On 13 December last year Beyoncé, the biggest music star on the planet, released a new album called Beyoncé. They say it sold a million digital copies in six days. That in itself was not surprising. What happened next was.
On the seventh day, as it were, it was as if Beyoncé's record had never happened. Those inclined to be excited about Beyoncé consumed and moved on. The rest of us remained untouched. The window of ballyhoo around a big album, which in the past would have lasted a couple of months, was finished in a week, leaving the rest of us wondering whether it had really happened at all. That's a reflection of how much the revolution in distribution has changed the game. The easier you make something to acquire the faster its mystique will decay. Contrast the Beyoncé release, which relied on perfect availability, with National Record Store Day, which we've just had. Here scarcity is artificially manufactured in order to create excitement.
This isn't simply because we're spoiled for choice and our attention spans are getting shorter. It's also because increasingly we find the means of delivery at least as exciting, sometimes more exciting, than the thing being delivered. The ease of pulling the product towards you provides a little bump of satisfaction all its own, a thrill next to which the thing you pulled is often a poor second.
The music business has come to terms with something that the rest of the entertainment and media world is dealing with in differing ways. Despite the repeated pieties about the magic of creativity and the special skills of writers, image makers and personalities, content is not king. Delivery has mounted its throne and has already eaten its lunch. To take an example from the Jurassic era of pop, in 1966 the Beatles were more powerful than all the record shops in Britain put together. They could, and did, reshape the processes of the businesses. No matter how popular Beyoncé may be, she'll never be able to make YouTube or iTunes dance to her tune. She is merely furnishing a handful of the trillions of noughts and ones being ground out in their mills day and night.
YouTube and iTunes are just two of the brand names that were largely unknown 12 years ago but have now eclipsed all the record labels in all the world. It's similar elsewhere. The delivery mechanisms are the new stars. These are either free or they feel as if they're free, they touch us all in a way that individual products don't and they're designed by people so attuned to our inner child that they can make us hug ourselves from sheer delight. It's increasingly our expectation that there will be more revolutions in the means of delivery than there will be in the things delivered. We wait in a permanent state of arousal for the new, new thing.
In responding to this traditional media owners are having to recognise that content in itself is not enough.
Any exclusive content which is appealing won't remain exclusive for long. Your fabulous picture session is no longer yours from the second the first grab hits the web. Your exclusive interview is on everybody else's site or Twitter feed. Our personal news and intelligence gathering network is being reshaped daily by our social media use. Here's where the value lies. In the future you're not going to be looking to a news provider to provide you with first news of the news. In the world of social media news travels at the speed of your interest in a particular unit of it. If there is something pressing I need to know about the world of, say, Tottenham Hotspur or The Archers it will come speeding towards me. Obviously there are ways journalists and other information providers can accelerate this process but they are less and less likely to instigate it. We're living through the final age of household name editors and journalists. The people making the running, and creating the value, are developers. The people in dispatch.
It's funny how editors still favour those features about "the book or film or record that changed my life". There might have been a time when that happened. Not any more. It's the software that changes people's lives. Netflix, Skype, Spotify, Flipboard, Amazon Prime, Kindle, Paper and scores of others. These are as exciting, if not more exciting, than the individual items of entertainment and edification that speed along their rails.
We love them because we have sold our birthright for Cool Stuff and because they better enable us to do the thing we do most of all, which is not so much choosing as thinking about choosing. Reading our Twitter timeline in the hope of being sold on a friend's enthusiasm, having yet another listless flick through Netflix and wondering how most of these films came to be made, looking through the BBC iPlayer and thinking you really ought to get round to watching Britain's Tastiest Village. Travelling endlessly along the intoxicating open highways of delivery, fervently hoping never to arrive.
