Can We7 fare better than Sigue Sigue Sputnik in making people listen to adverts?
Last week saw a couple of significant moves within the music download industry. Apple started selling premium DRM-free music. An odd concept of 'premium' to me, since all the music I purchased up until about about 5 years ago was DRM-free. I'm not sure where the added 'premium' value comes in.
More interestingly, We7 announced an advertising supported music download service that would be free at the point of consumption.
The premise of their MediaGraft technology is that they will be able to add targeted advertising to downloaded files.
It isn't actually a totally new concept. In fact, it is one that has a long history in recorded music.
"It was forty years ago today..." has been used a lot by headline writers over the last few days, but it was forty years ago that The Who's third album - "The Who Sell Out" - was released, featuring fake advertising and radio station jingles between the tracks.
It was twenty years after that before somebody did it for real.
These days Sigue Sigue Sputnik may be chiefly remembered for having the epitome of poor 80s dress sense, but their debut album, "Flaunt It!", was released with genuine adverts in between each song.
Fortunately, rather like the Sigue Sigue Sputnik sound, the advertising on "Flaunt It!" didn't turn out to be the promised future of music after all.
I'm not convinced now either.
We7 have spent a lot of time carefully designing that diagram of how the service will work.
However, I'm yet to see how they will prevent me whacking the mp3 I've downloaded into Audacity and stripping the advert from it before I've listened to it.
In just the same way that all those years ago, judicious use of the pause button stripped the adverts from my friend's copy of the Sigue Sigue Sputnik album whilst I recorded it to tape.
Hi Martin,
Love the write up and the great examples from the depths of time.
I understand your cynicism and your question re Audacity.
With regards to your cynicism we have a lot to prove so keep watching 'this space'.
As for stripping the ad, as you demonstrated with your 'judicious use of the pause button' some people will do it, BUT, it misses the point.
The real point is the current choice on the Internet is Buy or steal, at We7 we are trying to create an alternative which lets people respect the rights of Artists and rights owners. This way (as our beatiful diagram shows ;-) ) eveybody wins.
Brilliant work keep it going.
Steve [CEO We7]
Ahh, I hate to come across as cynical when I just mean to be questioning
Thanks for taking the time to reply - I agree that only a small percentage of people will be bothered to fiddle about with the files to remove the adverts.
I also think there is definitely room in the online music market place to experiment with different payment models, so I look forward to using the service.