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Q&A: Napster CTO says long-term win goes to the cat
In Part Two of MP3.com News' conversation with Bill Pence, Napster's tech guru talks about branding and how personalization will help the company beat Apple and iTunes.
In Part Two (read Part One here) of our conversation with Napster CTO Bill Pence, he talks about the company's success in distancing the Napster brand from its days of free music for all, and says the digital music space is still only in its infancy.
MP3: So we know marketing's not your bag, but let's chat about branding for a second. Obviously, the word Napster was synonymous with free music just a few years ago, and the goal, of course, is to make that diminish over time. Has that happened?
Bill Pence: We know it has. I know that we have done studies when we relaunched the service and found that people thought of Napster as cool and innovative, but definitely free. We continued that tracking study, and in the recent past when we've done it, to our satisfaction, we found that the positive attributes of the brand, "cool" and "innovative," still were right at the top, but "free" was no longer there.
I think we've gotten the word out now that we are a legitimate for-pay service, but we still very much want to maintain that edgy brand and really focus on that immersive experience.
MP3: What made Napster cool, back in the day--other than it was free?
BP: What made Napster cool in the original days was you went in and you found music. You found it from when you were in high school, when you were in college. It was just a blast. Back then people were saying, "This thing is going to have to go legit some day, but wouldn't it be cool if you could just do this? I'd pay $10 a month for this." And that's exactly what we've built.
MP3: Let's talk about the XM deal, real quick. Napster recently signed a marketing deal with XM Radio. What impact, both as a marketing tool and an indirect competitor, does satellite radio have on Napster?
BP: It's become very clear to the whole industry that where this is all going is toward a fully integrated experience. Satellite radio is very popular, moving beyond the auto and in to the home, and I think it's going to continue to grow quite rapidly. And yet they recognize that they're not just replacing passive listening on terrestrial radio with satellite radio. It's digital, and people are going to want to have that full, immersive experience where sometimes you're going to want to get a programmed experience over the satellite, or you're going to want to come back to those tracks that you've recorded on the device, or maybe find out more about that artist and build a collection for listening in your home. Then there's convergence going on, in which those digital devices will have receivers in them but they'll also be basically MP3 players, and they'll be able to carry a collection.
MP3: So we've talked about education and branding and marketing and the mobile space. So what is the single biggest thing Napster is focused on from a technological point of view?
BP: I would lump the things we're doing into a couple of spaces. One is extending the platform outward, which includes mobile, the automobile, and the home network. And this is not something we're all doing by ourselves, but trying to really advance it so that the Napster subscriber can easily play music on their living room stereo speakers, plug it into the dashboard in their car, and if they want, carry a device with their collection or carry a cell phone with their collection. The cell phone is a piece of that kind of overall initiative.
And now we've got a good handle on the mechanics of the portable subscription. If you compare that to an a la carte service, it's like a Model T vversus a Ferrari.
And then the other thing that you might not think of as a real technology investment, but it is, is this challenge of really continuing to refine that immersive experience. When you come in to iTunes, you come in to a store. There are lots of recommendations and things, but at the end of the day, it's a store.
When you're in a subscription service and there's literally a million tracks swarming around your head, it's our job to figure out how to present those to you in a way that is relevant, engaging, and not intimidating. So personalization and building that experience is a big focus for us right now.
There's a lot further to go with music, in terms of trying to figure out what we think you might like. And that's really the grand challenge. That is a hard, hard software problem.
MP3: Big picture: Where are you at in reaching your goals?
BP: We're still sort of building the television sets here and making sure everyone can get a color signal. Once that's done, then we've got to make I Love Lucy, and then we've got to make Friends and Seinfeld. It's a long way, and we're just scratching the surface of what we can do. We just need to make sure that we get past this television-building stage.
MP3: Good luck, Bill.
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