By Antony Bruno
Take the first lesson: Share everything.
It's right there at the top of the list, but only now is
the digital entertainment industry taking notice. Once littered
with walled gardens and content silos, the digital landscape is
beginning to sprout a customer-friendly ecosystem of shared
content and traffic.
Fueling this newfound spirit of interoperability are
technologies that enable the sharing of content between sites.
They include the Open Social initiative and Facebook's open
development platform, both driving the "widgetization" of the
Web.
It's also a reflection of the surging "mash-up" movement
online. A mash-up is a Web application that combines content
and features from multiple sources for a specific purpose that
none of the contributors do individually. The most commonly
used applications are those with easily embeddable content or
open APIs (programming information available to all), such as
Google Maps, Twitter and Last.fm.
But in the past year, mainstream services have taken the
bait. In 2007, Music-based social network MOG added YouTube
videos as part of its MOG TV service. Yahoo's FoxyTunes
originated as a mash-up that combined artist bios, lyrics and
news from Yahoo; related artist recommendations from Last.fm;
and links to buy tracks from Amazon.
The list goes on. TiVo users can now stream YouTube videos
and Rhapsody's music. MTV is using its partnership with
Rhapsody to let fans stream music heard on its TV shows. AT&T
Mobility subscribers can choose between Napster Mobile or indie
haven eMusic as their mobile music provider.
RETAILERS REVAMP
Digital music retailers are getting with the program, too.
eMusic will soon incorporate relevant content from other sites
into its online music subscription service. For instance, a
pending revamp of its artist pages will pull in music videos
from YouTube, artist entries from Wikipedia and fan or other
photos from Flickr.
And in the spirit of sharing, eMusic is reciprocating by
unshackling much of its exclusive editorial content and making
it available in widget form. That includes features like the
eMusic Dozen, as well as Q&A profiles and Spotlight articles.
Its new album-page features enable users to post their favorite
albums to Facebook, Twitter and more than a dozen other social
networking sites and services.
"The days of building some big, monolithic, walled-garden
digital music store that people will come to and you never let
them out of are gone," eMusic CEO David Pakman says. "We
(haven't been) making it easy for fans to embed their favorite
eMusic finds, so this is really a recognition of behavior that
already exists."
Even Apple, that bastion of rugged individualism, is
starting to play better with others. Hand in hand with the
recent iPhone launch was the introduction of iTunes' App Store,
made possible by Apple's decision to give developers access to
the iPhone platform (at a price). The result is a host of
programs that take advantage of one-click iTunes sales, as well
as the integration of such iPhone partners as YouTube.
Rather than competing with these readily available
services, it's proving easier and faster to just incorporate
them.
"Tear down the walls," Pakman says. "Let's bring stuff into
the site that people are already using, and let people take our
stuff out."
It's early days, to be sure. But if successful, these
forays could pave the way to an interoperable future where,
rather than trying to guess how fans want to enjoy music
online, services will simply let them create their own
customized experiences using their favorite tools.
Reuters/Billboard
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