It is easy to be seduced by the power of an idea – and hard to know how to cope with the long wait for dollars
Apple's iPad … well, it should have had a name, came out this week, but perhaps the number after two proved elusive. Or perhaps it was just too catchy to add the letters HD, on the grounds they may have been too difficult to spell. Either way, for once the company failed to deliver on the hype, a reminder, perhaps, that the digital revolution doesn't always move as fast as some people expect. Although, if you thought about it more deeply, what was it Apple was going to do? A device that allows viewers to teleport through the screen would have had some merits on this measure; but, in reality, incremental progress makes more sense. And one day British consumers might get to use the device's 4G features, an uncomfortable reminder to phone companies and policy makers that gone are the days when Britain led the way in mobile networks.
The ah, was that it? launch, though, is not the only underwhelming moment in the iPad wing of the digital revolution. Hopes that last Christmas would see a sudden jump in iPad newspaper subscriptions have not quite been fulfilled. The Times and Sunday Times only signed up about 3,000 new digital subscribers in December to add to the declared total of 119,000 for the Times. Although the near-120,000 figure is decent progress for the paywall effort, the fact remains that movement to a larger number, that might lead to sustainable print-replacing revenues, is going to be slow. No wonder, then, that News International, a great believer in cut-price newspapers, is doubling the price to £4 a week: the £12.5m that 120,000 were generating at the lower rate is not a sustainable sum for papers where the editorial budget is more like £100m a year.
If the digital hype can sometimes get away from us, or if the digital revolution is stubbornly slow in arriving, there are plenty of parts of the media economy where it does not seem to be arriving at all. A couple of years from now, Britain's record companies (in what is supposed to be the most digital of industries) expect to be generating half their (reduced) revenues from digital. But there are some parts of the music economy where the CD accounts for the lion's share of revenues; 90%-plus in the case of Susan Boyle, despite all those YouTube views of I Dreamed a Dream. Even supposedly youthful Kasabian followers are stubbornly enthusiastic buyers of CDs, which goes to show consumers don't always move as fast as might be expected.
It is easy to be seduced by the power of an idea in the digital business; which is not to say that, in the end, the trend will come. It just arrives more slowly and with fewer dollars attached than might have been presumed. Those who need another example need look no further than the Twitter revenue figures leaked on the usually accurate Gawker on Friday: $28.5m of turnover in 2010, $23.8m in the first four months of 2011. Even for Twitter, a publisher of sorts, it turns out that making money out of journalism, or whatever tweeting amounts to, isn't quite so easy.
The response to the long wait for the digital future varies across the media industry. In music the answer is consolidation, from six to perhaps three global players; in news media the answer is to do nothing other than cut costs and wait for the new model to supersede the old. Neither feels like a complete response: there may be too many British newspapers, but nobody wants mergers amid reasonable worries about loss of plurality. In music, no one outside the business worries about plurality because, well, it's music, and surely the songs will turn up on the radio anyway. It is possible, then, to move both too fast and too slowly in response to changing technology. Much harder is judging it right.