Lady Gaga, along with her record company, is evolving the album in the form of software as a service. Considering the content of her hit new video, Telephone, it is fitting that she would use software to tackle the hard problem of getting paid by amazing fans.
On her path to global dominance, the site, LadyGaga.com has innovated the next generation of brand management for artists. To do this, she creates a join between Google's YouTube, Apple's iTunes, Twitter, and Facebook. Way beyond having a an Twitter account, LadyGaga is hosting an interface party, and you're invited. She's a performer who is inventing ways to create the value of using multiple platforms to juice the network effects.
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Like it a lot? Take a souvenir home from the party for the low introductory price of $1.99 in your iTunes.
Today, we noticed another cultural icon, VC Fred Wilson posted this question on his blog as to what will emerge as Commerce 2.0.
"So the question is who will the YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter of commerce be? Maybe they exist today and will emerge as large scale web services soon. Or maybe they are still ideas in the minds of entrepreneurs and will be hatched in the coming years.It's an area I am excited about and will be on the lookout for. Clearly I'm not the only one."
This is where we think LadyGaga.com's promotion for Telephone stands out as an example of the new world economy. This world is connected by the best ad engines of Google. And it is directly connected to Apple's amazing commerce engine. Apple, in the context of digital goods is showing how extremely it is positioned to be the payment engine.
Embedding YouTube: Get it Now, Anywhere
We witnessed YouTube transition from the wild-west to a control point for labels. Now, a lot of the newest official artist videos flow straight to Vevo, the branded label friendly site that runs ads and controls the experience of the brand.
YouTube is taking advantage of its place as a channeling service for video. In this case, the top, most requested inventory pays for the rest of the service. The higher the demand, the more attention it gets.
LadyGaga.com, like many sites, uses embeddable YouTube. In addition to pointing to commerce services, it embeds links back into other properties at Vevo. Being embeddedable, provides entire custom experience including artist promotion to the site.
iTunes is prominently offered for both buying the video (which is also free on the same page) and also the album. So, there is a bet here that people want to own it, or place value in their iTunes library to offer this connected service.
This brings the user to a one-moment to buy scenario. Shown here, there is the familiar transition to iTunes from the LadyGaga site.
And, the authorization to 'Buy Now'.
In default mode, iTunes is set to require a validation step (a second click) to buy the media. The user can can be set easily to bypass this step and enable the user one-click to buy from the web in the future.
This feature is available to any Apple affiliate, but we find it particularly effective coming from the artist embedded with the video and other endorsements.
Tweeting, End to End, Facebook, FTW
We noticed that with a simple interaction, we can logon to Facebook and Twitter from LadyGaga.com and drop a status post, or "tweet" into Facebook or Twitter. Incredibly, inside iTunes, both services are available as well. The real story is that social networks, and commerce networks work together, end-to-end, and, for-the-win.
In a twist of fate, in this version of digital music future the record labels win big. They do it by being close to both eyeballs (Google) and library (Apple), and bringing out the thing they know, the pop.
LadyGaga is on a roll.
With the help of Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Apple she will connect more than ever, do it in fewer clicks than any artist before. We wonder how this evolve further into other platforms.
Will LadyGaga's services continue to find ways to leverage realt-time services? We're starting to envision personal mobile and location aware fan applications.
And, for god's sake, Beyonce' has her back.
Will the forces of cloud computing and commerce force Apple and Google be best-friends-forever in music?
And, will we ever build a phone that doesn't disrupt us while on the dance floor?
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