Once, the currency of wisdom seemed to consist in knowing who one's father was. Latterly, in these business obsessed times, knowing your own customers seems to have become more important. Which, of course, was the promise of the internet for harassed newspaper owners. So much for the anonymous news stand buyers – the future, instead, would consist of joyous readers in a harmonious (and more profitable) relationship with publishers, their contact information visible for the first time. Plus, readers would probably be prepared to pay as much or almost as much as in the costly ink-on-dead-trees era.
Then, along came Apple, and we've all been feeling post-lapsarian ever since. Last week, the computer giant decided to reread its terms of service for publishers bold enough to be part of its iPad/iPhone experience. Lest there had been any doubt – Apple wants 30% of the revenue from any subscriber signed up through its App Store and it will hang on to the customer information, thank you very much. Oh, and as Josh Halliday reports , if you are on the App Store, you are not allowed to offer cut-price services via another platform. Hmm.
You can argue, if you must, that this is not such unfamiliar territory for a consumer media business. A newsagent – remember them? – typically takes a fifth or a quarter of the sale price of a newspaper for itself. It costs money to come up with iPads, and it is not unreasonable for Apple to charge a subscriber management fee. That's fair enough, but nobody was preparing to give Apple the right to take over every function of every newsagent worldwide. It will not quite be enough, the next time you see deserted shops, to reflect that it's OK, Apple has a gross margin of 38.5% and is delivering for its shareholders.
There are other questions about Apple's dominance. Apple has made it hard for some content creators to get their work on to its App Store. For example, the American satirical cartoonist Mark Fiore found his work rejected because "it ridicules public figures". He only got on to the App Store last year after winning a Pulitzer Prize and a mini-media outcry. Not everybody, though, can do that to get past Apple's move into content censorship.
Of course the music industry has been here before. The shops – Woolworths and Virgin Megastores – are mostly gone and in their place is the iTunes monster that is the place where most people buy their music. Yet, sales in the music business continue to tumble as digital growth begins to stall – suggesting there are limits to what even Apple can do. For all the merits of the latest iPod, Apple gets in the way of an artist and their fans. Which helps explain why Radiohead didn't bother with iTunes for the first stage of Friday's release of King of Limbs – a short trip to the band's website armed with £6 in a bank account and one's email address was enough to get hold of an open, non-Apple MP3 format.
Radiohead may be one of the ultimate examples of the "band as brand" phenomenon, but even they hardly demand the same loyalty as newspapers or magazines, where readers are expected to pay up or turn up every day, week or month. In principle, then, the sentiment necessary for a direct consumer relationship is there, and as the Times paywall experiment shows, it is possible to convert some of those readers into paying customers via a website rather than an iPad. That said, it would be a brave media organisation (Radiohead apart) that would be willing to cut out Apple. The point, rather, is that Apple is throwing its weight around – and regardless of how much some of us like the iPad or whatever devices the company creates, we should not have to accept everything that comes with it.
No longer the Apple of every publisher's eye, page 6