There’s one thing an mp3 won’t replace for the music fan — and that’s the liner notes. Why the hell not?

When people talk about the loss of the physical artefact in online music, they’re often talking about the liner notes. The information, artwork and explanatory or exploratory essays that accompany a good record. And they’re right.

You might get the front cover of the album in the ID3 tag of your music file — or even a link to a review of the record, but it’s not the whole booklet, and nor is it the extra artwork and back cover.

I mean, just because you can’t hold the paper in your hands, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get all that interesting and desirable stuff, right? In fact, in these days of user-generated content, wikis and rss feeds, shouldn’t you actually be able to get more?

Sometimes when I listen to music, I like to read about the music as it plays. But even though a website isn’t right for that — for a great many reasons — the characteristics of the online environment, and the nature of digital files, still suggest that metadata should be a key feature of the experience of digital music.

It isn’t.

If you’re lucky, you’ll get the front cover, artist name, year, album title and tracklist — equivalent to two sides of a single square of paper slotted into a CD jewel case. Disappointing stuff.

But what if you could get ALL of the information — and more?

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Online music enhances the sampling, sharing and impulse purchasing — but it obsolesces the giving.

I was in a record store on Friday, and there was a couple browsing through the shelves. Before long, the woman went up to the counter with the (excellent) Alice Russell CD, Under the Munka Moon. I overheard the conversation with the staff member at the record store. She asked if she could play the CD before she bought it. Just to check.

“It’s a gift for a friend,” she said. “It looks right — can I hear it?”

Having been satisfied that the gatefold cardboard CD packaging with the nice design looked suitably gift-ish for her (clearly cool) friend, the only thing left to check was to see if the music was a more or less satisfactory fit for the purpose.

Of course, it was.

The artwork, the feel of the design and the aesthetics of the disc had encouraged the woman to buy for her friend. The music was just another part of the experience.

“I hold this in my hand,” she seemed to be saying, “and it says ‘here is what I think of you’”.

So for our purposes, the question becomes — how exactly do you design that sort of gift-giving impulse into the digital music experience, in the absence of tangible packaging?

Here are some thoughts to get you started: you might wish to contribute your own:

1) A subscription methodology. For a one-off “gift-value” charge, provide a monthly or weekly download or membership privlege.

2) Gift vouchers. An easy one.

3) Make it gift-worthy. Include high quality photography and design into what you do. Go for an immersive experience.

4) Why not send it to the giver to present in a handy, gift-wrappable format? Say… a customised USB key with your music, artwork and videos?

5) Offer a personalised message to go with the music. Buy it as a gift, and the artists in question will say a quick happy birthday, anniversary or whatever…

These are just a few ideas.

But it’s worth remembering that music used to be one of the most popular of gifts — and now, online, it’s bought almost exclusively in a first-person fashion, which diminishes your potential market. Might be worth looking for interesting ways to address that situation.

Paid downloads have helped, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be enough to save the record business. Is Britney’s next album going to have radio-style ads in it?

There’s an interesting article in the latest New Media Age magazine. It was brought to my attention by a colleague of mine, who is more involved in that side of things.

It concerns a discussion that took place at the recent Midem in Cannes to do with the promise of the new ad funded online music services such as Spiral Frog. It turns out that Spiral Frog has had a really significant shakeup at the top end, and it seems unlikely that they’re going to be on track for a launch any time soon.

However, one significant piece of consensus that came out of this discussion is that it seems unlikely that the music industry is going to realise its dreams of returning to its former economic glory through downloads alone.

Mark Mulligan, research director at Jupiter Research thinks that 2007 will be the year of the ad funded download. He says that the pay to download model is not enough to turn things around and that it has failed to capture the imagination of young music consumers. Ads, he thinks, are the way forward.

Unfortunately, it was unclear as to how the new ad funded system might work — and there are fears that if it works too well, it may well spell the end of the high street retailer. His solution seems to be to impose limitations as to what users are offered.

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When trying to get to terms with technological shift, often the best strategy is to question the question.

I received an email from the nice people at Music Tank — an organisation that puts on superb Music Industry events, predominantly in London. They asked me to their next seminar, and asked a simple question as a kind of straw poll. Think I had a simple answer?

They wrote:

Whether or not you are attending this think tank, we would be grateful if you could consider the following 2 questions posed by the event’s keynote speaker, Gary McClarnan.

1) As a music fan, if your favourite band offered you the freedom to choose the price of their download, what would you pay for it?

2) iTunes have just employed you and your first task is to re-appraise the price of iTunes downloads. What would you charge?

To respond, hit the reply button, put REPLY in the subject field, and numeric answers only, please, to questions 1 & 2.

Of course, in order for me to answer a couple of questions like that, I needed more than just a few digits. I wrote:

Hi,

With the best of intentions — and sorry to be a drag — but neither of those questions actually contribute to the debate, or advance it beyond the mere quibbling over price point. The issue is far more fundamental than that: digital music downloads don’t adhere to the same rules of economics that apply to physical products.

There is no scarcity of supply, and nor is there scarcity of shelfspace — and consequently there’s more going on here for music business than “how much should this cost?”

Try something like “what does it mean that our company now has infinite stock of everything we have ever released, and overheads have dipped to near-zero?” — or “how do we replace the simple retail model of music-commodity-for-cash with an economic exchange that makes sense of the fact that music is no longer a tangible commodity at all?” — or “now that music is free (by a factor of 40:1 in 2006), how should we now make our honest livings as intermediaries between artists and music fans?”

They seem more sensible questions than just “how much further should we keep discounting what we do in order to hang onto every last vestige of a model that is well and truly on its way out?”

Oh, and if you must have a numeric answer then I’d go with 10p for now… but reduce it to a single penny per track once hard drive storage is typically in the terabyte range, and broadband speeds average in excess of 8Mb/s. Give it, say, three years.

If you want to hang onto the retail model, then all you can continue to do is undercut in the hopes that consumers will simply buy everything ever.

Sorry I won’t be in attendance on the 6th — but I’m sure that will at least help the day run smoothly. Enjoy.

I won’t be there — but if you can, perhaps you should be. Here are the details — and you should know that I have never come away from a Music Tank seminar feeling I had wasted my time. They are always recommended.