Emotion vs. Logic / by Stéphan Angoulvant

Tomorrow’s Physical iTunes Store

Dis­tri­b­u­tion Revolution

Apple’s recent announce­ment of the iPad stirred con­tro­versy. Reac­tions seem mostly neg­a­tive. Smart peo­ple call it ‘future shock’.

With the iPad, I believe Apple has changed the game on two fronts: com­put­ing and con­tent con­sump­tion. Smart peo­ple have explained the new par­a­digm of com­put­ing. I won’t go there. What I want to focus on, is how Apple is chang­ing con­tent con­sump­tion today, and how tomor­row it will rev­o­lu­tion­ize con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion.

Con­tent Providers

The major media indus­tries of the west­ern world take three forms: music, film/​TV and pub­lish­ing. All three indus­tries are con­tend­ing with a world inex­orably mov­ing towards dig­i­tal consumption.

When Apple intro­duced the iPod, it rev­o­lu­tion­ized the music indus­try. What was dif­fer­ent wasn’t the device, it was the 99 cent down­load. Bring­ing the music indus­try on board was crit­i­cal to the suc­cess of a dig­i­tal music player, and no one before Apple had done it.

Apple tried chang­ing the film/​TV indus­try with Apple TV. So far its inroads are min­i­mal because this colos­sal indus­try looks to com­pete with Apple via Hulu, and other pro­pri­etary (or legacy) dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels. But I believe Apple can pre­vail there too.

Today the pub­lish­ing indus­try is in sham­bles. Pub­li­ca­tions are shut­ting down all over Amer­ica, and with pay walls fail­ing as a solu­tion, the web seems to be a dead end. Like putty in Apple’s hands the pub­lish­ing indus­try is ready to make a leap of faith. This is great news.

Con­tent Consumption

The iPad intro­duces the first viable alter­na­tive sup­port for news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines. Not only is it viable, it presents com­pletely new forms of inter­ac­tion and excit­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to mon­e­tize. Wired recently made a great case for it.

The iPad presents a third dimen­sion for the inter­ac­tion between reader and con­tent: depth. ‘Zoom out’ to see the pub­li­ca­tion in full, ‘zoom in’ to receive infor­ma­tion more gran­u­lar than ever before. This has been the dream for ages. Apple just hap­pens to be in the right place at the right time.

Hear me now. 5 years from today, phys­i­cal news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines will have vir­tu­ally dis­ap­peared from Amer­ica. (The book is a dif­fer­ent matter.)

Con­tent Dis­tri­b­u­tion and the Mas­ter Plan

With writ­ten con­tent finally hav­ing its place in the iPad, Apple has cre­ated devices suited to the con­sump­tion of every type of media.

Inte­gral to Apple’s suc­cess is iTunes (and soon the iTunes Book­store), the hub for all con­tent to be accessed, paid for and down­loaded. So what will kiosks, book­stores, record shops – media retail­ers as a whole – do when every­thing can be found on iTunes?

The answer is the phys­i­cal iTunes store. If Apple doesn’t do it, some­one will.

Just like today’s record or book shop, the phys­i­cal iTunes store is where you go to con­sume media (and cof­fee). Except there’s no phys­i­cal media to be seen. It’s all touch screens and dock­ing sta­tions. You’ll walk up to a dock­ing sta­tion, plug in your iPod/​iPhone/​iPad, and Genius will take over. At the phys­i­cal iTunes store you get full song pre­views, just like you would at a record store, and you can flip through entire e-​​books and mag­a­zines, just like you would at a bookstore.

Genius knows what you like and gives you rec­om­men­da­tions based on your lis­ten­ing, view­ing and read­ing trends. The phys­i­cal iTunes store is a place to expe­ri­ence dig­i­tal media in a vis­ceral way, unlike any­thing you expe­ri­ence at home. Sur­rounded by large touch screens you can flip through beau­ti­ful album cov­ers and read liner notes; reviews are there too.

With a flick of the wrist you’ll send con­tent straight to your device as you con­tinue to browse. With 1-​​Click pur­chase there’s no cashier and with data stor­age in larger loca­tions, there’s no down­load time.

The phys­i­cal iTunes store is eas­ily scal­able. It has no inven­tory. It’s a stand at the air­port and a multi-​​story empo­rium at the cen­ter of metrop­o­lises. The pulse of data is its heart­beat. It knows you bet­ter than any store clerk and pro­vides the great­est selec­tion no mat­ter the size of the shop.

Phys­i­cal pres­ence still has a place in this world. Peo­ple crave that pal­pa­ble social expe­ri­ence. We just need to think of it differently.