I've noticed that most mature/static market sectors split in a 90/10 (or maybe 85/15) ratio between a majority incumbent and a rival format -- e.g. Windows/Mac in the PC market, car/pick-up truck (in the US -- pick-ups are a rarity in the UK -- and anyway, SUVs/crossovers are gaining), Android/iOS in smartphones, and so on.
I've also noted that in many segments there's a cost/quality preference split, with the bulk of the market share going to low cost (and low margin) products, but the smaller segment going to a higher cost/quality product. Glaringly visible in smartphones where Apple's iPhone, with about 15% market share, takes about 60-80% of all the profit in the entire business.
This leads me to suspect that there should be a niche for a rival to Amazon that focusses on curation and quality rather than price, at least in the soft goods sectors (books, games, videos, music).
Trouble is, quality is highly subjective -- and how do you assess it? I think Amazon kneecapped themselves in the early days by going for a crude 1-5 star rating system; it's possible to refine your recommendations on Amazon, but the process is time-consuming, tedious, and not very accurate.
]]>It was quite easy for someone like me to have read almost the entire canon of significant SF novels -- as long as they were published over here. I did eventually find a couple of second-hand bookshops that had rows of battered US paperbacks -- grey market imports -- but you certainly wouldn't see them sold as new in regular bookshops.
But the point is, up until the early 1980s I was pretty much on top of what was going on in the field (albeit too immature to understand a lot of the contexts).
By the early 00s, the UK market had expanded to something like 200-250 SF/F novels a year and it was no longer feasible to stay current with British SF/F, never mind the American field (which was a whole lot larger). Selective reading was then mandatory.
(Also, my reading speed decreased with age. I was probably averaging about 300 books/year from age 10 through age 18. But at age 24 I had a bad detached retina and -- following eye surgery -- read about 4 novels during the subsequent year; I came out of hospital and straight into an accelerated CS degree course and just didn't have time. These days I think I'm back up to 30-60 books/year, but my attention is split with the world wide web, which is a huge time sink.)
Thing is, I don't believe it's possible for anyone to stay current with the English language SF/F genres any more. With specific subsectors within it, yes: I can see someone staying on top of MilSF, or steampunk, or paranormal romance, by the skin of their teeth and by reading voraciously, 2-4 novels a week. But the field as a whole is just too big, even before you include the deluge of self-published work, much of which is shit but some of which is as good as or better than anything that finds a traditional publisher.
]]>Hint: Amazon owns Goodreads. Goodreads selects for committed readers. But GR also has a simplistic rating system, and there's no sign of Amazon trying to beef it up.
]]>Talking mostly about music, but includes some useful statistics. For example,
According to the O.E.S., songwriters and music directors saw their average income rise by nearly 60 percent since 1999. The census version of the story, which includes self-employed musicians, is less stellar: In 2012, musical groups and artists reported only 25 percent more in revenue than they did in 2002, which is basically treading water when you factor in inflation. And yet collectively, the figures seem to suggest that music, the creative field that has been most threatened by technological change, has become more profitable in the post-Napster era — not for the music industry, of course, but for musicians themselves.
And for writing,
The O.E.S. numbers show that writers and actors each saw their income increase by about 50 percent, well above the national average. According to the Association of American Publishers, total revenues in the fiction and nonfiction book industry were up 17 percent from 2008 to 2014, following the introduction of the Kindle in late 2007. . . . The numbers seem to suggest that the market for books may be evolving into two distinct systems. Critically successful works seem to be finding their audience more easily among indie-bookstore shoppers, even as the mainstream market has been trending toward a winner-takes-all sweepstakes.
…After hitting a low in 2007, decimated not only by the Internet but also by the rise of big-box chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble, indie bookstores have been growing at a steady clip, with their number up 35 percent (from 1,651 in 2009 to 2,227 in 2015); by many reports, 2014 was their most financially successful year in recent memory. Indie bookstores account for only about 10 percent of overall book sales, but they have a vastly disproportionate impact on the sale of the creative midlist books that are so vital to the health of the culture.
And most relevant to Hugh, I thing,
The new environment may well select for artists who are particularly adept at inventing new career paths rather than single-mindedly focusing on their craft.
Anyway, it's a good article. Well worth reading.
]]>http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rise-of-phone-reading-1439398395
]]>How can you make money off a better rating system?
A better rating system nigh-certainly reduces total sales; people would buy fewer books it turns out they don't like. Individual tastes are fairly narrow and, if facilitated effectively, can get narrower.
Any truly effective rating system would have to build some equivalent of the "components" approach the graphics folks are getting to for compact storage of images, only for complex text semantics. You'd have to make it good enough to work for someone having a fondness for both McPhee and McKillip, to make it work at all. (That is, more effective than the incumbent reviews-and-samples.)
To make it work really well it would need to be time-aware (tastes change!) and you'd probably need user input for mood. Then you would need to make it extremely difficult to poison, which, well. Look at how much of Google's search effort goes to keeping people from gaming the results; any good rating system would need to be a defended commons. Amazon has no business case for defending a commons that will reduce their sales.
Building the thing at all is a big project involving actual cutting-edge research with no certainty of success. Amazon hates those.
Plus, they're the incumbent; incumbents hate change, because change means loss of market share. Their overall business model involves getting to a position where nobody else can get enough capital to compete with them. (Rather like the endgame we're seeing in phones; minimum ante in phones is somewhere north of 10 GUSD.)
]]>They would have to overcome the problem that bookshops and gaming shops have right now. People come and browse, get recommendations, then buy online because it's cheaper. (And bitch when the local shop goes under, because how will they know what to order now?)
I'd love to see it. But when you pay a premium for an iPhone right now, you get different hardware than if you opted for the cheaper Android phone. But the goods sold in your 'curation and quality' boutique will also be sold in the Amazon megastore*, so people can browse the curated boutique to get good recommendations, then flip to a different browser tab and save a few bucks at Amazon.
Unless I'm really missing what you're getting at, which is entirely possible.
*Unless you were thinking of an exclusive arrangement, which sounds chancy for the authors.
]]>Then you have people who cross over multiple subcultures - both creators and fans - and the fans in particular are good vectors. So you have people deeply immersed in subcultures, some of whom are indiscriminate, but some of whom are hugely discriminating, and then as a casual follower you find a critical voice that you like.
In short, I think you just accept you aren't going to see/hear/read everything great, but if you can't find good stuff now - it's probably you.
As for the balance of new and old - the old stuff is also becoming more and more accessible. It would be interesting to measure the growth of available back catalog, including YouTube.
]]>Spotify is terrible for this.
My kids wanted to listen to "Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer". The home speaker network is connected to Spotify. Should be easy! But I wasn't home to say "Gene Autry". So they gave up, because finding an actual decent version on Spotify was too hard - they didn't want to listen to any of the dozens and dozens of covers by no-hopers.
To be fair, most cover bands don't think of themselves as no-hopers. But nonetheless, I'd pay more for a "Spotify super-premium" if they offered one that had less music choices.
]]>Richard Prior refers us to a NY time article that sends us to the OES of the BLA in the USA. That's the Occupational Employment Statistics of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It's written as a refutation of the claim from a decade ago that the interwebs would destroy creative jobs because piracy. What it shows is the the number of people employed doing creative stuff hasn't changed much. I don't quite get the BLS's categories system, and found their historic data hard to query, but that's the NYT article's claim about that data.
But how can it be that we're seeing a "tidal wave" of new works, and yet not seeing an increase in the number of people working in this sector?
Is this what economists would call a "productivity miracle" in which we get more output from less labour input? (less typesetters, editors and sound technicians needed, more writers and musicians producing their own stuff)?
Or is this the age of the creative amateur and part-timer?
Or what?
]]>I'm not surprised that hasn't changed much; getting the majority of your income from a creative endeavour is difficult. Hardly anyone who self-publishes fiction is making their living at it, for example. (Not "no one", not "it's impossible", but hardly anyone in the "it's a lottery win" sense.)
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