The following MBW columnist comes from Eamonn Forde (pictured), a London-based music journalist, and author of The Last Days of EMI: Selling Pigs. His new book, Leaving the building: The energetic afterlife of the music zonesNow available through Omnibus Press.
In Japanese culture there is a concept tsundoku. This means that when someone buys too many books, the act of reading them becomes overwhelming. So they sat unread as more books were added to the slanted piles, the bibliography empty behind bars.
Tsundoku typically involves tangible objects but it increasingly feels relevant to the streaming age of subscriptions.
Case in point: it didn’t happen rather not yetbut I this Exit cancel my Netflix registration.
I imagine my £6.99-a-month loss won’t put Netflix’s share price in a bad spot. I assume it won’t trigger an emergency board meeting at Netflix Headquarters.
If I cancel, I will definitely receive some passive (automatic) active emails and push notifications asking me to reconsider or let me know [name of hot new show here] just “dropped” and I won’t be able to watch it unless I go back to the first screen of Netflix.
My decision to think about maybe considering canceling my subscription has nothing to do with the price increase in the cost of the subscription, where Netflix has added a full £1 to my bill since April this year.
My decision to think about possibly canceling my subscription was because my viewing on Netflix was at least erratic.
This is of course all my fault. It’s not Netflix, it’s me.
Some months, I give it a clack and watch a decent amount (I choose not to binge, thank you) of what’s on offer despite Netflix having one of the poor search and discovery interfaces the most intuitive of any major media product in the world. Honestly, it shocking.
Its algorithm seems to be built less on taste and preference and more on creating a feeling of FOMO: “This is number 1 in the UK RIGHT NOW and you will be a mocking character if you don’t see it all at once.”
I’m okay with being a mocked character. I made peace with that part of my life.
Then, other months, my account collects digital dust. Sometimes it takes two or three months before I even think about spending 10 minutes looking for something I might be interested in watching. I sighed as another £5.99 (now £6.99) was accumulated from my bank account as a tax on my laziness, ingenuity and indecision.
I’m lazy so I probably won’t cancel… quite yet?.
All of this – and the recent media buzz about Netflix losing 200,000 subscribers in Q1 while Disney+ added 7.9 million new subscribers during the same period – sparks controversies surrounding media saturation and attention degradation.
But I quickly got tired of thinking about it and instead thought about how Netflix and every other subscription service could keep subscribers like me.
All of these services are built on what they see as a glamorous premise, providing us with everything we could “eat” from their catalog for a fixed price per month. . On paper, it’s a huge deal. In fact, it is presenting us with an existential conundrum about inconsistency.
There are months when it seems like the bargain of the year. And there are months when it looks like the streaming media equivalent of a three-card Monte.
“The fixation in the DSP world is growing at all costs; this is why no one raised the price. But it takes planning for when the market reaches saturation point or when people start to check the sheer number of subscriptions they have and make the cold decision to sell off the subscriptions they rarely use. most useful”.
Netflix tried to raise prices and not necessarily lose me, but there’s bound to be a tipping point or breaking point – even a defining point – where Netflix ultimately makes the decision to cancel me. Eventually, I will get tired of paying for something that I use infrequently and infrequently. Like it was a lawn mower. Or a stamp. Or a wedding dress.
There will definitely be Spotify and Apple Music subscribers in a boat similar to the one I am drifting aimlessly through the vast ocean of Netflix content. They are paying for something right now but there will be a growing suspicion that they are not making the most of it. A few hours here and there some month doesn’t feel like a best used subscription. A library of 80 million songs is not suitable if you spend only a few hours out of a few months reading it.
For some, there is a significant difference in volume and value.
If Netflix changes the price to say £2.99 a month but limits me to, say, 10 hours of streaming per month, I’ll happily pay it and stay with them. £5.99 still gets me unlimited streaming, but if I’m at £2.99 and it’s over 10 hours per month, I’ll have options, such as a fast, pay extra mobile data plan a little to exceed my monthly allowance.
The All or Nothing subscription model really needs to be updated to the All, Something, Little Less than Something or Nothing subscription model. It takes flexible pricing to understand that not everyone consumes in the same way or to the same extent.
More thought is needed on what we can begin to understand as two-way maintenance pricing: how low can you lower your price to still make economic sense for both sides as consumers wander. hike every few months, take a look and then hike again?
Here, the ARPU arithmetic that needs to be re-imagined is the Per-User Attention Retention Rate.
These services can see which users don’t like their streaming and which users pick it up, shoving shows or music around their disc and not accomplishing anything. Those who find it are the ones most at risk of leaving. So how do you stop them from leaving?
Currently, the number of new subscribers coming in is more than the number of old ones leaving, so it is not a concern for picky consumers to get out; but any fixation on the development of the platform alleviates the longstanding problem of subscribers not using the system and why they leave the system.
If they don’t address these people, the decline, when it happens, could be a lot bigger than they dared to predict.
Maybe it’s time to look back at how eMusic used to work, understanding that some consumers consume more than others, so they created different levels based on their voracity or level of appetite. user health.
There are also bloom.fm tried this decentralized access model in the early 2010s, but it was a bit confusing/confusing and it lost too much ground because Spotify was powering the front. However, there is something that a market-leading service with years of user data at its fingertips, rather than a niche player living by mouth with its capital, can succeed.
Fixation in the DSP world is now growing at all costs; this is why no one raised the price. But it is necessary to plan for when the market reaches saturation point or when people start to examine the sheer number of subscriptions they have and make the cold decision to sell the subscriptions they rarely use. best.
For digital music subscribers, the immersive feeling of tsundoku is not so buckling under the brutality of mass as quietly strangled by the fallacy of value.Worldwide music business
