Breaking Down (Then Rebuilding) the Media Industry, One Atom Of Content At A Time

If you wanted to skip to a particular song thirty years ago, you had to drop a diamond-tipped needle into the smooth intermediate section on a vinyl record, which was maybe a millimeter across.

It made changing songs a pain. Especially since you couldn’t do it using a remote. You had to get up, walk over to the record player, and try to land that needle on that little smooth guideline. So people would put on a record and just listen to it. Each song in a row.

Cassettes weren’t much better. Everyone of a certain age can replicate the whining squeal a tape deck made as you fast-forwarded to the vicinity of the song you were looking for. In both cases, you could always buy a single (a 45, for example), but when the song was over, you had to switch out the medium.

Point is: CDs changed record albums. You could immediately skip ahead to the song you were looking for. Artists could no longer expect that listeners would hear the songs in the order they appeared on the album. Some artists didn’t (and don’t) like that. As recently as 2007, Radioheaad refused to list its album on iTunes, so the audience had to buy the full album instead of just singles.

Another point: MP3s and iTunes destroyed the established industry. The original Napster debuted in 1999. Compare that to this chart of the profitability of the music industry.

What happened? People were able to select the precise song they wanted to hear, download it, and listen to it. An industry of albums became an industry of (less-profitable) tracks. Molecules became atomized.

There’s a chicken / egg question here. Did people gain a taste for picking out their favorite nuggets – or did MP3s allow people to realize a latent desire? (And why was music the first media economy to atomize? Because of the compact size of songs – and, therefore, downloads in the modem era?)

Whichever came first, the expectation of atomized consumption is spreading.

In Sunday’s Times, Joshua Brustein looked at the advent of stations and online tools that show only real-time sports highlights or provide alerts when games become “worth watching”. Hulu does the same for TV shows; YouTube, for movies – a quick search yields your favorite scenes.

In every case – just as Radiohead would argue about its songs – the consumer loses context: the preceding three minutes in the basketball game, or the set-up to a joke on Community. Subtlety, flow, drama, more important moments or information – all are (or, can be) sacrificed to atomized consumption.

And, of course – this same diffusion has happened to the news.

>>>Next – How institutional journalism started to splinter with the advent of the World Wide Web.