If the general-interest newspaper is now one of the endangered species, so too is the music album, reads a sobering thought in ‘Niche: Why the market no longer favours the mainstream’ by James Harkin (www.hachette.co.uk). “As the universe of music is chopped up into mp3 files and transferred to vast online ecosystems like iTunes, CD album sales remain in the doldrums but singles enjoy something of a renaissance,” he elaborates.
Digestible chunks
As much as the general-interest newspaper, the album is being dismembered by predatory consumers, cut up into more easily digestible chunks, the author describes. And, interestingly, each of those chunks is available all of the time, such as when you are sitting in a coffee shop and listening to a song you like but do not recognise.
Reminiscing such an experience, Harkin recounts that he took out his iPhone, opened a popular online music recognition application called Shazam. “Not only did Shazam correctly establish the name of the song – Pixies’ ‘Where is My Mind?’ from their 1988 album Surfer Rosa – but it immediately directed me to its iTunes listing so I could buy it.”
We ‘informavores’ have also become fearless bargain-hunters, especially when everything is tagged with electronic information in a vast virtual universe, the author observes. He cites a study by the economist John Morgan at the University of California which found that shoppers who bought electronics products via a price-comparison site saved an average of 16 per cent off the average listed price; and that the more firms who listed prices, the bigger the savings.
Hawkish customers
Another study referred to in the book speaks of how the easy access to information on the Net has eaten away the average gross profit margin of car-dealers by 22 per cent. “And that is only the beginning of it. When our mobile phones allow us to scan products and search for prices and product information elsewhere, the managers of high street stores will be forced to look on powerlessly as hawkish customers stalk their aisles armed with beeping smartphones.”
But pricing things up in an instant is not the only way we are taking advantage of the information we find online, notes Harkin. We are just as likely to spend time truffling for unusual items as hunting out bargains, he reasons, because a vast online ecosystem such as eBay, Craigslist or Amazon, allows us to pursue exactly what we are after.
“Many of us use it not to pick up the stuff we could get in the supermarket but to track down the distinctive, the unusual and the recherché: a now-defunct toy that we might have played with as a child, a particular part for a computer, a CD we can’t find anywhere else.” An insight of import Harkin mentions is that the freedom to roam and search out anything we want, as estimated in one study by MIT economists, is seven times more valuable to book-buyers than the lower prices made possible by the online retailers.
Imperative read.
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