Why We Buy (28 page)

The third and final bonus of a web-enabled mobile is that it would also work as a form of personal ID. It would connect somehow to your physical self in a way that would allow the phone to work only when it was in your vicinity. Meaning if you drop the thing in a gutter by accident or someone steals it, the phone becomes for all intents and purposes useless.

What the web-enabled phone also does is create a network that bypasses the traditional media of both the web and of face-to-face communication. The elections in Spain in March of 2004 were influenced partly by all the instant messaging provoked by the deadly terrorist train bombings in Madrid that happened on the eve of the election. No one was debating political issues, but an online community was able to shore up its allegiances. So we now have the tools to disseminate information in a way that transcends phones, magazines and newspapers—and that connects us all locally.

To take convergence to a retail level, it could also mean that the bricks-and-mortar model, with its distribution systems and supply chain management, might be ripe for overhaul. The era of the big-box merchant, at least in the first world, has reached its apogee. Stores may be getting bigger, but that doesn't mean consumers plan on spending a correspondingly increased amount of time, or money, in them. Scaling down stores makes both economic and ecological sense. If we start ordering our staples online—and even if we only swing by and pick them up at the store—do we
really
need that laundry aisle?

Come to think of it, when we reach the point of convergence, the entire purpose of a physical existence may have to be dramatically reconsidered. The United States is investing huge sums of money in nation-building outside the country (think Iraq), but in the meantime our docks, ports and bridges are rotting, our passenger railroads are vanishing
and we've all but lost the capacity to think big or be bold.
We are backing into the future. At a time when we need to get beyond our addiction to fossil fuels and take better care of our planet, we are stuck. A hundred and fifty years ago it took vision to push our railroads across
the country; a hundred years ago it took guts to conceive and build the Panama Canal. Today, America is a follower, not a leader—so convergence will happen somewhere else first.

Convergence will initially find its footing in someplace like Africa or India where someone doesn't own, or have access to, a landline. Part of what I find interesting about visiting India is that for reasons of space, density, primitive retail and an absence of things that Americans and Western Europeans take for granted, it's a country that's managing to leapfrog the traditional landline. Visiting Delhi recently, I was struck by the number of people whose mobile phones were always in their hands—far more so than in New York City. Mobile phones weren't just for calling; they served as their owners' pivotal identities. People's mobile phone numbers were at least as, or more, important as their names.

This makes sense when you contrast India's path with the evolution of technology followed by most Americans. First we had our landlines. Next we had our computers, followed by the Internet, followed by the first mobile phones. (Recall if you will that the first mobile phone stores didn't appear in the U.S. until the late '80s and early '90s, and were used mostly by business guys. I can remember once attending the opera with a friend who'd never used a mobile phone before. She glanced down at mine as if it were an exotic mango. When she called her daughter, the first excited words out of her mouth were, “Guess what—I'm calling you on a mobile phone!”) After that, some of us graduated to PDAs, which ushered us into the first mobile Internet world. Oh, and incidentally, the next time I saw the woman from the opera, she was the proud possessor of both a mobile phone and a BlackBerry.

If you ask most people, they'll tell you that mobile phones have been around forever, rather than since the early 1990s.

Compare this technological journey to that of an emerging country, where someone is going to migrate from having nothing—no landline, no laptop—to suddenly, overnight, having the Internet at his or her fingertips. In Delhi, it was almost comical overhearing people calling each other on their mobiles.
Where are you? I'm going to be three minutes late.
Made me wonder how people got along before mobile phones appeared.

But that's why I'm positive convergence will take place first in an emerging country. At which point, someone in the U.S. will exclaim, “Hey, why the heck don't we have that here?”

 

One of the most remarkable things about the World Wide Web is that even its most grizzled veterans lack a clear-eyed understanding of how it works. Most of us have accepted it, embraced it and sworn at it, but it's in our homes and in our coffee shops and in the air, whether we use it for Hollywood gossip, stock trading, or simply as a combination electronic post office and gigantic animated
Encyclopaedia Britannica.

So what would happen if there were a cyber war and the net collapsed? What if an organization or foreign nation decided that the best way to assault the United States would be to sabotage the web? If we think about terrorism and the fallout from 9/11, what happens when the terrorist moves beyond dreaming up simple stupid viruses and figures out some way to make the web disappear? What happens then?

Rather than sitting around figuring out what the next Facebook will be in this money-crazy culture, it's worth setting aside a little time to think about that.

But enough with worst-case scenarios involving nefarious plots. Let me leave you humming a few bars of music.

I have a professional friend, a guy I don't see as much of as I'd like, but someone I'm always happy to run into when I do. He has three interconnected vices—he runs marathons, smokes a half-pack of Marlboros a day and is a total music junkie. Every time we meet up at some conference or another, he'll pass me a fervent note that says, “Check out these guys,” before listing off a few musicians he stubbornly believes no contemporary iPod owner should live without. The last band he recommended was called Balkan Beat Box—a fusion of Middle Eastern music tangled up with electronica, with a heavy bass beat behind it. Terrific dance music that sounds just as good when you're bopping down the street with headphones on.

So I went to the iTunes store, typed in “Balkan Beat Box” and up they came. Two albums' worth, some twenty-five songs in total followed by
a ten-line description of what the music was about and a few customer reviews. That was it. Hardly enough to chew on—extremely frustrating. I ended up buying three or four songs at ninety-nine cents a pop, plus some songs from a couple of other bands my buddy told me about, and I put together a mix, which I've been enjoying, as it's pretty complex, wonderful stuff.

But if my friend hadn't brought the band to my attention, chances are high that Balkan Beat Box and I would've never found each other. Why? Because for all the talk about iTunes being this revolutionary new medium for sampling and downloading digital music, let's face it, it's a pretty limited site—and I'm a lifelong Apple fan.

Example: Why doesn't iTunes offer me any song samples longer than thirty seconds? Sometimes the vocals or the melody don't even begin to kick in by then. Why doesn't the site request more personal information, including where I live and what kinds of music I'm interested in, so it can tip me off to local concerts based on my preferences or on the music I've downloaded already? Why doesn't it permit me to buy, say, a three-play version of a song for twenty-five cents, so I can decide whether I want it in my permanent music library or not? iTunes also can't seem to figure out why a guy who buys Balkan Beat Box also gets a kick out of vintage Eartha Kitt. Plus, where are all the liner notes? I love reading liner notes. It turns out I can peruse them only if I buy the whole album for $9.99 or $11.99 or $18.99, or however much the site is charging me.

Where's the information explosion here?

There's another issue: I'm at a point in my life where I own four iPods, each with its own speaker system. I keep one such sound device in my living room, another apparatus in my kitchen, a third in my office and a fourth…well, it migrates. But why hasn't Apple recognized the revolution it's created and facilitated it? It should be selling me—all of us—much broader solutions than it does now, other than just simply being the latest, coolest new distribution system. Because the site is preoccupied with selling me songs for ninety-nine cents—as well as audiobooks, TV episodes, music videos and just-released DVDs—it isn't giving me the tools to manage my fleet of iPods. I want Apple not just
to sell me content, but to expedite and simplify the role of its products in my life.

Recently I met up with a senior group of executives at Sony BMG, the global music conglomerate. As a lot of people know, CD sales are in a downward spiral, and in 2007 they declined again by some 30 percent. Strange fact: The only places where CDs are doing okay are in niche markets. For example, polka is holding its own. Same goes for Latin music. Little indie stores with focused and dedicated clientele are surviving. But the rest of the industry is suffering.

There's a lot wrong with this picture. Because today we find ourselves at a time in history where there's never been a more voracious appetite for music. A typical fifteen-year-old kid in 2008 has a working vocabulary of all different varieties of music. He or she knows something about trance, blues, rock, reggae, heavy metal, country, rockabilly, stoner music, the British Invasion, contemporary, hip-hop, world music, even the Christmas Peanuts soundtrack. Yet in spite of the knowledge and appetite out there, the Internet doesn't have the tools yet to indulge it wholeheartedly. It can't penetrate its outermost edges. It can't get us psyched about listening to good new stuff.

I know, I know, online music sales are booming, but the thing is they're not even close to matching the falling sales of CDs. Again, that's not because digital downloading is anything terrific, or the quality of the sound is all that excellent, or managing your MP3 sound files is any easier than juggling your ancient vinyl collection.

To blame file sharing or online piracy is a copout, too. In 1959, the typical American household had 1.7 sound reproduction devices—the parents had their stereo and maybe the kids had a portable record player upstairs. We placed the needle reverently on vinyl, cocked our ears and listened. We couldn't move (or dance), because the needle might skitter across the record. Today we do just about everything to music—cook, read, work out, make love. Music has become the soundtrack to our multitasking lives. Yes, I have four iPods of various styles and sizes, but in total, my house has twenty-three sound reproducing devices. I've bought one particular Doors album four times, on vinyl, cassette, CD and as MP3s. Yes, kids are trading music—for God's sake,
why wouldn't they if for almost twenty years we made them buy pricey CDs rather than 45s that conformed to their budgets? Problem is, the music industry has historically been closer to the musicians than the consumers.

Music has flourished online because of the failure of the music industry to recognize that consumers don't want to buy the whole cake—we want to buy the stuff by the slice. We don't want to shell out $13.99 for
The Best of the Troggs
or $24.99 for
Arthur Rubenstein: Chopin Noc turnes.
Maybe we just wanted “Wild Thing” and Nocturne op. 15, no. 3 in G-Minor. Did the music industry intuit this about us? No—they're still putting out music the way they did back in the days of Chuck Berry, and now they're paying the price.

That said, if iTunes is the only music portal out there, I think we're all in trouble. If Sheryl, my significant other, who's a professional musician, is hunting down an obscure piece of chamber music, she isn't about to find it on iTunes. There was a time not so long ago when she could pay a visit to Tower Records near Lincoln Center, and some shy, knowledgeable clerk would know exactly what she was talking about, and the various versions, and why the 1962 studio version recorded in Vienna was superior to the one done live in 1978 at the Concertgebouw. But Tower is gone, Barnes & Noble is unlikely, Wal-Mart is out of the question and Sheryl is stuck.

One of the questions I put to the Sony executives was, can you figure out a way to put your catalog in a place where people can access it? It almost suggests the need for a company portal for their entire classical backlist. As I said, the appetite for music today is overwhelming—it's just a matter of helping consumers find it. If I want a classical compilation with a title like
Chill with Beethoven
or
The Most Relaxing Classical Album in the World,
I can download it off iTunes, no problem. But wouldn't many of us pay a premium for a Sony-led chat room, where, say, we could pick and choose from a complete catalog of music, and the host—some distinguished, goateed professor of music from Berkeley or Juilliard—would ask us what type of recording we wanted, if we preferred a live or studio recording, how old we are, what our ears are like and all that, before directing us to the perfect piece of music? Whether
we walk away with something digital or a real CD—or even a bracelet with earphones attached to it—it's an opportunity that's just waiting for someone to invent the process. Techies?

A music store or bookstore of the future—couldn't it be similar? It might resemble the comic-book clubs they have in Japan, where you can go in, rent a chair and read all your favorites. You would pay a small admission fee. In return, someone whose taste you admire and appreciate would serve as the emcee. Your fellow members would be men and women who like and appreciate the same music you do. Maybe the club could serve drinks and feta-stuffed olives and a wheel of Epoisses cheese. The people who run the place would know what you like and even hand-sell you stuff, including vintage collectibles.