| Tuesday, October 18, 2005 |
20:28 - nth time's the charm
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I've got to admit that the new ad campaign for Napster is actually pretty effective.
When the current incarnation of the Napster service debuted at the beginning of the year, with its "Do the math" campaign, the ads all featured that strange little cat mascot and lots of stylized clip-art, the message of which was unclear at best. What makes it better than iTunes? Uh... well, you don't have to have one of those trendy iPods to use it! Yeah, that's compelling.
They didn't seem to know how to present their argument, and certainly didn't have any of the iPod's cool on their side. Which is interesting: for a certain class of music consumers, the ones who don't care about owning their music and who are comfortable with paying a monthly fee for the ability to rotate through the entire available library, it actually isn't a bad deal. If you don't mind that the music will go away if you don't pay your monthly fee, and you've got a fast enough connection to support frequent download sessions, it can in fact be an attractive proposition. Yet Napster didn't seem able to articulate that.
Well, now they have. The new ads feature a gray, staticky, "underground radio" sort of motif, with an ethereal voice whispering from the airwaves at you as your TV loses control of the vertical and the horizontal:
You don't have to OWN music... to have music... to enjoy music... to discover music.... 1.5 million songs... unlimited access... Bye Buy Music...
And much as I hate to admit it, that actually works pretty well. It gets the message across in such a way that those people who would prefer Napster's model of music downloading will immediately understand what makes it different and worth their attention.
Now, I still don't think that segment of the music-buying public is all that big, and I don't think iTunes' market share has that much to fear. Napster still doesn't provide the user any sense of permanence or independence; long-term listening habits and personalized playlists aren't really possible under this model, unless you plan on paying $15 a month forever to keep accessing the files on your own computer. The system is also still prone to abuse, such that I think an eventual backlash from the labels is all but inevitable. I think the market will continue to favor iTunes' model, especially as it extends its reach into video and the possibilities of personal ownership of TV programming and movies. But from now on that battle will be fought on the basis of the two systems' objective merits, rather than on who has the better marketing.
UPDATE: CapLion wrote about this tonight too, and I swear I hadn't seen his before I wrote mine.
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Brian Tiemann
