Good Retail or ‘Shame on You HMV’?

Well you can’t blame them for trying, but this leaves a little bad taste in my mouth i have to say.

No, I’m not a priss, I’ve been sharing Jacko gags with the best of them, but this… come on.?

Is this good retail or just a bit distasteful? When would it be okay to do this..?

I guess it could have been tasteful had they put a little more effort into it and comp in an ‘In memory’ page with some considered imagery and respectful editorial or something.

But to hand crank the homepage to fill with Michael Jackson albums, videos etc without adding anything reeks of opportunism to me.

I say boo.

Nanny Nanny Wash Wash Clean

Is it me or is it a bit mental that all these sanatiser gels are appearing everywhere? I saw this in an M&S food.

M&S Food! Why are they selling this stuff?

I’m all for washing your hands when they’re dirty, but seriously walking around with sterilised hands can’t be good for you. Yes okay, if you have a baby and need to wash before changing/feeding etc but surely we all need some bugs in the tum to keep us fighting the worlds ills?

People will buy anything.

Tesco creating ‘Eco-Towns’ – Building Demand – Filth

By Warren Hutchinson

Tailwind gets just a little bit protesting/activist today.

In a little village just outside Cambridge, on the Cambridge / Essex border is a picturesque little place called Hinxton. Just nearby is the village of Great Chesterford, Shelford and the medieval market town of Saffron Walden.

What surrounds these quaint and very old little villages is agricultural land. There are one or two A-Roads, A1301 and A505, that link the villages and of course the M11 makes it’s way past Duxford en route to the M25, but largely this is a beautiful and tranquil part of the world. I know because it’s where my wife is from and we’re often up there with her folks and siblings.

View Larger Map

Tesco, along with Jarrow Investments want to ruin it by building a housing development there.

Image taken from the Stop Hanley Grange Website.

They call it an ‘Eco-Town’ and use phrases such as ‘Hanley Grange is a new type of community. With sustainability and respect for the environment at its heart’.

Sorry, but how is it conducive to sustainability when you build on raw agricultural land?

Idiots.

Furthermore:

“Hanley Grange will feature around 8,000 new homes, 40% of which are affordable, with an opportunity to deliver a further 3,000 homes in the future. This will enable it to sustain a secondary school, up to five primary schools, a health centre and a range of community facilities, shops and public spaces.”

Ah, sustainability again. Sustain a school that wouldn’t have been required had they not built the houses.

Fools.

Who are Jarrow Investments? Well:

“Jarrow Investments has a long-standing commercial agreement with Tesco to work with them and other landowners to take forward the proposals for Hanley Grange. One of the requirements set out by the government for eco-towns is that they should provide a good range of facilities, including a secondary school, a medium scale retail centre, good quality business space and leisure facilities. We hope a Tesco store will play a part in delivering that retail centre and are delighted they are involved as Tesco an industry leader in the development of sustainable supermarkets.”

‘The development of sustainable supermarkets’?

Are they serious?

Tesco are the purveyors of fine intensively farmed chicken if you remember Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall’s ‘Chicken Run’.

(By the way, check out his site for information on the intensive farming industry, it’s an eye-opening read.)

They’re not sustainable.

This makes my blood boil. I don’t like Tesco very much. I don’t like them for all the reasons most people don’t; squeezing the suppliers, ousting local businesses, selling mucky, intensively farmed meat and poultry ‘2 for a fiver‘.

Hanley Grange is to provide homes for between 8 and 11 thousand people. See a map of the proposed site here:

Doing so is going to wreck the area and possibly close historic Duxford airfield, stopping the flight of Spitfires.

I think there should be more Spitfires flying, not less.

Taken from the Stop Hanley Grange Website:

1. The wrong location
   This is a resurrected planning application South Cambridgeshire District Council has already REJECTED and has chosen Northstowe as a new town – this should be our eco town.
2. Enough is enough
   We already have one of the biggest house building programmes in the country. South Cambridgeshire is committed to building 23,000 homes. We don’t need any more.
3. We don’t have the infrastructure
   Our roads are under huge strain now. The Liverpool Street/Cambridge line lacks capacity and station car parks are full. The Citi7 bus is regularly held up due to the volume of traffic.
4. Destroying greenfield land
   You don’t improve the environment by building on miles of high quality grade II farmland.
5. Undermining local democracy
   The “eco-town” is being imposed by ministers and bureaucrats in Whitehall, subverting the normal planning process. We believe that local people should decide through our elected representatives. It’s a question of democracy and accountability.
6. An ECO-CON, not an eco-town
   The carbon neutral house hasn’t been designed yet. Thousands more cars on our roads aren’t carbon neutral either. The plan just won’t work.

It’s one of 15 sites across the country proposed for development of an ‘Eco-town’.

Apart from all the usual anti-Tesco angles and the fact that this is an ill-coceived development in the first place, what about the following?

- jobs
- access
- water

What I disticntly dislike about this is the idea that Tesco build these places with a single view to provide intense demand for a store it hasn’t yet built.

This, people, is dark strategy in play.

There is a large Tesco in Saffron Walden (yes, of course – just on the edge of town) and a Waitrose in the town. There is a market and local butchers actually within the town itself.

Visit the STOP HANLEY GRANGE website and sign the petition by June 30th 2008. Or better still

Sign petition at No 10.

Twitter Retailing

This was doing the rounds at my place of employ last week:

Dell using Twitter to communicate offers.

In a nutshell, DellOutlet has a Twitter stream communicating offers and coupons.

Okay, so you only follow if you want to which I guess is fine, but I’m just not a fan of brands entering into this kind of ‘conversation’. It cheapens it and erodes the idea and starts to make me want to get out. To [mis]quote Seth Godin, where is the ‘permission asset’ for Dell?

Regarding the Dell feed I doubt anyone loves Dell so much that they permanently follow DellOutlet on Twitter so I’m curious as to how people discover and then track the offers. How is it making itself known? Word of mouth? Surely people savvy enough to pick up on this aren’t in the market for a Dell machine, I don’t know.

Why is Twitter a valid channel for this over and above a standard RSS offers feed? Maybe it’s due to the fact that Twitter is a web 2.0 darling, albeit from last year’s SXSW and an RSS feed just isn’t out there enough.

Incidentally, a quick hike to the Dell Outlet site shows that the left and the right hands aren’t talking as there is no allusion to the Twitter stream, no list of followers, nothing.

Interestingly (or not), the tone of the Dell Outlet site isn’t chatty like the Twitter feed either.

Either way, I don’t fancy a smidgin’ of ‘ambient intimacy’ with Dell thank you very much.

I shall not be following.

Besides, I’m a Mac fanboy.

The Who go ’subscription’ and Hear Music sign a newbie.

Rock legends, The Who are the latest artist to jump on the new music model bandwagon asking fans to exchange for $50 of their hard earned cashola in exchange for access to streaming video, music, messages etc.

I’m sure that there is more to it than this as I’m sure any die-hard Who fan already has much of the back catalogue and wil therefore be sniffing around for unseen exclusives. I’d expect there to be a range of previously unreleased, cutting room floor type content available.

Also, Starbucks’ record label Hear Music have signed their first new artist and will be selling the wares of Hilary McRae alongide crooners such as Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchel and James Taylor. For me, this line-up is starting to say omething about their coffee and I wonder jut how much affect, long-term, this is going to ave of coffee punters.

Imagine they were signing a load of heavy metal artists, surely if you knew that you’d be going elsewhere for your caffeine fix?

Incidentlly, I’m off the coffee for the whole of November. It’s amazing how just after 1 day of cuttig out the black stuff, I started feeling really sluggish and had mild headaches.

Though I didn’t stop purely because I can’t stan te sight of Macca McCartney’s face beaming up at me from the counter in Starbucks.

Pay What You Want for a Magazine Subscription

Now a music magazine has adopted the Radiohead ‘Pay what you want’ model. Based in Ohio, Paste Magazine is a music rag trying to take digital idea into the print space.

No time to comment, as ever, but here is the news.

Thanks to Coolfer.

C’est trés interessant non?

Powered by ScribeFire.

Disruption in music

A lot has been written about the Radiohead free album thing over the past week or so. If you missed it here’s a précis for you.

Having split from their record label Radiohead decided that they wanted to get their latest album ‘In Rainbows’ to fans as quickly as possible in a kind of cut-the-crap sort of way.

To do this they started placing small icons all over their website to stir interest. Then they announced ‘coming soon’ then they announce ‘October 10th’. this was all prior to announcing that the album ‘In Rainbows’ will only be available on the website for fans to ‘pay as little or as much a they like for the album’. Which effectively means, bar the 45p credit card fee, Radiohead fans and non-fans for that matter ca obtain their new album for free.

Aside from the download, for £40 you can buy a special box set of 2 x vinyl, 2 x CDs and other Radiohead merchandise including a hardback book, photos and more that will be delivered at a later date.

It is reported that in a single day, Radiohead may have made as much as $10 million and that some fans may have paid the maximum value that the system was set-up to process; £99 (or about $200).

£99 for a Radiohead album? Not on my watch, but then I’m hardly a fan.

When I first heard about this move, which Oasis, The Charlatans and Jamiroquai have been quick to follow (in words and promises at least), I wondered about the value exchange between band and fan, between band and semi-fan and between band and non-fan.

It stands to reason that people will pay a reasonable amount for a band they have enjoyed for a few years but what was thought about the masses that would undoubtedly pay the minimum? It’s clearly a good way of reaching a fringe audience as the risk to the purchaser, in terms of not liking the album is reduced.

I may even consider buying it myself, but I’m distinctly a non-fan for no other reason than the fact that I hate music designed to meet your melancholy requirements. No-one needs suicide songs in their life IMO. Happy, bouncy, funky get-down on the get-down for me. Brass, bass and a side-serving of thang if you please.

Anyway, back to the album and some figures discussed on our internal mailing list at LBi:

Apparently they had 1.2 million downloads in 2 days at an average of £5 giving £6 million ($12 million).

Apparently (again), in order to make a comparable amount to a conventional contract with a record company they would need to shift 1/2 million copies at 75p each.
Good business. Easy-peasey.

Now as I’ve said, I’m not a fan of Radiohead but you simply have to admire this level of disruption. Record companies have had it coming for years charging us up to £15 ($30) for a CD and only passing £1-2 through to the artist. No-one will be crying for them, it’s time for some serious reinvention or as Tom Peters would say ‘ Time to re-imagine’.

Record companies used to add value by enabling artists to actually make records then use their marketing clout to get the track airtime, exposure and rack-space. Of course this is no cheap endeavour and anyone who thinks music should be free is failing to see the costs of getting produced and getting out there. Yes, you have your Arctic Monkeys, Libertines and Lily Allen stories but in general the whole product life-cycle of a music creation and distribution is a costly old thing.

Record companies have missed the opprotunities that digital, multi-channel delivery offers them. they’ve stuck their head in the sand demonstrating classic long-tail behaviour and are now quaking in their boots.

So with that said, CD sales plummeting and downloads rising from 0 in 2003 to in excess of 26 million in 2005 it’s time to allow fans and bands to make sweet beautiful music together. To cut out the middle men.

Or is it?

There’s a consumer life-cycle associated with music. In four phases you generally:

1. Discover new music
2. Manage it
3. Use/experience it
4. Share it (though not always)

In order to discover it you need to be introduced to it, you need mechanisms of discovery, you need something to inspire that ‘harvester’ in you to go collect. You need ways in which to store and manage it, you need ways to ‘use/experience’ it. Which is key as there are more live performances now than ever. And now that they’ve stopped selling the traditional C90 cassette, you need ways to share your music.

Unless of course it’s a ‘guilty pleasure’ and you don’t want anyone to know you still listen to it.

There are more bands than ever and you needs ways to accurately cut through the crap.

So could all bands start giving music away for free? Well, of course Radiohead are afforded the capacity to try this experiment having been benefactors of the old model (please don’t argue that they’ve been screwed by the record companies for years – that’s another discussion entirely), but it’s still a bloody good experiment.

I think this is an interesting way to reach a wider fan-base. Ask fans to pay what they want and you’ll probably see a similar affect to those ‘honesty boxes’ you get in WH Smiths (UK newsagents) where you drop your change into the box. While some people cheat the system, invariably it works out okay fr the retailer.

See people are decent folk. Well, some.

This type of ‘honesty box’ culture is fairly widespread and numerous bands have tried this before. See these guys of The Mooncake Project who ask for donations for their wares. Software too has long been in ‘donation-ware’ mode.

So, some questions:

• Does this approach create a tier system for bands and their relationship with fans? Cheapskate fans and top-dollar fans?
• Does this mean that Radiohead can now segment their audience and offer value adds to the higher paying public?
• Would fans consider subscribing to an artists for £30 a year and funding their work in a more committed way?
• How much could Radiohead expect to make overall? And what percentage will download for free?
• Would there be secret pay-bands where real fans (people who pay decent mounts for the album) get some ‘extras’, maybe some extra tracks, some studio snippets, some images, video, advance tickets etc etc

Variations on the theme are popping up all over the place, Jamiroquai and Oasis have suggested they’ll follow suit, Jamiroquai having recently ended their 8 album deal with Sony. In the same week indie legends The Charlatans went one better than Radiohead and made their new single You Cross My Path, available from radio station Xfm’s website at no charge.

The diminutive purple pop-star, the-artist-who-I-will-call-Prince, also made waves when he released his new album for free with the Mail on Sunday. Okay, so you had yo actually be seen buying a Mail on Sunday but essentially free if not socially-suicidal. You could argue that this was to promote his 21 night event at the O2 Arena in London, which was of course the real money spinner.

Then of course there is Madonna, who’s signed a 10 year £60 million deal with Live Nation the concert ticket search people. The deal sees Madge gain cash and shares in exchange for excluive rights to merchandising. Apparently Live Nation have struck 360 similar deals with the Madonna one obviously being the largest.

T-shirt of a 60-year-old Madonna anyone..?

Technorati Tags:
music, radiohead, music industry, downloads

New Mobile – iPhone or N95?

Yay! It’s new phone time again. I’m out of contract on my current Orange mobile which means in new phone terms, the world is my oyster. Ahem.

I’ll probably stay with Orange as I generally have no issues with them apart from apalling service around Richmond in London. However, I find it very strange that I can’t get the best deal from Orange for an Orange contract. It’s far better to go down to a ‘Carphone Warehouse’ and get a free PSP or PS3 thrown into the deal.

Decisions decisions.

Is it worth holdiong out for an iPhone on O2 seeing as my 3rd Gen iPod now only lasts 35 minutes? Or should I get the GPS enabled, 5 mega pixel N95 beast from Nokia. It’s ugly, but does cool stuff.

It seems someone else had the same dilema.

Virgin Media cut through the noise

In the ever chaotic world of convergence one has to hold their hand up to Virgin Media and say ‘good effort’. All the competition seems to be struggling to put things in one place and under one offer.

A quick visit to each of the respective homepages illustrates this, they all seem to separate Phone, TV, Broadband and Fixed-Line (that’s if they provide all 4).

While BT, Orange, Talk Talk at all all struggle to convince their customers that they can now ‘do internet as well as mobile’, Virgin have popped their head above the parapet with a nice simple proposition:

“Choose choose 2 for £20, 3 for £30, 4 for £40 or a Very Impressive Package – simple!

And the savings you make are incredible”

The idea is that you have 4 elements that you choose from which drives the pricing:

1. T.V.
2. Broadband
3. Landline phone
4. Mobile phone

I have to say I like its simplicity, I like it being in one place and I love the idea of ‘Very Impressive Packages’.

The offers are simple, coherent, jargon free and above all competitive. I’m seeing ads for this all over London at the moment and I have to say 300 minutes mobile, 300 texts, TV, Broadband and fixed-line for £40 looks very good to me.

Well done Virgin, let’s hope that you can fix the NTL customer service issues.

Blogged with Flock

Starbucks Goes Auto

I read a blog posting called What Must Starbucks Do that seems to have generated a lot of interest.

It’s basically about how Howard Schultz has issued a challenge to his team to reinvigorate the chain. He feels that its losing its soul, its uniqueness even.

Here’s and excerpt from the posting:

March 2 | Howard Schultz’s battle cry email deriding decisions the company has made in order to grow is making the rounds. If you haven’t read it, you can read it here.

He’s concerned Starbucks is in danger of losing its soul, its uniqueness—its remarkability. Howard says the romance and theater of coffee have disappeared from Starbucks stores because Baristas now use push-button machines to make espresso drinks. That stores no longer smell like coffee and that every store looks cookie-cutter.

I read this, and then I find myself in the Starbucks near to my office looking at a tangible example of their demise:

Look closely and you’ll see a new machine. It’s not a manually operated one. It’s push button!

The art of coffee making is indeed dead.

The Barista now places a cup underneath the spout and presses a button.

I mean it was pretty puch button before, but for some reason the semantics of this coffee ‘thing’ reach tipping point.

It really is a glorified vending machine.

I shall now be boycotting this particular branch of Starbucks and any one I see that has these operational efficiencies in place.

LOVE MY COFFEE!!!! It just cost me £3!!!