Musicadium Blog

The big buzz around the Twitter, Blog and digital music news sites today was about Apple’s new service, code-named “Cocktail”, due to be dropped sometime in September (a fairly ambitious finish line, methinks).

From HypeBot, Apple Cocktail is “an interactive album bundle that would add additional content like liner notes, lyrics, videos and more to every album download.”

Further comments state that Cocktail’s purpose is “…all about recreating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork while you listened to the music,” one executive familiar with the initiative told the Financial Times. “It’s not just a bunch of PDFs. There’s real engagement with the ancillary stuff.”  This suggests that it won’t be a half-measure and that iTunes are, at face-value at least, dedicated to not just putting some PDF files (already available for a lot of releases, though definitely not all) in, bundled with the audio files and branding it a new product.

The comments on the Hypebot article (the small sample that has been posted today) seem to be geared very negatively towards it, saying that the rich content that Apple is promising is already available online and generally free, i.e. High-Quality Youtube content, Hi-Res Album Covers etc, albeit not in all cases.

It is also being reported that the “Big 4″ major labels had previously pitched a similar idea to iTunes, who rejected it at the time, but is now packaging the idea as theirs.  Another criticism it seems to be attracting is that it will be delivered in yet another proprietary format, almost a self-contained application to be run on the computer that plays all the content.

In terms of trying to drive album sales rather than piecemeal sales of low-profit-margin singles this isn’t a bad idea, but not as a proprietary format.  Time and time again, we have seen that open-ness and offering various forms of consumption for playback is the key for gaining new customers - it seems that consumers don’t want to be constricted by the way that they stock their portable players.  The ability to break the package down to tracks and videos for adding (whether as a whole album or singular tracks) to portable MP3 players/iPods and new phones could very well be the success of this product.

Obviously, this product is coming, so it remains to be seen how it will be finally delivered.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 8:01 pm and is filed under Industry News & Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.