge. Realistically I don't think that it could ever have been trialled, tested or rolled out, as success or failure rests on giving the rest of the industry plenty of notice and hoping that they will all jump on board. What will be fun to watch is who doesn't join in. Murdoch's comments today about

"the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content"

suggest that he doesn't get what digital distribution is. His UK competitors at The Guardian and The Telegraph seem to have a much better grip on the realities of news distribution in the 21st century. What they clearly don't have at the moment is any more idea about how to make money from reporting it. The 'if you report it {and make it freely distributable through APIs and full text RSS} then they will come' may still bear fruit in the long run, but can they afford to wait? The dual squeeze of paper cost inflation and massive ad revenue contraction means that they have to look to the short term in order to survive.

So it's safe to say that any business that has been based on charging for news in the past is going to be examining the ways in which it can do so in future in the next few weeks. I've been trying to get my head around any way in which this can possibly work, and so here's a few attempts:

1. In the UK at least there is a robust model for paid content. 9m households subscribe to Mr Murdoch's own Sky TV/Broadband. As is clear from the post below, I am a massive fan of not just the technology, but everything about the Sky brand. If News International can leverage this paid network, and potentially include Sun or Sunday Times online content as a Sky Broadband subscription package (for instance instead of one of the free TV packages) then this would demonstrably monetize online news content with minimal impact on TV revenues. It may not provide any major cash injection, but let's face it, Rupert's pockets are deeper than his rivals, and anyway the whole paid news content is in desperate need of credibility; Sky could overcome the initial hurdles for News Int in a way that no other news publisher could compete with.

2. eReaders. Have been referenced by the upper echelons of News Int as the future recently. (apologies for linking to my own posts, but I've love writing about this stuff, and then I know where to find it!). News Int are apparently negotiating with Sony over a new reader, but personally I can't work out the point. Ever decreasing size and increasing power of digital devices means that we really only ever need to carry one. If I have the internet, email, Twitter, an mp3 player, camera, video recorder, feed reader and phone in one device in my pocket, there is no way I'm carrying another one with a news subscription on it. So, applications. Interestingly the pin-up kid of paid news, the Wall St Journal, offers free access via iPhone app. Ignoring that, most of the difficult bits of viewing news on a small screen are about navigation and search, so justifying payment on personalised content may work - the value for the viewer is not having to hunt for stuff that's interesting because the app learns what is and seeks it out.

3. And the alternative to applications, and where I think Rupert may already be casting his eye, is the mobile market itself. So absolutely commoditised that a bespoke content owner should be able to make major inroads quickly (only problem would be a tech partner - Apple hide behind an even bigger wall than newspapers, while I can't see this crusade sitting comfortably on open source Android)

But there's also a few tricky obstacles to overcome in this last hurrah. The first is that in the UK we have a pretty healthy paid content operation, the BBC. We pay around £11.50 per household per month for all the news, comment and analysis we can eat. And all it takes is one source of quality content to remain free and all the rest will just lose traffic. Expect the Murdoch press to become even more vehemently anti-BBC over the coming months.

I think there is an important distinction though between the BBC and News Int, which is that News Int's business has been newspapers. There's no new costs involved to publish text and pictures online once they are sent to the printers. People don't view websites in place of newspapers, and their enjoyment of them is rarely enhanced by engaging with them across two media. It's just the same content in a different place.

Secondly, there are lots of people who are quite happy with newspaper content because they trust it and it has always been there. It just happens that they are spending more time online than they are reading newsprint these days. If for some reason it wasn't there, they might well find out that most of the best stuff online isn't written by newspaper journalists. It doesn't matter whether you are after cricket analysis or celebrity scoops, it is a really straightforward lesson to learn, and one that newspaper marketing departments should be terrifed about. News spreads fast in the21st century, and they really are in danger of getting left behind.

And the most important question is how people will find these sites to go and pay them. Google can't look behind walls. The whole basis for paying for news is that you will be receiving the most authoritative set of opinions (ok, or The Sun. Or Fox News. So you might just be getting the set of opinions that you want...). Anyway, 10 years from now there will be no reputation left worth mentioning. As Jeff Jarvis points out in The Guardian, this move cuts access to the link economy. And whatever might have brought success last century, that is where long term revenues will be found this time around.

Chris Anderson's Free - Free here now

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson

I turned up to Chris Anderson's Brand Republic/Spotify funded book launch event last week with a fairly cynical head on, as it seemed very likely that this going to be all about a book with a £20 odd price tag that explained why Free was a business model to compete with.... but if I was lucky I might get a free one to take away. Turns out that most of the marketing for the book is an ongoing experiment with some of the many and varied ways that Free can build a business for Paid. The first way was the abridged copy funded by Adobe and Brand Republic, which I'm half way through reading.

I probably won't buy the full version, but that's not really the point: I was only at an event that was handing it out because I work in a business that tends to pay Chris Anderson pretty well for setting up consultancy work with its clients.

The audio version though goes the other way - here you can have the full one free, but you pay for the abridged version, on the basis that with print, everyone reads at different speeds, but audiobooks can only be listened to at one speed. The value is therefore in getting the information quicker. Not sure I agree with that, but that isn't really the point: this is an ongoing experiment, which will be reported back on Chris's Long Tail blog, to show which of the theories in the book have actually worked in his own case.

And for anyone who wants a [free] preview, the full version is at the top of this page. I don't know if it will still be there in a week, as I think they are going to play around with the idea of time-sensitive scarcity as well (to paraphrase Withnail Free to those who know about it, very expensive to those that don't)

We7 - free music streaming and sharing

Free music - Summer Tunes

I have a have a tendency to request Beta invites for anything that looks like it might be interesting, and then often forget to actually do anything with them. I guess that's what happened with We7, a Spotify competitor that has just emailed me an invite code.
The interface web rather than desktop-based, but the selection of music looks at first glance to be a good start (ie lots of artists I like, but not necessarily all of their albums). What is interesting though are the sharing options; playlists can be set up as apps in your social network, although currently that only works as long as your preferred network is Bebo. The playlist appears in your profile page like this:
And can offers embed codes like the one at the top of the page. As it's a sunny day I've grabbed a few tunes that remind me of summer, but with a bit of a range of style and era to show the range of music already available on We7.

I don't think this is anything radically new, but the idea of embed and share app codes for playlists is pretty sleek. While you can do far more on LastFM, you have to start parting with cash to get any of Last's better features. And obviously, I like having all the music there is available on my desktop.

Spotify: Not losing a battle but winning the war

For all the love that Spotify has had from the tech and music community in its 4 months of beta, this has seemed a pretty tricky week. Basically some bands have been pulled from the service, mainly due to geographic issues with rights in different countries. From what I can see there isn't one particular label that has thrown toys out of the pram: user comments from the Spotify blog suggest that this mainly at individual bands' requests (in the same way that bands like the Beatles and Rolling Stones are particularly anti C21st music distribution) - Led Zeppelin are one of the quoted parts of the archive that has been removed. However most of the unsupportive comments appear to be from fans of niche genres - Spotify is a Swedish company, and there are a number of references to Scandinavian synth music and metal being removed. As no-one could have predicted the rate at which Spotify has grown in the UK (200k subscribers) since December, you can understand that international rights will have become an issue that bands may not have considered. If these bands find that after consideration that they would prefer not to reach an audience growing at quarter of a million music lovers a month, then that's fair enough. It's clear from the blog comments that people will go back to Piratebay rather than Amazon if Spotify is taken away from them though.

None of this should detract from the fact that this application is adding tunes at a rate of 10,000 per day, and is on the verge of mass appeal in the UK with hugely positive Guardian and NME features this week. The most important news for Spotify is not in its content though - it is a distribution platform, and has taken a huge step this week in becoming a viable competitor to iTunes by employing a Head of Mobile, Gustav Soderstrom from Yahoo. Mobile is the ultimate destination for music content, and the speed that which the application spreading makes an ad-funded business model viable. Could a tech startup really save both the music and the mobile industry from Apple?
(thanks to Zia George at Spotify for audience data)

Written whilst listening to Airborne Toxic Event, MGMT, Killers and Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip, who are all still available on Spotify)