Musiceuticals: New market or just music vendor differentiator?

I've been wondering about what I think of as Musiceuticals(tm). Let's start at the obvious beginning. Pharmaceuticals make you feel better. More recently other "...ceuticals" arose. Nutraceuticals is one of the most famous (notorious?). According to Wikipedia:

Dr. Stephen DeFelice coined the term in 1989. The term has no regulatory definition, but it is commonly used in marketing. ... Nutraceuticals are sometimes called functional foods.

Ok, foods that make you feel better. Do things marketed as nutraceuticals actually affect how you feel? Few know. Fewer still rigorously ask.

Music. Ah, music. That's a very different kettle. Does anyone with even a passing fondness for even one sort of music question whether it can alter how we feel? The question is: how to harness the power.

Hmm. Power. Not a subtle segue, but it'll work. Like many new approaches, Musiceuticals has ancestors. There's Muzak, for example. That horrible elevator music-like set of frequencies that is supposed to energize and/or calm, but generally annoys. (To be fair, those Muzak scientists have apparently gotten pretty good at this stuff. But you can rarely tell from their output.) And there's marching bands. And there was that little flap about Republicans using Springsteen's "Born in the USA" as a theme song when he wasn't really a fan. And more recently, the Nike/iTunes PowerSong (from the Apple site):

From the Nike + iPod menu, you can set a PowerSong. When you want to hear this song during your workout, press and hold the center button for instant sonic motivation.

In all these examples except the last, someone tries to make you feel a certain way because they choose to do so. Sorry for the tired analogy, but the last example, the PowerSong, is like the Web 2.0 shift from website contents being company-driven (Apple.com, Walmart.com) to being user driven (YouTube, MySpace). For the first time, you store a personally-selected sound that is supposed to make you feel a certain way at a certain, personally-selected time.

Take the morsel of music affecting mindset, link it with personal choice, turn the approach upside down...and you have Musiceuticals. Hey, I love my playlists. They aren't going away. And sometimes I select by genre. Or artist. All these are right on my iPod screen. And yeah, they'll be on the Zune screen. We need another menu item. It may be "Emotion" or "Mindset". Maybe "Musiceutical." In any case, it will alter or maintain your feelings at will. Like a Pharmaceutical, it may not be successful in changing your state of mind without additional forms of "treatment." But it will be a drug of choice.

The only big challenge? What do you need to know to connect music to emotion? And that's a future entry...

Musiceuticals in a trademark of Dox O'Ryan, Doxspot, and the Doxspot owners.

How Can Pandora Make Money?

First things first: Pandora rocks. If you're reading this, I'm sure you know about it. It's not for the purists that think song order on a CD is part of the art form, but if your music preferences include radio and setting your multidisc to "random," it's the perfect path to variety and exposure to new music. [OK, for the uninitiated: tell Pandora a song or artist, they create a radio-like station that plays related music.] I'd be in the theme of this blog to simply encourage Pandora usage. But that's not the point. I like Pandora...and lament it could be crushed any day. It will likely be crushed by a big player with a similar approach, so as a user, I might not care. But Pandora did it first--a good idea simply and elegantly executed. They should live. To do that, they have to make money. So I've been wondering about how they might do that. This is an idea or two on that topic.

Pandora revenue will follow making money from what they know. So what do they know? They know what you've said you like. And they know how songs relate to each other. Hmm. To expand their value, they need to move from what you've said you like to what you really like. I'm not implying you're lying, just that you don't have time to tell them everything. So the first step is obvious: Pandora can look at your entire song collection. And since they know how songs relate to each other, they know more. A lot more. But that's too simple. Your collection is varied because your musical desires vary. So they need to look at your collection at a more granular level. That sounds like work. It sounds manual. Never mind, it exists already. It's your playlists. OK, so this was easy, analyze playlists to deliver multiple, highly targeted "stations." (What? Couldn't afford all the songs that would truly define your taste? No problem, add them to the station manually or give them a thumbs up when they play--just like Pandora today.) Done. They know what you really like. Now to step 2.

Integrate with a music provider. Are you shocked?! Of course not. You know they are busily trying to cut a deal as we speak. But on what terms? With what focus? Just like iTunes, it's all about user experience. When I'm online, I don't usually listen to my own music. I know it too well. I listen to Pandora. I want to keep whatever sense of wonder and newness I have about my music when I'm away from Pandora...which is to say, I'm offline. [Here's where you mileage probably varies--after all, this is a blog, so it comes with a point of view.] So what I really want is "Pandora-To-Go." When the gods shine down from Olympus and cover the planet with wireless broadband, this goal goes away. But we're not close yet.

How does the money work? Online, Pandora is free. Offline access already has a name, it's called "buying." So Pandora-To-Go is an interface for buying. Let's say I was willing to drop just $10 in a typical month for my P-T-G. No subscriptions, just a typical pattern. And let's say (this shouldn't be hard) those clever Pandorites cut a deal with the copyright owners (directly or via iTunes, Walmart, Zune Marketplace, etc.) to deliver non-specifically requested songs at $0.25. This pricing isn't required, but it's a good direction to differentiate from typical music buying. How the *#*&@ could they cut prices so much? Remember the Pandora model is that you can't select what song plays. Even if it is the seed for your entire station. It's free because it's radio-like. It's free because listeners must generally take what they get. It's free because copyright owners know it advertises new music that listeners didn't realize they wanted. P-T-G needs the same approach: it's offline, so it costs $$, but far less because it isn't infinite choice. If they want to get fancy, they could allow you to get a refund on 1 song for every 8 you buy.

There's a deal to be made.

This is a totally new way to fill that iPod. But Apple already owns the market. But you know what? For this service, I might trade my Nano for a Zune. Microsoft should snap up Pandora and provide Pandora-To-Go to provide at least some exclusive value to the Zune Marketplace. Because you know they won't be superior at playing that same game as Apple....

Blink: Is Information Destructive?

This is the first time I've mentioned Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, but it won't be the last. According to Gladwell's site, "It's ... about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye." And you should get it (audio, paper). Heck, it's one of the only books where the support points alone are worth your time (e.g. insanely detailed research leading to fast, simple, accurate forecasts of which married couples stay married). I'm going to start off with one of Gladwell's relatively minor points: information can be destructive. Most of us are info hounds. The idea that more can be less in something so fundamental seems like silly folklore. Perhaps more info can bog things down a bit, but "it's not really going to make things worse in the real world." And that's where Blink changed my thinking. Gladwell uses a long example about the use of information during war. "When bullets are flying," his objects of study assert, "scenario planning bogs down thinking and filters out the really great (and typically unprovable) ideas." But another example is even more compelling: Doctor diagnosis. Turns out that additional tests and data don't objectively improve doc's diagnosis accuracy. Yep, that alone is worth repeating: more data doesn't improve diagnosis. (OK, eliminate the extremes of diagnosing over the phone without seeing the patient, etc.) Gladwell cites research on this which, if you believe he's not confused or purposely deceaving, is compelling. But if this is where the story ended, it would just be an economic issue. You'd be taking tests and not getting better results. The bill gets bigger. But what's destructive? Ah, that's the rub. The docs who diagnosed with more tests and data were more sure of their diagnosis. They were more confident. Mind you, they were not more accurate. They just thought they were. And this is classic "null hypothesis" territory. If you feel more confident, it takes more to change your mind. If you feel more confident, you stop questioning. If you feel more confident, you will be slower to realize when you are wrong. And that's destructive. There is zero question that if Gladwell isn't fudging results, additional info can be destructive. And this isn't a bizarre, unlikely example. It's an example in field that all of us might one day have a personal interest in accuracy.

"Just one more!" comes from Being an Animal

"Evolutionarily valuable" is an interesting concept. To me, it means a behavior which, if followed, would help an organism chug along the evolutionary chain. (If you don't believe in evolution, well, this isn't your topic.) So I've been wondering about what everyday tendencies are evolutionarily valuable. I was rather shocked on day to realize it's evolutionarily valuable for an organism (like a person) to think satisfaction is just beyond its current state. Why? It is, by definition, evolutionarily valuable to achieve something that helps you survive. And we've certainly evolved to find things that help us survive (at least in moderation) to be satisfying or pleasurable--food, physical pleasure, shelter, etc. So no surprise. The organism--or person--is motivated to do things that help survival and evolution. That's half the story. The other half is people seem to have an inbred sense of what economists call a "discount rate." That is, any good thing now is worth more than the exact same good thing (in the same quantity) at some time in the future. And if it is indeed inbred, it is likely not specific to humans, but perhaps many organisms. Maybe even nonsentient ones. Who knows why this sense might develop, but it can be as simple as "enjoy it now because by next week you may be eaten by a cougar." The result is obvious: if you have a satisfying outcome in the future, you will be motivated. But if your brain breaks the outcome into tiny pieces and spreads these like tiny milestones with the same final endpoint, the sum total of motivation increases! Put these together and what do you get? You get an organism that will evolve to want "just one more." For people, that means believing that slightly more in many typical areas will finally make you satisfied. A bit more food, alcohol, money, career success, friendship, etc. will be "just what I need." The implications range from dieting to goal setting to career planning to family planning. The next time you want "just one more" of anything, at least question whether you only want it because your genes are telling you so.

Senseo

I have a serious recommendation for you: the Senseo coffee maker. For the few that don't know the genre, it's a smallish coffee maker that holds water in a 3 or 4 cup reservoir. The coffee is in "pods," simply circular pockets of filter paper with coffee inside. The machine forces water through the coffee and right into a cup or mug. It's not espresso, it makes coffee. So you have to avoid listening to the naysayer reviews about low pressure on the water and all that. The simple key is ease and speed. Lots of both. And there's the obvious advantage for those who want one cup and who share space with caf and decaf people. A colleague recommended this to me a year ago. I didn't do anything until my old coffeemaker died. My delay was foolish. Senseo is cheap and does the job well. I've never tried to price drip coffee by the cup, but Senseo is certainly a small fraction of Starbucks and the like.

The key caveat (sorry Senseo) is their own brand of coffee is poor. Forunately, pod sizes have standardized so there are tons of producers and distributors. More than you'll ever be able to evaluate (unless you start your own website to keep you in free coffee like SingleServeCoffee.co m!). I didn't evaluate them all either, but I tried enough that I can point you to PremiumPods.com, Coffee and Tea Warehouse, and Better Coffee where you won't go wrong. To be a total contrarian, I'll even mention that when desperate waiting for an online order, I tried buying at a Safeway. They only had Senseo and Folgers. Not liking the former, I took the latter. It wasn't as good as the ones above, but drinkable. It'll even taste good if you think of corporate breakroom coffee. I'm tempted to slip it into a blind tasting. If you have a cube, office, home office, etc., Senseo a no-brainer addition. And hey, it comes in colors, so it's practically an iPod.

On Intelligence, Part I

Want a users guide to your brain? You have to get On Intelligence (paper, audio) by Jeff Hawkins. Yes, the Jeff Hawkins of Palm fame. Jeff is pretty impressed with himself, but given Palm, Graffiti and now On Intelligence, maybe he should be. Jeff says he made all that money just to fund his real hobby of figuring out the brain. Maybe he did. Anyway, On Intelligence is Jeff's theory of how the brain works. Not just how it acts, but how it really works. Which tells you how it (and you) will act. And once you read it, you won't see the world the same way again. You won't trust your senses or your memory the same way. You won't teach your children or expose them to things in the same way. It's one of those books that becomes a filter for everything you experience and comparison for new content on the subject you come across. Yes, really. If you find his theory to be hogwash, well, then it won't be like that for you. But if you value understanding your own thinking, you're going to get a ton from the book. Why, it just makes sense and fits (that is, predicts) everyday experience. There might be other ways the brain could work that could also predict human action and thought patterns this well, so the specifics might not be right. But if his theory predicts as much as it does, what else can it tell you? Get it. (By the way, I'm not going to be able to avoid mentioning it in the future, so it would be better if you read or listened to it yourself. ;-)

Talking to Yourself: Thinking Tool or Speaking Practice? (Part III)

Let's finish the "experiment" results mentioned in the last post: I'd found the Fountain of Time. Wait for an internal conversation to start, jump to the end, watch the final scene, follow the decision. Presto. I'd just saved the time of the conversation, whether 10 seconds or 10 minutes. Was there any loss? Turned out there was: Explaining the result. Turns out the silent internal conversation may not have had the apparent purpose of helping reach a good decision after all. Turned out it seemed to have (or also have) the purpose of building and rehearsing the explanation. Most of us never practice what we're going to say. Great presenters do. A lot. But for everyday life, almost never. So if you have had at least one conversation about a topic (even if silent in the hollows of your own little brain), you have a big leg up on most of the world. When your decision comes up and you need to explain yourself, you're ready. There are a few obvious results:

1. If your decision is based purely on "gut" or instinct or intuition (whatever those mean collectively) and not internal conversation, you haven't done the rehearsal. That may be no problem, but it's true.
2. If your decision never has to be justified (what to have for dinner?, is that bird going to firebomb me if I sit at that table?, what font should I use?), then who cares? Rehearsal is irrelevant. Save the time.
   
3. If your decisions are regularly discussed, you won't be as prepared.

Yep, #3 is true. I saved tons of time. I already realized that my, well, arguments weren't as tight when I brought up new ideas with others. It was usually worth it (more than worth it), but this is suddenly like a new internal technology (Thanks DL) to use appropriately. Use that Tivo Forward button when it makes sense. But if actually seeing the whole game rather than jumping to the score at the end makes it easier to talk about it the next day, you might want to see the whole game.

Talking to Yourself: Thinking Tool or Speaking Practice? (Part II)

So back to the question in the previous post: What are these weird silent, internal conversations about? Is it an "objective" conversation between multiple internal perspectives to help you reach a good decision? Or, do you know in advance where the conversation will end...making the whole thing a waste of time? (Or something else)
So I tried an experiment. For a month or so, everytime I sensed an internal conversation starting about an approach I should take, I tried to fast-forward to the end to get to the result. Think of it as hitting the Tivo Forward button so you get the last 30 seconds of the show. And what a surprise, I could always get right to the final "answer." Always. OK, maybe I'm dense and it shouldn't been a surprise. After all, both participants in the conversation are me. But every time? Even when I really did think I was trying to make a decision? Eureka! What a great way to save time! What a great way to be able to think about more stuff in a limited amount of time! More time and no one gets hurt. But is there a downside. Yep. Maybe in only special cases, but yes. See Part III.