Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Frank Zappa spotted it before Apple


In the next meeting with a client or a design neophyte, refrain yourself from using the overused quote "people want a hole in the wall, not a drill". Every single marketing student has learned it and repeated it ad nauseam. Better than that, you can use a quote from the visionary Frank Zappa:

"Music consumers like to consume music... not pieces of vinyl wrapped in pieces of cardboard."


Back in 1983 he already identified the motivations of people for buying music beyond the artifact itself (accessibility to a virtually infinite catalogue and playable from multiple devices with no physical limits) and triggered him to propose a system 'where you could subscribe to whatever genre of music you wanted and get it delivered in batches' which sounds a lot like iTunes music store but many years ago:

"We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store THE BEST of every record company's difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items [Q.C.I.], store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user's home taping appliances, with the option of direct digital-to-digital transfer to F-1 (SONY consumer level digital tape encoder), Beta Hi-Fi, or ordinary analog cassette (requiring the installation of a rentable D-A converter in the phone itself . . . the main chip is about $12)."


1 comment:

  1. Enric its you!! Its me..Lobke Nice to get some lessons from Frank..hug

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