The Fifth Avenue Apple Store
They were waiting in line to pay.
One of my first stops in L.A. was at Tower Records, on Sunset. I had to make a pilgrimage, this was the place they opened early for Elton John, so he could buy 300-400 albums at a clip.
I was impressed by the giant album covers adorning the structure. The incredible inventory. The stacks of records on the floor that only I thought I knew of. And the lines. People were always lined up to pay, to get a hit. They could go to a plethora of other retailers and be serviced almost instantly, furthermore, Tower didn’t feature the lowest prices in town, but they had to come to the industrial yellow building with the leaning block red script TO BE A MEMBER OF THE CLUB!
Apple built its reputation on saying no. The initial iMac, the company’s first breakthrough product after the return of Steve Jobs, lacked a floppy disk drive and a serial port. The press laughed, but the public flocked. There’s no on-off switch on an iPod, no instantly clickable volume button. How could a device with so little succeed? The major labels wanted variable pricing at the iTunes Store, Steve Jobs said no and now it’s the number one retailer. Could it be that saying no leads to success?
That’s the way it used to be in the music business. I won’t do your TV show, I won’t take money from the corporation, I won’t do that advertisement. IT’LL KILL MY CREDIBILITY! But now handlers say there’s no such thing as credibility, that you’ve got to take the money and run, that your audience expects you to sell out, that you’ve got no option, it’s the only way to break through! Can this be true?
Those candy-colored iMacs might have been a success, but the company’s market share continued to sink. PCs had won the war. Macs were niche products on their way to extinction. But then came the Titanium PowerBook. And the aforementioned iPod. And OS X. And now, many college campuses are running almost fifty percent Mac penetration. And the youth are our future, in case you didn’t know. They’re the ones who made music free.
Approaching the glass cube I remembered the days of yore, when it was important to get it exactly right. If the album cover color was off, it was scrapped. The act was king, the executives reacted to them. Now the businessman is king and the act is just a pawn in his game, a fungible item that can be told what to do. Clive Davis is a bigger star than any act on his label. And if you don’t believe this, then you’re forgetting all the stars of yore he’s outlasted.
Clive doles out publicity judiciously. He wines and dines tastemakers. He chooses his slots of exposure. I’ve got to give him credit for getting it right. He knows one Oprah show is more important than a score of magazine covers. How come he can get it so right and everybody else gets it so wrong? They think it’s about the act, the song with Clive. But it’s really more about the marketing, the imaging, the sale. Think if Clive worked with credible acts, who spoke from the heart, whose tunes weren’t written by hacks. Then you’d have the era of Mo Ostin and Ahmet Ertegun. The heyday of the business. Today you’ve just got second-rate players who’ve never had their own money at risk shrugging their shoulders and doing it the way they think they must, to keep up their lifestyles. Hell, look at Steve Jobs. Apple essentially never responds to criticism, you can’t get anybody at the company to go on the record, and if an employee leaks, he’s fired. I guess they can’t institute this policy at the label, they’ve already fired everybody.
People were taking pictures. I had to wait in line to get down the circular staircase. And as I descended, I couldn’t understand the visual assault. I still can’t make sense of it. What was everybody DOING THERE?
Were they just there to check their e-mail? But the table where the salesman was giving a demo of GarageBand was full. Another worker showed a foreigner a MacBook Air and the customer laughed and smiled. The Genius Bar was longer than the bar in most clubs. Staffed with attentive employees, dispensing free advice.
Maybe Apple’s got it right, you’ve got to give it away free in order to get people to buy. It took almost a decade for the record industry to realize people want to hear before they buy, not just a thirty second snippet, but the whole song.
And then there was that line… When it got really short, I counted its occupants. And the number came to thirty. Not that Apple was ignoring them, in addition to the clerks at the counter, there were roving employees with mobile credit card readers, checking out those at the head of the line.
There were SO MANY workers. The sales floor was a sea of turquoise shirts. They didn’t want one customer to go unattended to. But unlike Tower on Sunset, the help was open and friendly as opposed to closed and surly. That’s the geek mentality. We’re smart, we’re educated, we’re here to answer all your questions, we’re here to HELP!
How did it Apple get it so right and the music business get it so wrong?
It starts with the product. The music business didn’t care if there was only one good single on an overpriced album. Apple wants its computers to look like museum pieces. Then there’s the service. Go to apple.com and then myspace, you’ll see why the latter is no competition. Everything’s in service to the customer, the buyer is invited in. Price becomes irrelevant, because of the raw DESIRE!
The vibe in the Apple Store was palpable. It was akin to that at the gig, decades ago, when music was the most exciting art form, when you used to have to listen to the record to know which way the wind blew. Sure, Apple cares about Wall Street, but when the stock tanked, there was no excuse, no crying, no explanation. That expectations were too high, that sales would exceed forecasts, that there were key products in the pipeline. Once again, there was no access, just a focus on the underlying business, and a resultant mystique.
I don’t care if you use a PC. I don’t care if you still listen to CDs. Marketing and merchandising cross all product lines. The goal is to get people to desire all your products, to make them a customer for life, to get them to give you ALL their money. This is what acts used to do, by making good music, by treating their fans right. This is what Apple does today.
