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June 09, 2010
A Business Model For The Insane
r: You do have some cheese, do you?
Vendor: Of course, sir. It’s a cheese shop, sir. We’ve got …..
Customer: No, no, don’t tell me. I’m keen to guess.
That exchange comes from Monty Python’s famous Cheese Shop sketch. The customer who cannot find any cheese of any kind in a store that claims to sell nothing but the stuff is an able parody of the maddening retail experiences we all have at some point. Most of the time, you can chalk up such nightmares to circumstance: your bad luck, the store’s bad management, etc.
How often can you chalk it up to the retailer’s actual business model? You’d be in a consumer’s version of the Twilight Zone, right? Well, there’s a business out there which persists in maddening its customers year after year with just such a perplexing business model.
Imagine, if you will, that you sell coats. You have an enormous inventory of coats from a wide range of designers, some all-time classics and some fresh off the runways in Milan. You are the exclusive distributor for the designers on your roster. To advertise your wares, you publish a catalog and maintain a website.
However, the only information you divulge in your catalog and on your website is the name of the designer and the type of coat. There are no pictures or prices.
Also, imagine that you will only sell your classic coats to a customer. If a client wants one of the latest fashions, she can only rent the coat from you.
Since there are no pictures in your catalog, the only way for a customer to actually see what a coat looks like is to order a loaner from you, for which she pays a small fee plus the cost of shipping. Your customer is willing to do this because you are the only vendor from whom she can rent the coat.
If the customer likes the loaner, she has to send it back on her own dime and then request a rental quote from you. Your price will be based on how many times she will wear the coat and how many people will see her in it. Since your catalog has no prices in it, the customer will only find out the price once she’s given you this information.
By the end of her business with you, your customer will have paid a fee for the loaner coat, the cost of shipping that loaner two ways, the cost of the rental coat itself, and the cost of shipping the rental two ways.
If this was your business model, would you expect your customers to want to deal with you more than once or twice a year? Would you expect to do a brisk business in the rental sector of your inventory?
As hard as it may be to believe, there is an industry which actually employs this business model: music publishing.
In order for someone to perform a new piece of music which is under rental restrictions by a publisher, they have to submit to this archaic system. It takes weeks to ferry physical scores back and forth. The perusal fees and shipping costs add up quickly. The entire process is so cumbersome, costly and error-prone that it makes normally sane people want to pull their hair out.
Composers often bemoan the lack of new music on concert programs, but are they aware of how hard their publishers make it to actually perform their music?
Musicians need to look at a score to determine if it’s worth performing. When you have to pay $50 (about the average for perusal+shipping) just to look at a score, there’s a powerful disincentive to ‘window shop’. Instead of a thriving market for new music, there’s a deliberate cloistering of the product behind paywalls erected by its purveyors. Because the rental system is so punitive for the performers, it chills the demand for new music. Less demand means less revenue, which becomes a masochistic justification for the publisher’s decision not to promote the works in the first place.
There are a lot of obstacles facing the performance of new music. In 2010, a publisher’s unwillingness to email a pdf of a score shouldn’t be one of them.
Originally posted by jodru from ANABlog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jun 9, 2010 at 04:13 AM