Business Jazz – 25th May 2013 – The Visual Podcast

TOPICS THIS WEEK: Risk, Experimentation and Change

Part of running a business and being an entrepreneur is trying new things.

We're all about connecting with our community on this podcast. We think the most successful businesses are the ones that engage well with their target market. They build communities.

In this week's episode, we talk about changing the podcast to allow us to engage better and more directly with our listeners. In fact, we're thinking about how you can participate in the actual recording of the podcast. One way of doing that is using Google+.

Our conversation leads us to discuss how audiences and companies find each other and how they build relationships. Rather than trying to please everyone all of the time, the better strategy is to please a smaller subset of people who really get your business.

That involves taking a leap of faith. Risk is part of finding your true audience.

The video

Links to people and things we mention

Chris Brogan

New rallying point

You are a big part of the story of this podcast. We'd like you to be an even bigger part of it. To help with that, and to help us have discussions about being genuinely attractive in business, we've established a LinkedIn group. Please knock on the door and we'll let you in.

Country tally

Our confirmed country tally as of this week is: 8.

We know we have listeners in Canada, Ireland, the UK, the USA, the Netherlands, Croatia, Serbia and India. If you live in a country not on this list, please let us know. We're working on an interactive Business Jazz listeners map, which we hope to launch soon.

Listening to the podcast

You can listen to this week's podcast using the player at the top of the post or download it directly here: Business Jazz – 25th May, 2013.

We're also in iTunes. We'd love it if you subscribed or left some feedback.

Business Jazz Players

This podcast is a collaboration of people dotted around the world. Most of us have never met each other. It's quite a story and it's still evolving. 
If you'd like to read what's happened so far, you'll find it here: Our Story.

THE BATTLE TO CONTROL ONLINE PRICES

The struggle to control prices of digital content sold online continues, with producers and distributors battling over prices for downloads of books and music.

In the latest skirmish, Amazon removed Macmillan books from its website after the company protested that online retail was using monopoly power to force publishers to accept prices no higher than $9.99. Macmillan and other publishers have now signed distribution deals with Apple that allows them to price downloads at $12.99 and $14.99.

Producers, of course, want higher prices because they produce higher revenue and better profits.

The struggle to control prices is not unique to the online environment. In the offline world, producers of books, magazines, CDs, and DVDs have long struggled to gain limited shelf space because there is a large oversupply of products and retailers’ have selection preferences for popular, rapidly selling products.

Large national and retailers have also used their bargaining power to push wholesale and manufacturer suggested retail prices downwards. Wal-Mart, now the number one music retailer in the World, uses its purchasing and sales power to sell large quantities of music at the lowest price possible—the basic price/quantity model for all the products it carries.

What is new in the offline world is that the conflict does not merely involve struggles over the price and quantity strategies of retailers, but that the retailers are using the media content as a joint product with their proprietary digital hardware.

Amazon wants content prices low not merely to sell more books, but because it helps it sell Kindle, its e-book reader. To date, it has been able to do so because it was the leading seller of both products—something it learned from Apple’s strategy with i-Tunes and i-Pod.

Competition in distributing content, even just a little competition, helps shift some of the power away from the retailer and back to the producer. Apple was forced to back away from its enforced price of 89 cents for a download when recording companies made deals with other download providers and threatened to end the rights for Apple to see their popular music. Apple is now playing spoiler to Amazon in the book downloads and Amazon has agreed to carry Macmillan books again.

Newspaper publishers are now seriously testing and considering a variety of e-readers as ways to reduce production and distribution costs. As part of their strategies, however, they would do well to learn from the experience of the music and book business. They need to remember that a basic rule of business is that if you don’t control price, you don’t control your business.