Bryan O’Sullivan pointed me to this great blog post by Ian Rogers of Yahoo! Music. It’s a transcript of a talk he gave to some music industry people, and it’s solid gold for understanding what works on the Internet. Ian knows what works on the Internet, he built a lot of great working stuff until he hit music-industry-mandated DRM. So after too many years watching DRMed bounce off users, he’s finally in a position to tell the music industry he’s not going to help them torture customers any more:
I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience.
Because Ian understands that what works on the Internet is what’s convenient: Inconvenient experiences don’t have Web-scale potential. He ends with his vision of what will succeed:
Lets get beyond talking about how you get the music and into building context: reasons and ways to experience the music. The opportunity is in the chasm between the way we experience the content and the incredible user-created context of the Web. […] But the content experience on the Web is crap. Go to Aquarium Drunkard, click an MP3. If you don’t get a 404, you’ll get a Save As… dialog or the SAME GOD DAMN QUICKTIME BAR FROM 1995. OMFG. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THIS IS ALL WE’VE ACCOMPLISHED IN 15 YEARS ON THE WEB? It makes me insane.
There’s more in his post that’s even better than this. Read it. Normally I like to add context, but Ian’s post is eloquent and says everything that needs to be said about putting users first and what’s wrong with the current range of Internet media experiences.