| A thread that's currently running in the Music Club on Ecademy. I've been mulling this over for a few days. First some background. - Michael Stype has taken to giving his friends fully loaded iPods with a custom music selection. - There's a service in the USA that supplies loaded iPods to restaurants and bars for background music. - There are people who will supply you with a complete wardrobe or a complete house furnishing as service to high net worth individuals with no taste and no time. - There are *lots* of people out there who stopped buying music when they left University. Just look though the record collection of 30-somethings some time. - Elvis Costello once produced a list of the 500 Albums you must own. - Somebody is offering a service to rip all your old CDs to Mp3 and load them on an iPod. Send them a big box of CDs, plus the iPod, they send it all back with the music transferred. So here's the deal, you supply iPods loaded up with a customised selection of music for people who want some music for their home or lifestyle but don't know what to buy or where to buy it. Include play lists for things like "New Year's Eve Party", "Dinner Party", "Relaxing with a book", "Driving". The thing I'm unsure about is just how much you'd have to charge for the whole thing to be legal (!) I can't imagine being able to sell this for much more than £1000. So that's £750 for music. Even if you negotiated a big discount with the download services, you'd be hard pushed to get more than 150 Albums and I'm not sure if that's enough, although it is 1500 tracks. And that's without any profit margin. And you'd want to automate the whole thing. Start with a short questionaire and then generate the track lists, playlists and dump automatically. So has this got legs? Or is it never going to work because you'd have to charge £10k, and there aren't enough musically clueless people with that kind of money? Vladimir writes. From experience (I have helped, free of charge, wealthier friends buy 100 'essential' CDs and frequently help others select 20 in a shopping spree where I can only allow myself 3-4) I believe that those less than fanatic about collecting music are usually happy with a fairly modest collection. For most lifestyles and tastes I would say 100 albums is a 'big' collection. Probably a mini-iPod or a solid state player are more appropriate for the pre-loaded service. Both the device and the collection size (license costs) will make the whole thing realistically priced, and therefore quite marketable. As I think more about this, where's the package deals from the music download services. The key player in this would be Virgin, now that they have a music download store and a hardware player. Let's see a music player for £150 and a loaded music player in one of 5 styles and tastes for £250. You could take your new player to the download counter and have it filled with the Yuppie-AB mix of 50 albums while you wait. |
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[ 20-Oct-04 1:53pm ]
