Envisioning the Future through New Media

At our BIF-1 summit, Josh Koppel stood out as one amazing storyteller. He engaged the audience with his ideas and concepts around emerging digital technologies. So we asked Koppel to return to BIF-2 to share how one of his "crackpot" ideas fared during those 12 months between the summits.

When we last saw him, TuneBooks, a product Koppel developed for Apple's online music service, was set to debut. "I'm happy to report that TuneBooks launched on iTunes last November, and has since become the new standard for interactive liner notes."

"A lot of my work is about creating new formats and new ways, new places where you can talk to people," he says. TuneBooks "is a fully digital product, including pictures and lyrics, and it's done in a way that's entertaining and fun."

Selling full albums in the digital age requires more than just music. Koppel says it takes transforming today's shopping and listening experience into something more visually engaging. "TuneBooks provide the visual content fans crave by bundling online albums with a collection of unique and innovative media highlighting the band and their visual sensibility," he says. Since its launch, Koppel has created over 70 Internet-based liner notes for artists such as Paul Simon, Outkast, Nelly Furtado and LL Cool J.

"I think about things I'd like to see in the world, and then I make them," says Koppel, a 31-year-old from Chicago who also runs a production company in Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood. "With Tunebooks, I saw a new opportunity for collateral material for CDs which had not been taken into consideration for digital music."

Koppel's interests and clients are diverse to say the least. This year he's been working with Walmart developing a 14-part documentary on sustainability for the stores 60,000 suppliers. He is now at work creating content for the company's in-store television network. "What started as an image-building exercise has turned into something quite dramatic. It's heartening to see the company commit themselves to social and environmental sustainability. Walmart is truly changing the way they operate."

Koppel always knew he would go into the creative arts; what he didn't know is what would prove to be his generation's medium. Television and movies don't offer enough opportunities for innovation or controlling one's own work, he says, but emerging digital media are a brave new world to those savvy enough to take advantage of them—or even, in some cases, envision them.

Take Koppel's book, Good/Grief, a series of six highly self-reflective short tales drawn from his childhood and told with sparse words and graphic images in the form of a flipbook.

Quick, concise and provocative: Described by Steven Johnson as a "lighthearted recasting of Proust for the age of Attention Deficit Disorder," the book—developed from Koppel's senior project at Amherst College reflected a keen artistic sensibility and an intuitive grasp of the possibilities offered by new media.

By the time Good/Grief was published in 2001, Koppel was following up on the entertainment and production interests he had shown in college, where he founded Citizen Poke, one of the first online Web magazine for college students.

Teaming with music producer Rick Rubin, he created a CD booklet and music video for Rage Against the Machine; with writer/director Harold Ramis he created The College Show for Comedy Central.

Koppel still creates promos and commercials for clients including MTV, The Sundance Channel, Fine Living, Cartoon Network, PBS and AMC. But that continues to be just his day job while his production company finances his "crackpot theories and ideas."

"People today are buying data, not products. In creating content, we're at the beginning of a whole new type of consumer behavior," Koppel says. "I want to make media for kids who grew up computer kids like me. I want to make that digital candy, that digital snack that's going to be fulfilling for those kids."