> At the indie stores you have PUSH distribution.
> The music is pushed all the way to the consumer. At chain stores you have
> PULL distribution where the consumer has to know and want your product and
> get it.
Both that comment and an earlier one about physical media vs downloads
got me thinking about the idea of outsourcing to the consumer.
A guy on the radio was talking about Walmart and how they can manage to
sell a dining room table for, say, $100, when usually you have to spend
$250. The reason is that it's an "assembly required" product, so
essentially, the assembly has been outsourced to the customer. (Ikea
the same, but they also use a lot of renewable materials.) You can look
at automatic grocery store checkout the same way--the checkout activity
has been lifted from, say, 4 paid employees, then outsourced to the
customers, and overseen by 1 paid employee. Now, personally, I prefer
to interface with robots over humans, especially checkout humans b/c
they are always in a bad mood, and I would be too if I had that job, but
the outsourcing analogy still holds.
When people download media instead of buying it, they've taken
responsibility for distribution and physical media. That's interesting.
maybe there's an opportunity in there. Less physical media is
ostensibly better for the environment, but with disk space selling for
$.50/gb, for every cd we've not produced, we've simply added a little
cadmium and lead to the waste stream, most of which gets chucked (and
leeches into groundwater), and not send through proper recycling or
reuse channels. The winners are disk manufacturers, data centers, and
bandwidth operators, not musicians, and not the water supply, although
we've saved the energy used for transportation in this interaction.
I've often talked to places that send me promos, offering to download it
to save them the physical media and mailing costs, b/c I'd rather take
that responsibility, eliminate the media and the transport, and save
them a buck.
And what Dirk's describing here is that, in a way, promotion, or I guess
awareness of new music, has been outsourced to customers in chains, but
in small shops, there's still a lot of attention to the actual music and
talking to customers. Same story all over....Home Depot may be open
until 10pm and guaranteed to have lots of stuff, but there are really
good reasons to go to your local hardware store instead, reasons that
serve you in the long run.
Now, if only fewer indie record shops had that gat-damm superior
attitude, and some dude trying to show off what a great dj he is by
blasting everyone out of the store. Save your ego for the club, and
tell me about the music. Again, I prefer robots...I like listening
stations stocked with stuff I never heard of rather than trying to get
the dude to turn it down and understand my tastes.
Lately, the vast majority of my music purchases have been at merch
tables after performances. If I like I show, I make damn sure to pick
something up at the end. Got chatting with Ken Vandermark that way, and
his bassist's mom! Turns out Ken really likes bawlz out rock, and
Shellac in particular, b/c they are a minimal take on rawwwwk. Interestink.
Received on 2006-04-08 21:14:09