You know the guy. It’s the guy asking what’s the song? in comments to any youtube video with more than a few views and no music credit.

This guy is very important. This guy is the audience and where it is going, for good or bad. You need to know this guy and why he keeps asking

Contemporary consumers are less and less problem-solving oriented. They want to feel good now.

In the old days of advertising, it was simply enough to inform the buyer that your product was better, faster, bigger, more.

Today, almost every consumer has evolved a very strong defense mechanism against advertising. This mechanism is boredom.
Most messages fail to connect, interest, or stir. Meeehhh! is the sound of the internet.

And music is still the default method of breaking through that carapace of emotional detachment.

From radio jingles to TV ads, successful advertisers use popular music to grab the viewer’s attention.

Apple is using the “distribution control through convenince”, first with with it’s ipod and then it’s iphone model.

One cannot make money selling music alone anymore, since people can download it for free, but since most people have a problem programming a VCR, if you make the convenience of getting the most valued product- music- on your iphone or ipod … convenient, you can have the success of itunes.

Most websites today are still using the problem-solver approach, that works only on the task-oriented, object-driven segment of the audience.
From ebay to gmail, they are serving the client’s needs.

But no one has yet broken the medium out to the point where it is a message causing immediate emotional attachment and interest.

Youtube’s most popular content is, you guessed it, music.