The following excerpt is from Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood’s book Simplify. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes
Proposition-simplifying can make life easier and more pleasant for consumers, and it can make a fortune for the simplifier. Perhaps the value of simplifying and how to do it are only just starting to be fully understood. Perhaps, also, the internet and associated technologies are making it easier to simplify and transform a market almost overnight.
Let’s take a look at an instance of proposition-simplifying that now seems so obvious that we wonder why it didn’t happen years earlier.
A few years ago, you were probably still fumbling around with CDs (and their cracked cases), feeling very modern by paying iTunes 99 cents for every song you wanted to hear on your first-generation iPod, or being very naughty and downloading tracks for free from a shadowy peer-to-peer file-sharing service that never paid the artists a penny. It would have been an outrageous idea to think that you might be able to get access to most of the music in the world.
Now, though, sixty million people can make that claim, courtesy of Spotify: Three-quarters of them use the service for free and put up with annoying advertisements between the music, while the other quarter pay $10 per month for an unfettered, all-you-can-hear experience. The latter group…