Content Matters

Apple Music - the Spotify Accelerator

 

Apple Music was finally announced this week at WWDC.

For months (years) we'd been hearing that Apple was ready to launch it's "Spotify killer". But, will Apple Music be a big threat to Spotify, Pandora and other streaming services?

 

Apple has proven that it can sell music. Before iTunes, digital music was the wild west, fraught with piracy and viruses. Kids and tech-savvy adults figured out how to download music, while the rest of the world barely could figure out how to rip a CD. Along came iTunes, creating a safe and user friendly marketplace for buying music. Yet, 14 years and numerous tries later, Apple hasn't shown the ability to deliver a compelling music service. Remember when Apple launched Genius as the "Pandora Killer"? Yeah right.

It's usually a safe bet that anything billed as a [        ] killer will fail to deliver on that promise.  Remember the Blackberry Playbook, the "iPad killer"? Or for those in fintech, the Reuters 2000 terminal aka "Bloomberg killer".  I love Slack, but it's not really an email killer. And Apple Music won't be a Spotify Killer. In fact, it could be a Spotify Accelerator.

What might the impact of Apple Music be? It might:

• Grow the audience for streaming music beyond the tech-savvy market
• Simplify the concept - Apple didn't use the word "streaming" once. It was all about having all the music in one place.
• Enroll millions of users into Apple Music trials, some of whom will cancel after the 3-month free period ends, instead adopting free versions of Spotify or Pandora.

The one way in which Apple Music could have truly killed Spotify would have been if the rumored deals with the record labels came to fruition, eliminating the free version of Spotify and other competitors. But there's no way that would have passed antitrust muster. 

So now, Apple Music becomes YASMS (yet another streaming music service). Bob Lefsetz said it best:

in order to succeed you’ve got to deliver something better, bring in those who were disinterested or scared to participate previously, and there’s nothing in Apple Music that isn’t widely available elsewhere, including its social network and playlists.

When you're the little guy, driving public awareness is tough. Advertising is expensive and word-of-mouth only gets you so far. Despite those challenges, Spotify has grown to 75 million active users, with 20 million of them paying. Apple Music will help to make subscription-based streaming music mainstream. Think of it as your mother's streaming music service. And as streaming becomes more mainstream, that means more users for Spotify.

 

20 Years In, Personalization Still Fails to Deliver Data's Holy Grail

From the earliest days of the Internet, personalization was viewed as the holy grail.

Sites like My Yahoo quickly allowed users to personalize their web experience and it felt good for a while. 

But as time went on, choosing general categories, or selecting a handful of stock tickers just wasn't enough. We wanted true personalization. New products came on the market - iTunes Genius and Pandora promised to personalize music. Yet they still disappoint.

For data publishers, personalization would seem to be the key way to remain relevant in a world where information is increasingly free. Yet in market after market, personalized data still falls short. Here are three spaces where personalization should have transformed the market, yet it hasn't happened.

College Search

As the father of a HS sophomore, I've started to plan a few summer college visits. Our goal was to pick a few cities and plan visits around them. The process seemed simple - I'd pick a geographic area, select a few fields of study, provide a level of selectivity (e.g. top quartile), and I'd have immediate access to lists of targets. 

Apparently not. I tried several of the leading college sites, including Naviance and Cappex. Neither could deliver the simple lists I was looking for.

Hotels

With all the travel sites out there, picking the right hotel should be a no-brainer, right? Yet hotel screening sites rarely enable screening by the criteria that matter most to me. For business travel, assuming a minimal floor for safety and location, my priorities are:

1. Good wifi
2. Accessible outlets near the bed (I am so tired of moving furniture to plug in devices)
3. Good gym
4. 24-hour room service

OK - so try to search on those using TripAdvisor, Hotels.com or any other travel site. You can't. 

Hiring

Job boards were one of the early winners of web 1.0 and the process has been broken ever since. The job boards removed any friction in applying for positions, resulting in floods of unqualified applicants. I gave up on them a decade ago. 

The solution

In each of these cases, it's really about having good enough metadata to make the data searchable. In some cases, the publisher is fully in control. It's not that hard to provide more granular data on colleges and universities. The data is there. You just need to compile it and build a decent search interface. 

For travel or jobs, it's a little harder, in that you need the reviewer or applicant to fill out a form, rather than just entering text. But it's not that hard. I've posted TripAdvisor reviews and would be happy to score the hotel on 10-15 criteria, as long as you provide a decent UI to do so. 

It's amazing to me that, two decades in, we've seen so little advancement in creating great personalization for big markets. There's still a huge opportunity to take market share for those who can execute. And as the world shifts to mobile, improved personalization becomes even more important, driving alerts and other value-add features.

 

Product Management Roles at Interactive Data

2015 has arrived and we’ve got an aggressive growth plan. Interactive Data is growing and we have openings on the product team for rapidly growing, emerging products.

I’m currently recruiting for two roles. If you’re interested, reach out to me at barry-dot-graubart at interactivedata-dot-com.

Product Manager, Vantage

Vantage is the industry leading platform for fixed income transparency, price validation, corporate actions and reference data. Vantage today is a critical part of the workflow of hundreds of hedge funds, investment managers and mutual funds.

The ideal candidate will have experience in successfully bringing to market analytics or research applications in the financial markets. Strong knowledge of the fixed income market is desired, with experience serving front- or back-office markets within financial institutions. The ability to balance competing interests in order to manage development priorities is critical. This is a mid-level to senior position.

Here's the full spec for the Vantage Product Manager role.

Business Analyst, Continuous Evaluated Pricing

End-of-day fixed income pricing is no longer sufficient to comply with current regulations, driving the need for a continuous stream of evaluated prices. Interactive Data was first to the market with our Continuous Evaluated Fixed Income Pricing in 2014 and we are in the midst of adding that “CEP” stream to various products. We’re currently seeking a Business Analyst to support the Continuous Evaluated Fixed Income Pricing data across multiple products.

Successful candidates will bring a deep understanding of market data, strong technical skills (including SQL) and excellent verbal and written communication skills. Experience with fixed income data or supporting front- or middle-office functions at a financial institution a plus. This is a junior to mid-level role.

Here's the full spec for the Business Analyst role.

Both roles are based in our NYC (Tribeca) office, though I will consider candidates for the product manager role in Bedford, MA as well. 

If you or someone you know might be a fit for either of these roles, drop me a note or use the job spec links above to apply directly. It's a great opportunity to help drive the growth of some of our most exciting products.

What makes a great product manager?

Most roles at technology companies are pretty easy to define. Software engineers write code. QA analysts test to ensure releases meet requirements. DBA’s set up and manage data schemas. Marketers market and sales reps sell. But ask the typical person to define the product manager role and they’ll struggle.

Perhaps they’ll say something like “they own the roadmap” or “they define the requirements”, which are certainly true, but that’s only a part of the product management role. Or, they’ll confuse it with project management, which can be a part of the role, but isn’t the primary function.

And, because the product management skills are not so clearly defined, almost everyone in a technology company, from CEO to field sales, believes they can define the product. While they’d never say “let me code that feature”, they all think it’s fair game to weigh in with “that button should be larger” or “we need a search by color feature”.

In reality, Product Managers own the full lifecycle of a product, from initial strategy through market adoption and ongoing enhancement.

image credit: Product Manager via OneDesk

By definition, the day-to-day responsibilities of a product manager will vary, depending upon where a product is in its lifecycle. But, regardless of where you are in that lifecycle, there are certain skills required to be a great product manager.

Evangelist: From the early moments of developing a product strategy, you need to get the rest of the organization behind your effort. Throughout the process, you need to communicate what you are doing and why it should be the priority for scarce dev resources to focus on. And when you approach product launch, you’ll need to rally sales and marketing, customer support and others to embrace it.

Listener: Product management is not done inside an office nor a garage. Product management is done in the field, understanding customer workflows, their challenges and their goals.

Business Process Analyst: The ability to fully understand business needs is perhaps the most critical b2b product management skill. A good product manager can explain, in simple terms, the exact customer need behind a feature request. Typically, this is done in the form of user stories. The key challenge is that customers will often try to explain what they want in the context of how they perform the task today (with your product or something else). So, they’ll say “we need a button here that loads the profile” when what they really need is to integrate data from two systems into a single view. The Product Manager’s role is to probe until they understand exactly what a customer really needs and what specific benefit that provides them.

Relationship builder: To successfully bring products to market, you need to build strong relationships with customers, with engineering, with QA, with UX, with sales, presales and training. Product management is about building mutual trust and respect with each of these groups, so you can constantly manage the balance and conflicts between their desires and the needs of the business.

Prioritizer: product management is about focus and prioritization. There will be constant trade-offs in terms of functionality, resources and timing. The product manager needs to be able to say no, or at least “not now” to feature requests from sales, marketing, customers and even the CEO.

Technical knowledge: while I’ve met a few product managers who come from a coding background, that’s not necessary for the job. But you do need to understand the technology stack and have a sense of what it takes to build something as well as understanding of how to scale to meet the needs of the business. If you don’t understand the technology, you’ll never earn the respect of the Engineering team nor will you be able to effectively translate user stories into technical requirements.

Being a great product manager requires all of these skills. You must be effective at cutting to the core of what customers need, while being incredibly focused, constantly reprioritizing and, most importantly, able to influence without authority.

And I wouldn't trade it for any other job I know.

 

(Part 2 of this post will explore the differences between being a product manager for a startup and for an established company)

 

With Immediacy Comes Great Responsibility

UPDATE (5/26/14): Rap Genius cofounder Mahbod Moghadam has been fired.

Community site Rap Genius sets as their mission to annotate the world - or to become the Internet Talmud. That's a lofty goal and perhaps a worthy one, particularly if they expand into poetry, literature, political speeches and more. But it's also a thorny path, as you look to a community to interpret the words of others.

Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam learned that today when he decided to annotate and publish the "manifesto" of UCSB mass shooter Elliot Rodger. 

Defenders of Rap Genius will note that the words of mass murderers are often published and analyzed. But, for the most part, that doesn't happen immediately. Ann Rule's biography of Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, was published in 1980, five years after his arrest for multiple murders. Moghadam's annotated version of the Manifesto was published just a day after the shootings, at a time when the names of some of the victims have still not been released.

Making the matter worse, Moghadam's comments seemed to reinforce some of the rawness of the crime itself. In perhaps the most egregious example, in a reference to Rodger's sister, Moghadam's comments try to interpret the shooter's feelings towards her, saying "My Guess: his sister is smokin hot".

(image credit: Gawker.com)

While this text was later edited out of the Rap Genius post, it was at best insensitive and inappropriate, particularly since social media has been dominated all weekend with the #YesAllWomen hashtag. 

But the core issue, in my view, is that, while the immediacy of the web enables, and often encourages all of us to "publish" events as they happen, that doesn't mean that we should.

Traditional news outlets have editors who set policies and help journalists make decisions about what information should be shared when. Those of us (including bloggers like me) who do not have a background in journalism, nor editorial oversight, must make those decisions ourselves. And while I'd argue that having a layperson try to interpret the meaning of a mass murderer's comments, with no context nor professional experience, is a wrongheaded effort, the timing of it becomes a key factor as well.

Just a week or so ago, there was great debate about whether it was appropriate that the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City sell high-priced trinkets at a gift shop. Personally, I've been more offended by the politicians who have spent the past 13 years grandstanding in front of the site, but I can see the view of those who were upset by the gift shop. Yet, the Holocaust Museum has a similar gift shop that generates no such outrage. And a major difference, in my view, is the passage of time.

If Rap Genius wished to annotate the manuscript a year or two from now, it wouldn't generate much attention. Of course, it wouldn't generate many page views either, which was clearly a driver in getting it posted today. 

But the immediacy of the web requires us to gauge public response to our actions and to decide what we want our role to be in doing so.

 

 

 

 

 

It's Hard to Disrupt From Within: One Reason the Apple-Beats Deal Could Make Sense

There's no questioning that Apple has been a disruptive force in the market. Whether it's digital cameras, GPS devices, or the original Walkman, Apple has completely changed the way we use electronic devices, bludgeoning many companies in the process. And they've clearly disrupted the way in which we buy music. While iTunes brought order to a chaotic world of illegal downloads, together with Amazon, it's a major reason why Tower Records is no longer here.

 

But in each of those cases, Apple was the disrupter, not the company being disrupted. The one possible exception was when they disrupted the market for standalone iPods by adding that feature to the iPhone, but they were moving customers to a more expensive device in the process, so it wasn't a terribly difficult move.

 

But disrupting from within is not easy. Anyone who's ever tried to bring out innovative new products at an existing market leader can attest to that.

 

When I was with Crowd Fusion, one of our clients was Tecca, a startup funded by Best Buy. Tecca was a mobile-first content provider with great video and blog content on consumer electronics. They also provided a barcode scanner, which returned reviews and pricing from BestBuy, Amazon and Google Products.

 

Tecca could have been a great differentiator for Best Buy, driving greater value for customers who come into their stores. But, although they had incubated the company, Best Buy could never fully embrace it. After all, users of the app might see that prices were lower at Amazon. 

 

And that's the dilemma faced by all legacy companies, when trying to disrupt their own business. Too many people have their bonuses tied to preventing that disruption. And that could be the challenge for Apple and iTunes.

 

For several years, analysts, bloggers and consumers have been waiting for Apple to jump into the streaming audio market with a Spotify-like offering. And, just like the annual Gene Munster predictions of an imminent Apple TV, their streaming audio has so far been a unicorn. They've danced around the edges (iTunes Radio) but held off on building what seemed the obvious next step. And while there are many strong arguments against building an Apple television (low-margin business where consumers only replace a device once a decade), the arguments for streaming audio are much more compelling. So, what's held Apple back?

 

The reality is that iTunes today is a $28 Billion per year business for Apple (using estimates from Horace Dediu). And while the largest part of that is the App Store, iTunes music is still a multi-billion dollar business.

 

Now, I don't know how much the average iTunes user spends on audio downloads per month, but my guess is that Apple would willingly trade those users for a predictable $10/month subscription service. That's not what makes them worry.

 

But when you look at the streaming audio market, most of the companies in that space have used the freemium model. Take Spotify, for example. As of a year ago, Spotify had roughly 6mm paying customers and 24 mm active users. So, they've been able to convert about a quarter of their users from free to paid. As freemium services go, that's pretty impressive. But, for a company like Apple, with billions of iTunes transactions potentially at risk, that can be very scary. The idea that millions of iTunes users might stop paying for downloads, and instead use a free streaming service could mean huge disruption to Apple's iTunes business. 

 

The freemium model makes sense for consumer subscription products, as it's an inexpensive way to drive brand awareness. How would Spotify attract an audience if it required a subscription? Instead, by bringing new users on board for free, they hope to upgrade some of those users to paid over time. 

 

Beats Music took a different approach. They decided to buck the trend and not go freemium. Instead, they used a "free trial" approach, where new users could sign up for a trial of the service, but would then have to either subscribe or quit after the trial ends. Unlike Spotify and other rivals, Beats could rely upon its brand to drive awareness, while also partnering with other companies to spur trials. At launch, Beats Music partnered with AT&T, so users could simply add the service to their monthly mobile bill.

 

And that's why Beats Music is not nearly as scary for Apple as Spotify, Rhapsody or even YouTube. There's no free option with Beats. And, because they're buying an existing business, it will be more difficult for managers throughout Apple to sabotage it, even if they do see it as a threat.

 

I'm still not very bullish on this deal. As I'd previously written, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. But it could be that Apple management, realizing how difficult it might be to disrupt iTunes from within, saw this as a less difficult approach.

 

 

 

 

 

Fourteen Deals Yahoo Could Do With The Alibaba Proceeds

There's lots of discussion of what Yahoo! should do with the proceeds of the Alibaba sale. Some are calling for a dividend (boring), while Josh suggests a bold move would be to buy a controlling stake in Twitter.

And while the core advertising business continues to drag, I don't see any simple deals that would really reverse that. So, while Yahoo should continue to make small, strategic technology deals, I'd look elsewhere for the big deals.

Yahoo still has a huge footprint in both Finance and Sports, so why not double-down on those? And two important, emerging opportunities for Yahoo come in Video and Mobile, so those need attention as well.

Assuming Yahoo has $10 Billion to go shopping with, who should they buy?

In the Finance space, there are a number of interesting content plays that could reenergize their Finance pages and give them some unique content. Stocktwits, the online community for active traders, provides the best insights into financial events as they happen. Just watch the StockTwits page for a tech company during their earning release and you’ll see what I mean. Estimize, who crowdsource earnings estimates, M&A rumors and now economic data, could provide an innovative reason to visit Yahoo pages. TheStreet.com has been rapidly building their video content and would be an attractive fit, provided they could convince Cramer to stay on board for a few years. Yahoo could probably acquire those three companies for around $350mm.

While ESPN has now surpassed Yahoo Sports in traffic (according to ComScore), Yahoo is a close second. It may not be ideal timing, but if I were Marissa, I’d give Jim Bankoff at Vox Media a call. While the new Ezra Klein-led Vox.com may not be a great fit, SB Nation would be a great addition, while Curbed could open up some new opportunities. If they couldn’t get SB Nation, I’d see if I could pry Deadspin from Gawker and would also take a look at Bill Simmons’ long form site Grantland. I might also look to pick up either Narrative Science or Automated Insights, both of which offer technology which automates short editorial articles from statistics. Yahoo already uses Automated Insights for personalized summaries of fantasy sports results, but could expand its use across multiple verticals.

Video is a big area of focus for Yahoo, and one where they’ve had success, though the numbers aren’t yet big enough to move the needle. If I were Yahoo, I’d look at Funny Or Die, or perhaps see if IAC might part with CollegeHumor.com in order to drive short-form video and bring more of an edginess to their offerings.

That leaves mobile and social. There’s a lot of interesting activity there. I think the valuations for SnapChat are too high, and I could see it going downhill after an acquisition, but maybe Yahoo could make a play for Whisper or Secret.  And, of course, a content site like Buzzfeed or Distractify could drive a lot of social engagement on mobile and the desktop.

If you were Marissa, what would you do with that pile of cash?

LinkedOut? LinkedIn Shuts Out CRM Partners

Based on this post from Zoho CRM, it appears that LinkedIn has cut its CRM partners to just two - Salesforce and Microsoft. And, if you visit the LinkedIn Developer page, it becomes clear that they have chosen to work with just those two partners. 

In an environment where APIs and web services are at the core of innovative web applications, LinkedIn is taking a step backwards towards a walled garden. From a financial standpoint, I understand it. LinkedIn has an incredibly unique and valuable database. And SalesForce and Microsoft not only have the huge installed base, but also the deep pockets to make this a hugely profitable partnership. 

The exclusivity may make sense from a short-term revenue standpoint, but it's certainly not providing value to many of its users. I don't know the terms of LinkedIn partnership deals, but hopefully they can come up with an access plan that could make sense for some of the smaller, upstart providers like Zoho, Nutshell and others. 

 

Out of the Ruins: Lessons from Thunderdome

Yesterday's announcement by Digital First Media's John Paton, that DFM would be shuttering it's Project Thunderdome has provoked quite a bit of chatter. Much of that came in the way of schadenfreude, or "patonfreude", as Lucia Moses called it.

And, some of that is to be expected. John Paton has a big personality and he was not shy about touting the bold steps that DFM was taking in an effort to redefine their business. But most of the response was supportive, recognizing that bringing change is difficult, and we should celebrate the efforts, regardless of the results.

Ultimately, there were many huge challenges that DFM and Project Thunderdome faced.

As Mathew Ingram notes, a private equity-backed structure, does not lend itself well to long-term experimentation with new models. 

But digging more deeply, there were many structural issues. 

The basic idea behind Thunderdome was to create a centralized newsdesk to handle all big, national stories, with local properties handling local news. In many ways, that made sense, and DFM assembled an all-star team of digital news professionals, led by Jim Brady and Robyn Tomlin to lead it.

But that model may have been one of the big challenges for DFM. 

While shared resources make sense, transformation of a business from print to digital can't be done by a centralized, shared unit. Innovation is not something that can be created externally and dropped into an organization, as though by an Amazon drone.

As Ken Doctor notes: "Thunderdome wasn’t universally received well within the company. Talk to the locals and you heard grumbles. Traffic to the new Thunderdome sections didn’t impress them. They didn’t like national imposition on local news judgment."

Successful transformation has to come from a blend of new and old. Embedding new capabilities, while empowering existing editorial resources, is probably the best path to success. Of course, there is always resistance to change, and we've seen many cases where the legacy organization rejects the implantation of an innovation team. But it seems that positioning Thunderdome as the future, and the local papers as "the past" left DFM with no bridge to navigate the present.

 

Data Publishing With Content Curation and Aggregation

The traditional boundaries of publishing have vanished. 

Data publishers now create editorial, traditional "content" publishers want to publish data, and brands are hiring journalists to better engage their customers. At the same time, most publishers have stumbled when it comes to content marketing and social media.

For b2b publishers, this emerging world can be challenging. Yet, there are some simple ways for publishers to embrace aggregation and curation to drive engagement and to improve their content marketing efforts.

I'll be speaking on curation and aggregation this Thursday at the Specialized Information Publishers Assocation (SIPA) "Pathways to Publishing Profit" conference in DC. Here's a preview of some of what I'll be exploring.

The value of curation continues to increase as a means of filtering content for an audience. Curation is not new, of course. B2B publishers have long served as a filter for information. Whether you need to track legislative activity on a topic or market-moving news about companies, b2b publishers have filled that need. What's changed is that automation can be used in conjunction with human editorial to provide that filtering at a much greater scale. And, leveraging the right tools, there's no need for a large editorial staff to filter the content. Curation can be done by small teams or a single person.

A good example is Jason Hirschhorn's Media ReDEFined. Delivered via an enewsletter or via social media, Media ReDEF is a must-read for anyone in the publishing or digital media space. Jason is a one-man shop. Using RSS readers, he scans an estimated 3,000 - 4,000 stories per day and selects the 30-40 that he feels most important. And there are lots of ways to read Media ReDEF. I follow MediaReDEF on Twitter, but prefer to read it in Flipboard, as it's a great platform for news consumption. But you can read Media ReDEF via email, Facebook, RSS or whatever method you prefer.

 

Working at a slightly larger scale is Alacra's new Dealmeme, currently in beta. Alacra uses technology to aggregate thousands of news feeds, with probably 100,000 or more stories a day. Using a mix of semantic technology and human editorial, they identify M&A rumors, deal ideas and deal news, then display the information in a Techmeme-like interface. Dealmeme leverages a number of advanced technologies, but operationally, the team is a fraction of the size of what it would take to do the same thing using just manual editorial.

Effectively curated content can be used in various ways. At its simplest, it can be used to attract a following and engage them on a daily basis. Jason Hirschhorn's Media ReDEF has more than 7,000 Twitter followers. And most of those followers are big fans of the free service. Most b2b publishers have struggled to gain a foothold in social media. By providing a stream of focused content each day, you'll quickly grow that following.

Leveraging technology for aggregation and filtering, combined with editorial expertise to pick the right stories and topics, publishers can today deliver a focused set of information to its audience, without the need for a massive editorial team.

We'll cover much more at the SIPA conference. Hope to see you there.