How Nintendo Music Potentially Outlines the Future of Media

Nintendo Music, on the one hand, is another Nintendo standalone digital product emerging out of the corpses from previous apps including the 2016 social game Miitomo and quirky products like the Power Globe. On the other hand, I fucking love it — and there are four specific reasons why:

1. It creates further reliance on the integrated Nintendo ecosyst

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Media companies will increasingly have to choose what to own and what to co-pilot. Not every new venture needs to exist as an O&O product, nor does it have to exist within a centralized environment. Licensing out characters to various retailers, or allowing small merchants to use beloved characters in their own designs sought out by different c... See more

Because I'm going to have the hottest new songs. The problem is the consumer wants more than that. They want the old stuff to. So all of a sudden the power in that relationship moves from the distributor who can create new content and also has the consumer relationship to who owns the IP that the consumer wants, the IP that consumer wants a lot of ... See more

And so what you've ended up with, not surprisingly, is a few key players that happen to own the majority of the IP that is kind of a must have in this industry to have a product offering and a handful of distributors that have gotten scale on distribution of great user experiences like a Spotify, Amazon, a YouTube, whoever you might want to think a... See more

A flywheel, based on Walt Disney’s original concept (seen in the infamous diagram below) was to find new opportunities to build upon the love that people have for the set of characters they’re introduced to however they’re introduced. It couldn’t feel like a money grab. Look how that panned out for the comic book industry in the late ‘90s. No, it h... See more

So let's use video because I just think it's a great example. If you think about music and how you consume music, you actually consume catalog product a lot. I certainly do. And I think most consumers do. Songs that I've listened to once, I will listen to again and again, and again, at some point. With video, that's less the case. Once I watch seas... See more