The ultimate online music store

Offer me everything.
And I mean absolutely everything. From the best of the best to the kid plonking away on his guitar in the basement. If there's a recording of it, I want to find it. The theme song from the Beachcombers. The 'let's go out to the lobby' song from theatre intermission, an old time radio broadcast of Jack Benny or a cover of Hey Jude by some Japanese pop group.

In a digital environment we just need gates – not gatekeepers. Give us everything that can be given.

Price it so that I don't even think about it
The cost of a song should be a product of the cost to distribute the song. Whatever the cost to distribute a song is – quadruple it. 25% of the cost to cover overhead. The remaining 75% to be split however between the store, the publisher and the artist. Everyone makes a profit. At this pricing, a typical song should cost 5 – 10 cents.

I know what I like when I hear it – help me hear it
With a giant selection should come means and ways of sifting through the selections. Give me multiple means of finding songs and multiple ways to browse through what I like. Let me search by 'lyrics' instead of just by 'artist' or 'title'. Group selections by genre, or give me 'if you like this artist, you may also like...' suggestions.

Improve the quality of the AI behind suggestions. If I buy a few Beatles tracks – don't suggest more Beatles to me. I obviously already know about them and can find what I want pretty well. Individual tracks from John or Paul's later careers would be a start, but I would be more interested in being offered some new band that has a similar sound, style or quality of music. Someone I'd never heard of and likely wouldn't of heard of had it not offered up the suggestion.

Provide full and complete previews – and not just of songs, but entire albums. 10-30 seconds is hardly enough time to appraise a great many songs. Okay - give it to me in a degraded format (24kbps or AM radio quality) - but stop being a gatekeeper. Get out of the way and let me find and buy the music I want.

Give me streaming audio of preselected songs with a quick and easy way to link to an album purchase page when that song plays. Better yet – let me or any other user put together our own selection of music tracks and allow any other user to listen to it.

Provide a forum for people to talk about the music they like and the artists they prefer. Better still – get these artists online and let them speak directly to us about the music they create and the music they like and the artists that they prefer. Which leads me to...

Create a Community
Give me a soapbox to stand on and proclaim my love or hate of certain things. Give everyone a soapbox. Give the artists a place to talk about what they do and give us the opportunity to give these artists feedback. Give us all the ability to share the stuff we like and evangelize the artists we adore.

Trust your audience
Stop worrying about controlling how I enjoy my music and instead help enable me to enjoy my music. There are lots of entertainment choices vying for my dollar – do you want that dollar? Then make things as easy and enjoyable for me as humanly possible. Let me choose what file format I want the music to be in and what quality/bitrate it will be. Instead of wasting your R&D on trying to limit how I listen to my music through DRM – focus on improving the delivery and playback of the music.

Tie it into the RealWorld^(tm)
Let me buy CDs of the actual albums. Better yet – give me the option to create my own CD tracklist and have it professionally stamped and labeled with pre-fab or self-generated liner notes. Give me access to buy t-shirts, posters and other memorabilia.

If I've purchased a number of tracks from a certain band and they're playing in my area – provide a means of selling me a ticket to the event. If there's a band playing in my area that I might like – based on my music tastes – give me a quick link to some samples of theirs and again, sell me a ticket.

Keep me appraised of upcoming public appearances of the groups I like. Are they going to be the band on Saturday Night Live this weekend? Let me know. Will they be signing autographs at the local music store? Tell me about it.

So where is this store?
The store I've described would undoubtebly be one of the most profitable online ventures and likely would become the face of the industry for the coming century. A great bazzar from which all sounds have a fairly even chance to vie for the ears of the audience, and all levels of the industry have a chance to profit. An engine of fandom generation and perpetuation.

But the music industry has chosen to grip on to the old models with both fists. Rather than work together to create a model that would prove beneficial to all – they'd rather try to monopolize the audience. Instead of making music audiences partners in marketing and spreading the buzz surrounding a particular group, they've chosen to attempt monetizing every usage of the song and by extension label their audiences as criminals. They would rather control the conversation rather than facilitate it.

The result of the music industry's direction has been a stifled conversation, less choice and billions of songs moving with not a chance for profit.

The movie industry is on the verge of where the music industry was five years ago. Let's hope they can learn from the mistakes made and that we will soon have the ultimate online movie store.