Bear with me for two minutes on this one… this is not just another Baby Boomer pining to re-live old memories (although there might just a bit of that). The truth is, I’m glad to be able to download the newly released album, The Beatles Live At The Hollywood Bowl, because I finally get to hear what I saw on a warm August night in Los Angeles in 1964. This collection of live performances from 1964 and ‘65 is a re-mastering of songs from a long out-of-print 1977 vinyl LP, and the digital sound scrubbing technologies used on this release just didn’t exist 40 years ago. Listening to the new versions, you almost get a sense of what it might have been like to have been on the stage with the musicians, as they tried to cope with the roar from the audience that almost completely overwhelmed the amplification on stage. In “real life “, the audience could barely make out what the band was playing. So it’s all good.

That’s it for my Boomer-nostalgia.

What we might be able to learn from the Brand “The Beatles ” is what this piece is really about. Apple Corps (not to be confused with Apple, the maker of iconic technologies) is the company that manages The Beatles’ brand, and by any measure the company has done a remarkably good job at maintaining its caché. The stats are remarkable: 600 million albums sold worldwide, 20 #1 hit songs according to Billboard (which named the band the top-performing act in the chart’s history in 2015). That may sound like old news – after all, the band broke up in 1970. But after years of playing hard to get, the Beatles’ company finally negotiated the release of the bands’ albums via streaming audio in 2015 via Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal and Amazon Prime Music. As a result, in the first two days the band’s music set the record on Spotify for the most-ever simultaneous streams (according to CNBC, 250 million and counting).

Nattering nabobs of negativism (that’s another not-so-nostalgic reference to times past – so google it!) might say that the Spotify stat is representative of a bunch of Boomers who have been sitting in their chairs for years waiting for the digital dam to break. But general music consumption trends don’t bear that out. Over 65% of US music distribution industry revenue comes from digital musical recordings, while physical recordings only account for about 30% of sales (according to the Recording Industry Association of America, RIAA). A 2014 Buzzfeed Music article reported that less than 40% of CD sales come from the 35-and-under age groups while over 35% come from the over-50 crowd. Conversely, over 55% of digital sales come from the 35-and-under set while the over-50 group account for less than 20%.

You get the picture: younger listeners tend to go for streaming music services, the inference being that the brand known as “The Beatles ” continues to reach new ears.

A Brilliant Approach To Marketing A Brand In A New Way

It doesn’t hurt that the band The Beatles produced some great music and a ton of wonderful memories. But how the Brand, The Beatles, continues to be marketed might offer some clues as to how brands and store-oriented retailers might evolve in the new world of the digitally enabled consumer.

Music is a remarkably good candidate for disintermediation. “Disintermediation ” is a term from the finance industry that means “the elimination of such financial intermediaries as banks and brokers in transactions between principals, often as a result of deregulation and the use of computers. ” Microsoft’s Bill Gates famously brought the term forward in 1997 when he said, “we need banking but we don’t need banks “. Since then, the term has been used to help explain why some products and services don’t need a middleman to be delivered anymore, and it definitely applies to traditional “musical record companies ” (as well as book sellers and video rental stores).

I’ve used the term disintermediation to discuss those categories of product which are good candidates for direct-to-consumer strategies, in effect disintermediating physical stores. Any product for which a digital representation is good enough to cause a consumer to make a decision to buy is a good candidate for disintermediation. By “digital representation ” I don’t just mean pictures, specifications, price and availability – I’m also talking about all that social content that consumers themselves produce about products, such as reviews. Boomer though I am, I routinely read product reviews even while I’m standing in front of an item in a physical store – and I’ll bet you do too.

Besides music, books, and videos, where the digital representation is the product, there are plenty of other candidates, as Amazon’s success can attest – things like electronics, tools, everyday “replenishment ” consumer products, repeatable purchases of clothing and shoes, health and beauty aids, and home and garden products. All of those categories of merchandise are good candidates for direct-to-consumer, and if you’re a store-centric retailer who sells them, look out! because as the direct-to-consumer retailers figure out how to neutralize your one advantage, the convenience of immediate, you could soon find yourself being disintermediated.

Well, The Beatles’ product is all digital, but the brand may have given us all a clue about how the physical selling environment can succeed in the 21^st century. Here it is: the release of the new album coincides with a new Ron Howard documentary movie about the band, The Beatles: Eight Days A Week, and the keepers of the brand have done something brilliant.The movie is set for a very short theatrical release (in my town the movie will run for one day in the theater), with streaming via Hulu set to begin one day later. A September 9^th CNBC article about the movie’s release quoted Chris Formant, president of Verizon Enterprise, to say, “… the limited viewing window (in the theatre) will create a ‘while supplies last’ kind of demand. Hulu streaming will extend the audience, the viewing window and allows viewing when you wish and how much you wish. I think it’s a brilliant approach.”

So do I.

The Store Of The Future?

The forthcoming RSR study on the state of the retail store starts out with a bang: “Retail stores have a problem. The 21st century is nearly 1/5th over, and today’s stores still basically resemble what they looked and felt like at the turn of the century. Meanwhile, leaps and bounds have been made in the online realm to make that shopping experience more interesting and, just as importantly: more convenient. “

I hope stores learn how to thrive in the new world, to be entertaining and fun, and most of all, part of a satisfying shopping experience. But many retailers are threatened not just by the disintermediable merchandise categories that they sell, but just as much by their apparent inability to think their way out the box that they are in (pun intended).

Maybe the Beatles brand managers offer a clue. Imagine a store of the future where the latest or the best is introduced in the physical space very briefly before being made available via direct-to-consumer to a much bigger audience. Think of all the buzz that could be generated!

This is not so different an idea than what is starting to make its way in the world of high fashion. Christopher Bailey, the CEO and Chief Creative Officer at Burburry recently explained the challenge: “You create a lot of energy when you do the shows, and the broader these have become — whether it’s livestreaming, instagramming, or showing online — you’re creating all this energy around something, and then you close the doors and say, ‘Forget about it now because it won’t be in the stores for five or six months.’ And then you’ve got to create that energy again. ” His point: in the new world of high fashion, the product needs to be ready to go the very next day after its big splash introduction.

Why not consider the store of the future as a physical launchpad for new brand concepts and products in more categories? While it may not ever work for merchandise that has to be tasted, smelled, or felt, it just might work for other categories that up until now had to be physically experienced in some way.

‘Just a thought. Thank you, Beatles, and not just for the memories.