Launching Digital

Two different music recordings have been in the news. The new Nine Inch Nails (NIN) "Ghosts" project and (with a little less buzz) Melody Gardot. They're both interesting examples of success online, yet I believe their strategies have important differences.

Both have a low price point which is important, but NIN had popularized the album by using pirate music sites and offering exclusives at high price points. Also, I think a key difference is fan base. NIN is electronic music with a fan base interested in electronic media. (One promotional stunt they did was to leave USB drives with content on them in the bathrooms at their shows and the previous album was all tied up in a dystopian electronic surveillance theme.)

I think Gardot has used a much simpler model and grown in a much more impressive way than NIN. It is similar but I think there are important differences. Radiohead is a more similar comparison to NIN since they are both old groups with an established fan base.

An established band has the capital to set up a website and conduct online sales (the NIN interface is impressive). An emerging artist must rely on iTunes. The same is true in the book industry.

Dan Brown, for example, could set up a server, release an eBook and sell print copies via LuLu and give the publishing industry a wake up call. An emerging author would have to use iTunes something that many have not taken advantage of yet (despite Make Magazine presenting the concept at TOC this year). It may just be a matter of time before we see the same thing occur in books that we have seen in music. One could attribute this not happening yet to the slow speed of publishing or maybe it's just something that authors are not interested in. The parallel might hold true that established artists would have to pave the way with independent experiments and then the new comers might move along via iTunes (or some equivalent).

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Size Matters

Video conferencing doesn't work. Phone conferences and webex are all second rate to being in the room with one person. Of course when you need to connect 20 people, these technologies help, but the underlying issue is size.

The issue with video conferencing is that even on a large screen TV, the people you are viewing are a percentage of their actual size. There was a fellow we used to video conference with who would be the only one in the room, so he'd zoom the camera in on his face. He joked around that he was doing the anchorman thing, but beyond the humor he was connecting with us better. At that size he was almost life size. You could see hesitation in his gestures or subtle recognition in his face while you spoke. Of course he was disconnected from us because there were a dozen two inch people on his screen.

We are aware of nonverbal communication, yet it seems we don't realize that size matters in nonverbal communication. Sure we have video, but at the normal video conference sizes it is like monotone speech. People are used to communicating with others of roughly the same size. We are probably attuned to the subtlties of nonverbal communication on that scale. While having people larger than life on the screen would be a mistake (it would seem strange to our eyes), we should strive for near life size.

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