I admit I have a tendency to get more worked up than the average customer about bad form in email sign-ups. Most people, I’m sure, will either groan and put up with it, or lie… Maybe they simply don’t bother and move on.

But for me, it seems daft to go to all the effort and investment of persuading someone to engage more closely with you – and then make it so difficult to actually get on your email list.

There is really only one piece of information you should ‘require‘ to send someone email. Yep, the email address. Take a look at this form: it’s the only thing that Q have NOT required you to give. Madness.

All the other information is useful, I agree. But if you don’t get it immediately, it can still be gathered later… a really good welcome programme is a much better time to do it. Anyway, surely it’s better to be in contact with someone you know only a little about than to lose them completely because they don’t want to share their full address, mobile number and date of birth with you?

I’ve worked with a lot of companies on their sign-up processes and subsequent email programmes. I’ve analysed which data you hold on someone is the best indicator of customer value – for retailers and for media companies. Believe me, there are many more important things than having all these required fields.

Please, Q, stop making your would-be subscribers jump these barriers to entry. You’ll thank me for that advice if you follow it!

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'tis the winter of our list content

The calendar flipped over to December this week, we got an inch of snow in London… and everything ground to a halt. Except for the compilers of end-of-year lists, who’ve swiftly moved to fill the breach.

Long term readers (yes, both of you) of Sandlines will know that I’m a bit of a music fan, so I’ve closely followed the ‘best albums of 2010′ lists in Q Magazine, NME and the like – and I’m looking forward to various others.

One things struck me, in particular, about the NME list: on their website, they link to the reviews of each album and publish the score (out of ten) of each title listed. The consistency between what they are saying now with their own reviews over the course of the year is astonishingly low.

MGMT’s sophomore effort, Celebration, managed only 6/10 upon release – but features at #19 in the end of year list… considerably higher than the much more favoured Dilinger Escape Plan which, despite being raved about with a 9/10 review, only managed to scrape in at #67.

So what’s behind this?

It reminds me of the discussion around the ‘Pepsi Challenge‘, as discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Pepsi produced a product that, in blind tests, wiped the floor with market-leader Coke. They used this as the basis of a huge marketing campaign. Coke remained (by some distance) market leader. One of the reasons for this, suggested by Gladwell, is that the ‘sip test’ talked only to first impressions – and the sweeter Pepsi drink made a much better first impression. But over time, people found the sweetness cloyed.

Of course, another major factor is the power of brand identity and associations – one of the reasons why Stella Artois spent much of the past 30 years as market leading lager in the UK despite consistently doing poorly in blind taste tests.

So perhaps the lists reflect the more considered satisfaction with the music in question – and the power to last out the initial sugar rush. Certainly, NME’s choice for the top spot, the excellent ‘Hidden’ by These New Puritans signally lacks saccharine (excellent choice, by the way guys).

There’s a clear marketing lesson in there somewhere. But what I’m going to pull out is more direct: these lists make people buy. The Q list made me buy ‘Queen of Denmark’ by John Grant… an album that (assuming it’s not a ‘sip test’ reaction) is probably going to make my top 5 of the year.

PS – my others would be These New Puritans’ ‘Hidden’; Arcade Fire’s ‘The Suburbs’; The National’s ‘High Violet and ‘Total Life Forever’ by Foals.

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... just not direct to a mobile network

So Nokia has failed to persuade the mobile networks to stock it’s “Comes With Music” phones, notably the

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text goes ... er...

The more observant amongst Sandlines’ readership may have noticed that I’ve mentioned a band from Glasgow, called Glasvegas, a couple of times. You may not be amazed to learn, then, that I signed up for their email communications.

I think there must be something about music companies and their approach to email that just misses the point: this email is from Sony subsidiary, Columbia Records, but shows many of the same problems I saw a few years back from one of the other majors (who’ll remain nameless… for now).

In common with a lot of emails from this industry, there is a lot of reliance on images to convey the message of the email. This is fine until you realise that the default for so many email accounts to keep images turned off by default.

Never mind, I turned images on – after all, I want to see what they have to say.

Oh.

They’ve done the old black-text-on-a-black-background trick. I suspect they planned to do white text on black, but of course testing the outcome in the various email clients is just such a lot of work…

As Nate Elliott from JupiterResearch (before being swallowed by Forrester) said at my Advanced Email Strategies conference last year, “… (email marketers)… are Marketers without Images”. Seems Columbia went one better – marketers without images OR words.

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Anyway, alongside 7Digital and Play.com, iTunes is at last getting some serious competition. I like it!

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Bye Bye DRM

I blogged a couple of times on this subject already – this is really just an update. Seems Sandlines was pretty quick off the mark with this news yesterday, beating New Media Age, Brand Republic and the Guardian to the punch.

When I posted below, there were a smattering of Sony/Columbia etc titles available in MP3 format. 7Digital have now confirmed that they are 100% MP3. That means 4 million tracks. Oh, and that Glasvegas album is better value, this week only, for a fiver. You heard it here first

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BUT, I’m genuinely excited that we may be seeing the end of ridiculously un-customer friendly DRM policies in the sale of music. Who knows, if they get round to TELLING people they’re doing this, maybe their sales might even increase a little…. I’ve long believed one of the reasons that *some* people download, um, illegally is because DRM makes life so blinking difficult to enjoy music that you have legitimately bought.

Now all we need is for Apple to soften their approach to syncing your iPod with more than one PC and we’ll be making REAL progress in providing a highly usable digital music experience. Hurrah!

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MP3 = Universal Music format

… and it’s a yes!!!

Well, perhaps I shouldn’t really try to claim credit for this, but right after I blogged (below) about how Universal and Sony should embrace the brave world of DRM-free music and allow their catalogue to be sold as MP3, I found myself looking at the 7Digital site and lo, there’s a whole swag of Universal’s various labels all offering MP3 format downloads.

That means artists like U2, The Killers, The Cure, Amy Winehouse, Sam Sparro, Kanye West, Jay Z… quite a long list.

I feel a spending spree coming on…

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Comes with DRM Time Bomb

I’m a huge consumer of music – have been one way or another all my life – and I’m old enough to remember buying music in Vinyl (before it became cool again), cassette tape, CD, MiniDisc (remember that?) and now of course I buy most of it via download sites – MUCH prefering MP3 to the complexities and frustrations that DRM has inevitably brought to the process. So I come with baggage.

The only good thing about DRM (and there’s not room here to talk about all the bad stuff) is the opportunity for subscription services – rental of your content. And Nokia’s offering here is an interesting move ahead on what the likes of Napster and Vodafone (amongst others) already offer: this time the DRM is linked directly to the purchase of the device – so you buy your pay-as-you-go nokia phone, and you can download ‘all you can eat’. Then, 12 months later, the bomb goes off. You need to go out and buy another phone.

Neat trick: Nokia just turned the PAYG market into an annual subscription, of sorts.

D’you think they have people standing outside schools flogging these things?

Personally, Ihave an eclectic mixture of devices: a Sony Walkman music phone, an iPod Touch, a couple of other mp3 players – and I like my stuff to be playable whereever… so I MUCH prefer my music in MP3 format, thank you very much. Thanks to the mix of eMusic, 7Digital and Play.com, *most* of what I want to buy comes through in MP3 (legally!). I’m just waiting for (most of) Universal and for Sony to get with the programme… Come on guys!

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