Viper Future

iTunes Match: Music in the Cloud. A lesson for marketers

Author: Neil Wilkins

Neil learnt his marketing with the likes of Orange, NatWest, BP Castrol and Ordnance Survey and now helps individuals and businesses to communicate more effectively. He trains and mentors marketers on professional Chartered Institute of Marketing qualifications through to post-graduate level.

With iCloud, the music you purchase in iTunes appears automatically on all your devices. You can also download your past iTunes purchases. Where you want, when you want.

Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud. Since there are more than 20 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it on any of your devices.

Well that's what Apple's marketing message says about iTunes Match but it's just a sniff of the fuller extent of what's happening here. This is potentially exciting stuff and gives us a glimpse of the concept of cloud content marketing in action.

iTunes Match allows subscribers to store their music in the cloud rather than on a single device or fixed iTunes account. For the subscriber this means they can access their music from any of their devices when they want and wherever they are. For Apple it means potentially one central copy of every music file rather than millions of boxes of storage full of duplicate tracks, taking up valuable space in the world's ever expanding servers.

Of course it's wouldn't be just one copy of every track because of security and download resilience, but this is the concept... Centralised content, accessible from the cloud at a time and place the user requires.

So let's extend this idea a little further and explore how it might apply to content marketing.

If content is held centrally in the cloud, then whenever a user needs it, or a brand decides the user needs to be marketed to, it can be accessed by or importantly 'pushed to' them. It also doesn't matter how this information is accessed. It could be Bluetooth/wifi/GPS enabled mobile device or it could be a sign, interactive screen or Internet kiosk as they pass it.

From the marketers' perspective it's about storing the content or information in the cloud to enable this process. Cloud is rapidly moving from being about the technology to becoming the content, the information and the marketing that will fuel the entire concept. With content held centrally in the cloud any changes or updates required for legal or marketing reasons can be made to a reliable, single place, immediately updated rather than relying on users to download at some undetermined time in the future.

The key ingredient in the mix will be just how you join together the technology process with the content and information for a seamless customer journey. That will be the next key challenge to marketers seeking to embrace the opportunity.
 

- Posted on Monday 02 Jan 2012 at 13:11 by Neil Wilkins

Tags: cloud (2), content marketing (1), itunes (2), music (24)