A Genuinely Amazing Music Site

Sometimes people ask me, “Is there anything new online that has totally amazed you?” Usually I fumble around for an answer, and look a little dumb. Not much amazes me, I guess. But right now, I do have an answer: the Berlin Philharmonic’s online concert hall.

I should start by noting that I have been going to orchestra concerts for 40 years, but I’ve never been a fan of TV broadcasts (the awful “Great Performances” stuff on PBS) or even concert DVDs. Not only are they extremely limited in terms of selection, but the impact of actually being in the hall has almost always been completely missing. But for some reason I can’t quite explain, the online experience they’ve created in Berlin feels completely different to me. Seeing these concerts on a good monitor and audio system on my desk has an immediacy I have never felt from TV or DVD. (Maybe I should sit as close to my TV as I do to the monitor.) The quality of the HD photography and sound is stunning, as is the engineering and lavish design of the site itself. It helps, of course, that the Berlin Philharmonic is an exceptional institution – musicians, programming, conductors, concert hall. Just about every concert is worth the time. You should visit the actual site, but here’s a sample of the music (make sure you switch to HD, and full screen).

For about $200 a year, you can watch any Berlin concert live online, or whenever you want via the comprehensive archive. There are also monthly passes, online tickets for individual concerts, all clearly explained. If there’s a live concert coming up, you’ll see a countdown clock on the upper right. Thinking about buying a ticket to this weekend’s concert? You can watch a couple of minutes of the rehearsal earlier in the week, to see if you like the music. As I said: Wow.

You can imagine some nice features the site doesn’t have – I might like to listen to the audio of these concerts on an iPod, for example. But that’s trivial compared with what has been accomplished.

I can’t imagine how much it cost to develop all this, or to produce a multi-camera, broadcast-quality video of each concert on an ongoing basis. On the other hand, what other future for orchestras is there? Most are still primarily focused on filling up two thousand seats in a physical hall for each concert, which of course is an admirable and perhaps necessary goal. But if it’s listeners you want, and paying listeners, with this site we can now see the spectacular new model for how and where to find them.

If Users Won’t Pay for News, Someone Else Might

An interesting column by Simon Dumenco at AdAge.com called “How the $0 Netbook Might Just Help Save the Media Industry.” The thesis: To make money on low-margin netbooks, computer makers might have to gin up some bundles of add-on content to sell — perhaps including news and media subscriptions. In the process, they’d help jump-start the idea that said content is actually worth paying for.

I’m a little skeptical about the hardware people getting into this successfully, but it’s a reminder that there are plenty of people who might want to build packages of content, either to sell or to use as incentives for their own marketing. There are always combatants desperately trying to gain market share (Comcast vs. FiOS, Verizon vs. Sprint, Lexis vs. Westlaw, Starbucks vs. McDonald’s) — they need some of the proverbial (and elusive) “added value” to get people to switch. Why shouldn’t premium content (music, news, video) be part of the bait? Would you try using Google Chrome, or use a Verizon wireless data plan instead of Sprint’s, if you got access to premium news and music you’d otherwise have to pay for? If the offer were compelling enough, you might.

This isn’t a new idea. Why, back in 1996 when I worked at wsj.com, we got a big check from Microsoft to give Internet Explorer 3 users free access to the otherwise subscription-only Wall Street Journal (they also got some nice things from ESPN and MTV). Back then, Microsoft was trying to grab share from the then-dominant browser, Netscape. They did. This year (when they can force you to download IE8 in a way they couldn’t in 1996) Microsoft is giving the money to charity instead. The newspapers might need it more – too bad so few of them have come up with interesting services worth charging for.

Enough Opining about Journalism, Let’s Sell Some Stuff

When it comes to the nuts and bolts of selling online subscriptions, who knows more than Marketing Sherpa founder Anne Holland? Here’s Anne’s newest site, www.whichtestwon.com, with some fun quizzes where you can guess which online offer pulled the highest response. Good luck, Anne!

OpenID Gets Closer to Real Usability

Until recently I hadn’t been impressed with the so-called “seamlessness” of how OpenID was going to make life easier for actual users trying to register on Web sites. But things may be starting to come together. RPX, for example, has commercialized a very easy OpenID login/registration interface. If you want to see it in action on a live site, go to UserVoice and register. It’s now not so hard to imagine a world where we have one identity and one password, linking not just all our social networks but all the content and commerce sites we have relationships with.

Now let’s use the same open-standard approach to make it easier for one e-commerce relationship to grant us easier access to premium content across sites, without having to make multiple individual subscription purchases.

(And by the way, if you are a connoisseur of elegant registration/purchase screens – you know who you are – UserVoice’s are beautifully designed, well engineered, and short.)

How About an Amazon Newspaper/Magazine E-commerce Plan?

Seth Godin, who has lots of advice for everyone and sometimes some good stuff, thinks Amazon should come up with a subscription plan for books.

While we’re at it, why shouldn’t Amazon be the central platform for buying subscriptions or one-time purchases of any kind of online content? They already run the world’s best information store – they’d make the buying experience easy, and bundle products/services together if it made sense for buyers. It would get publishers out of the business of running their own expensive, clunky registration, access control and billing platforms. There are plenty of ugly technology issues that would have to be worked out, but not as ugly as the buying process is today for most online information customers.

And I’m not convinced that the Kindle is the only platform they could play this role – why not on the Web too?

Selling Conferences in 2009: “How About If We Pay Your Airfare?”

I hate telemarketing calls, even from organizations I like and do business with. But I received one today that got my attention.

CALLER: Will you be attending [conference name] in [Sunny Location] next month?

ME: No, I don’t think so.

CALLER: How about if we pay your airfare?

This wasn’t just talk. The operator asked me the name of the airport I’d be flying from if I were to attend, and then sent a detailed follow-up e-mail with a proposal that took the basic conference registration fee, knocked off $200, and then also took off the round-trip airfare (they had looked it up between the call and the e-mail) from Newark to the Sunny Location of the conference.

Great telemarketing, or a sign of desperation for the conference business in tough times? Maybe both. But it got my attention at a time when people are reluctant to make purchases like this. I hope it works for them! (I’ll be in a Sunny Location next month, but watching baseball, not this conference.)

The Amazing Revival of (Talking About) Paid News

Wow, what a miraculous and sudden revival of talking about paying for news Web sites, mostly provoked by the severe corporate chest pains being experienced by The New York Times.

Some of the eminences (some might say dinosaurs, but we’ll leave that for a separate discussion) of the news industry have weighed in on the side of some form of subscription wall and/or micropayments, including Walter Isaacson, Steve Brill, and even the Times’s own managing editor Bill Keller. Most aren’t well versed in the realities of online consumer behavior (people hate micropayments and always will), or even of doing a P&L for an online business. Brill, for example, actually multiplies the Times’s 20 million current monthly users times $2/month each to do a revenue estimate for his subscription plan. I haven’t seen math like that since the height of dotcom craziness ten years ago.

Despite the bad subscription and micropayment ideas out there, I’m still a believer in subscriptions, and think that more publications can have it both ways, as Chris Anderson suggested in the WSJ – plenty of content for free, and a supplementary subscription business for extra revenue. WSJ.com, my old stomping ground, continues to do a great job of having its cake and eating it too – much of the news is available for free, but the mysterious quantity that’s behind the wall still generates significant subscription revenue. The Times still takes unjustified derision (from Google-worshippers and other free-content gurus) for having created, and then killed, TimesSelect – its premium tier of subscription-only content that “only” brought in $10 million in revenue. Might have been the wrong execution, but the basic idea is still worth plenty of additional experimentation.

The challenge for sites that don’t have the clout of the WSJ or the Times is to make subscribing easy, seamless, cheap and painless — and ideally, as I’ve noted here before, it’d be great to have one easy subscription payment cover a whole variety of sites. For example, I’m never going to pay to subscribe to my local paper’s awful Web site – but I wouldn’t mind (I guess) if they secretly got a piece of a more general payment I was making for access to a whole range of sites that I like more.

That’s why I like the sound of something like Kachingle (well, the concept, not the name), the subject of Steve Outing’s excellent column this week. It sounds a lot like what I’ve been hoping for: a subscription MetroCard that works seamlessly across all sort of sites. You register once, voluntarily (more on this in a second) designate a monthly Kachingle payment, and when you visit sites that display the Kachingle banner, each site receives (behind the scenes) a share of your monthly fee, based on its share of your visits during the month. The idea is that the content on participating sites remains free, but that there will be enough paying paying members out there to generate some revenue for your site. Like public radio, most people will be listening to you for free, but some listeners (readers) will decide (via Kachingle) to pay you some money. “Crowdfunding,” they call it. Cute.

This isn’t a perfect concept (frankly, even the Kachingle Web site doesn’t really work yet), and like any payment scheme, we could all critique it endlessly. For example, I’m not sure why it has to be completely voluntary — why can’t publishers designate certain content as only for paying Kachingle users? I’m also wondering if Kachingle has any customer research or experience that suggests Kachingle would actually “work” in the real world. But for the time being, I agree with Outing, it seems like a great idea that I hope some publishers try.

Subscriptions aren’t the only place newspapers can turn to help themselves out. They can invent new, more useful print products; re-think what newspeople can and should be doing these days; invent and sell more of the marketing services local businesses need (there are plenty); explore premium vertical content. But the idea of collecting revenue from some users isn’t crazy. Here’s hoping more people try it – in inventive, creative, realistic ways.

Should We Shed Tears for Sunday Book Sections?

This week the Washington Post announced it’s eliminating the print edition of its weekly book section. There’s been lots of hand-wringing, of course, including from the former editor of the L.A. Times’s defunct books section, who moaned about what this meant for the “republic of letters.” (Frankly, what’s anyone who can say “republic of letters” with a straight face doing working for a newspaper anyway?)

I love book reviews. (I read the New York Review of Books, for crying out loud, and I couldn’t do without The Economist’s back-of-the-book section.) I even write them occasionally. But does that mean there’s still a convincing rationale for a newspaper to have a separate book section during times when there’s no book advertising? (Especially when the section in question is as dull and dated as, for example, The New York Times’s has become?)

Here’s the real question for those who want more visibility for books: Why don’t you start a self-standing, really good book-focussed Web site? All those user-generated reviews on Amazon can be very helpful, but it’s no substitute for comparative essays, author profiles, interesting debate, and lists of the best books on a variety of current topics by people whose opinion you care about. It’d be a lot more challenging pulling together a great site like that than just commissioning a dozen reviews a week, but it has a better chance to survive as a nice little business. From what’s online now, looks like the Post’s online book section has a ways to go before it gets there.

A $2 Million Newsroom – from Scratch

From the New Business Models for News Summit going on at the City University of New York, interesting post on how you’d build a newsroom from scratch these days for a largeish city like Dallas or Philadelphia. The tab: a little over $2 million a year for 35 FTEs, paid for with about $4 million in revenue (800 million annual pageviews at $5 revenue per thousand pages). (My former colleague Neil Budde, it is said, did the math.)

Since I spend most of my time working with much more vertical, industry-focused news sites, let’s do a comparable calculation for one of those. Let’s pretend you could get 20 million pageviews a year on a site like that, not 800 million. That’s $100,000 in revenue per year at a $5 RPM. Sure, on a vertical site maybe you could do a higher RPM — so let’s call it $300,000 in revenue. Can you do a decent job covering an entire industry with a $150,000 news operation?

I still can’t imagine how most (maybe all) news sites will survive without some kind of a model that enables them to get revenue from readers. A $199 annual News Pass that lets you read any news site you want, as much as you want? It’s sounding like even with lower royalties on music, internet radio stations are going to need some kind of a Radio Pass like that. I wonder who will come forward and make this model work – probably not Google, even though they are (perhaps) the only people right now who could get people to the table to help it happen.

Tougher Passwords = Lower Revenue?

Just finished trying to order a simple $30 online print job at Fed Ex Office (the happy life of a consultant!). I abandoned the whole process in the middle of trying to create an account to make this purchase. Why? I got this message after my third attempt to choose a password acceptable to the system:

I’m all for security, but how does it make my life better to force me to choose a password I can’t possibly remember? And how is it good usability to tell a user the password rules (in an error message) only after he or she attempts to choose one?

Some online program manager at Fed Ex (assuming they have one) simply wasn’t doing his or her job: Wondering if a checkout process like this would help customers spend more money.