This post is a follow up to my last post titled The Wrong Trousers where I described substitution as a far greater challenge to the music industry than sharing/replication. 

The Substitution Dilemma 
The iPod giveth, and the iPod taketh away. The digital music technology that enables your music to be effortlessly substituted for music created by someone else is the same technology that enables someone else’s music to be effortlessly substituted for yours.

Searching For Another Emotive Spike
I’ve had this quote (below) from Karla Starr’s excellent article titled 22,000 Songs And Nothing To Listen To rolling around in my head for months.

“My iPod is like a remote control or a slot machine, flicking through 500 songs, searching for another emotive spike.  I now find myself getting bored, even in the middle of songs, because I can. The paradox of spending so much time changing songs, trying to find one that you like—without giving it time, meanwhile thinking about what else you could be listening to—is that you wind up attached to none of them.”

I can’t find any hard research on behavioral patterns of digital music consumers.  However, when someone gets around to it, I bet you’ll find “emotive spike hunting” right up there with “playlisting” and “shuffling”.  

New Technology - New Behavior Patterns
Within a couple of years one billion people will have tens of thousands of songs at their fingertips; accessible through mobile phones and iPodish devices.  Think about the new behavior patterns:

• Emotive Spike Hunting - just explained.
• Playlisting - building playlists for personal consumption and sharing.
• Shuffling - random generation from an endless list(s) of songs you have control over.
• Button Pushing - Endless fast-forwarding and reversing - because you can.
• Recommending - Machine to human and human-to-human.
• Sharing - effortlessly sharing because it’s finally acceptable.

It’s all Substitution
All these new (easier to do now than ever) behavior patterns add up to what I am going to call the Substitution Challenge.  There are so many great songs in the world, and it’s going to be so easy to skim, skip and linearly or randomly churn through thousands of songs.  It makes me wonder how much of this activity, over any given interval of spare time, will displace what was once spent on passive listening?

Substitution and Economics  
In a competitive market, where products can be easily substituted, prices get pushed down to marginal cost; thus practically eliminating the ability to generate a profit.  MP3 players (and the Internet) are the new radio (my favorite line) and every artist wants to be on the radio.  Where record labels pay to place songs on the radio today, it makes sense that artists will certainly continue to offer songs for free in exchange for placement in the new “radio” tomorrow.  Unfortunately, those that are selling songs have to compete with those that are trying so hard to get on the “radio”.  And, as the first line in this paragraph says - where products can be easily substituted (see behavior patterns above), prices get pushed down to marginal cost; thus practically eliminating the ability to generate a profit.

The Substitution Solution
If you have some time watch this video by Barry Schwartz titled The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less.  My solution will be forthcoming.  There are two challenges that have to be dealt with simultaneously; the first challenge is the Lack-of-Margin-Challenge (in a .99 cent sale) and the second challenge is the Substitution Challenge described here.  The solution(s) to these challenges are intertwined.