the jukebox has a long tail

Chris Anderson's piece The Long Tail, already linked to shreds, brought a smile to my face with a quote from Ecast's Robbie Vann-Adibe. Robbie and I worked together at Viant, and I was on the Ecast team when Viant put together Ecast's original business plan, operating model and working prototype of their digital jukebox...

Meet Robbie Vann-Adibe, the CEO of Ecast, a digital jukebox company whose barroom players offer more than 150,000 tracks - and some surprising usage statistics. He hints at them with a question that visitors invariably get wrong: "What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a month?" ... Most people guess 20 percent, and for good reason: We've been trained to think that way. ... But the right answer, says Vann-Adibé, is 99 percent. There is demand for nearly every one of those top 10,000 tracks. He sees it in his own jukebox statistics; each month, thousands of people put in their dollars for songs that no traditional jukebox anywhere has ever carried.

I can't tell you how happy that makes me. Captured in there is the whole point of Ecast: thousands of tracks, delivered transparently on demand, giving barflys access to nearly whatever they'd want to hear at any time. And the jukebox is the perfect place for a long tailed catalog -- at one point we had modeled (inebriated) people paying slightly more for tracks that they typically wouldn't find in a corner bar.

And layered on top of the "any song, anywhere" benefit for users is the data component. Back in 1999/2000 when Ecast was blazing contractual trails with the major labels ("You're going to distribute digital versions of our catalogs to bars?"), the folks on the other side of the table didn't quite get the value of the data Ecast would be collecting. I have to believe that's changed: Ecast is sitting on geographically tagged social purchase data. As the hit business both concentrates and dissipates, being able to predict the lifetime value of a recording means more rational investments in artist development. It may not be as richly detailed as the data from Soundscan or the iTunes Music Store, but if I were in A&R or artist marketing at a major label, I'd sure as hell want to layer jukebox stats into my forecasting models. Music spreads socially, after all...and what's more social than feeding a fiver into the jukebox?

Comments

[Tom Coates]

Okay so this is a really interesting post - and I loved the stuff on local music preferences, that's really really cool. So what I want to ask now is about the selection that people listen to with jukeboxes. I can see how it's good for the individual that they'll choose the more obscure tracks - they get more personalised pleasure out of the devices. But what I'm less sure about is what benefit it has on the other people present in the bar. Is there a benefit in giving people access only to songs that people generally like, rather than allowing people to put on a 24 minute epic of Lithuanian goat-warbling? What's the social consequence of a greater variety of individual choice in communal settings? And what effect might it have on the atmosphere in the establishment itself?

[I was there, too]

Robbie and I worked together at Viant, and I was on the Ecast team when Viant put together Ecast's original business plan, operating model and working prototype of their digital jukebox...

"working prototype" is a bit of an exaggeration (the "working" part, that is), though the jukebox was admittedly better than the countertop. Java, Marimba, and ObjectStore ... 'nuff said. The industrial design guys didn't do such a swell job either, so don't feel too bad. I know, I know -- you were off doing PowerPoint stuff over by the window when all of this was going on. Still, you seem to be claiming some credit by association so you should be ready for blame by association as well.

It's also amusing that Robbie got credit for the "tail" observation, but I'll let bygones be bygones. It has been six years, after all.

[Michael]

heh. "prototype" is the key word. and i've gotta believe that whatever tech actually made it to market is dramatically different than the java / objectstore / marimba stuff that we used initially. but the point of the post still stands -- turning a jukebox into a digital device makes long tail exploitation possible. and from what i gather about what's happened since those heady days of 1999, robbie deserves a hell of a lot of credit for keeping the business afloat, long tail or not.

[i was there, too]

I don't know much about flotation devices, but Ecast has a new "interim CEO" these days.

Anyway, we knew about the "tail" not long after single song downloads were up and working somewhat reliably. It was as simple as "select count(tbSong.songID) from tbSong where numPlays > 0". This was in '01 or so.

Sour grapes aside, the "tail" would great news for all the paranoid folks at the record labels if they weren't too busy suing their customers to notice. As it is, Macaulay appears to have been right about the whole nation being in on the plot against copyright holders, so it's doubtful that they will ever cash in on the opportunity to the fullest.