Listen up music industry: "Inconvenience doesn't scale" 9 Oct 2007

Yahoo Music VP of Product Development Ian Rogers gave music bigwigs a lesson on user experience at Digital Music Forum West. (Read a full transcript here).

Rogers used the DRM-laden Yahoo Music subscription service as an example to illustrate the raw deal that users get when attempting to listen to music on the web:

"Yahoo! Music demonstrates this scale discrepancy perfectly...Yahoo! Music is the #1 Music site on the Web, with tens of millions of monthly visitors...But the ENTIRE subscription music market (including Rhapsody, Napster, and Yahoo!) is in the low millions...even after years of marketing by all three companies. When you compare the experiences on Yahoo! Music, the order of magnitude difference in opportunity shouldn't be a surprise: Want radio? No problem. Click play, get radio. Want video? Awesome. Click play, get video. Want a track on-demand? Oh have we got a deal for you! If you're on Windows XP or Vista, and you're in North America, just download this 20MB application, go through these seven install screens, reboot your computer, go through these five setup screens, these six credit card screens, give us $160 dollars and POW! Now you can hear that song you wanted to hear...if you're still with us. Yahoo! didn't want to go through all these steps. The licensing dictated it. It's a slippery slope from 'a little control' to consumer unfriendliness and non-Web-scale products and services."

He compared this to the experience of listening to a song on Amazon:

"But now, eight years later, Amazon's finally done what was clearly the right solution in 1999. Music in the format that people actually want it in, with a Web-based experience that's simple and works with any device. I bought tracks from Amazon (Kevin Drew and No Age), downloaded them, sync'd them to my new iPod Nano, and had them playing in my home audio system (Control 4) in less than five minutes. PRAISE JESUS. It only took 8 years."

Rogers concluded with a stark warning to the music industry:

"I won't let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don't have any more time to give and can't bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life's too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out."

Let's hope that the music industry listens.

[via TechCrunch]