October 3, 2011 Recently I heard a quote attributed to a music business executive that went something like this: “The new model doesn’t exist…” I can’t honestly believe that it was framed that way by someone in the business…Just what exactly would qualify as success or viability in the “new model” by the present day music business establishment?
September 20, 2011 I’ve started to notice a trend. Radio doesn’t like the internet. Actually, most of the music industry doesn’t like the internet. The traditional music industry can’t do much about file sharing, loss of their brand, the flattening of recording technology, etc, but they can do something about radio and traditional media. They can use their power in both worlds to ignore nearly every music star the internet has created.
September 12, 2011 Allegedly, Pandora now controls 3.6% of radio listening. This is an impressive figure, but, to me, a disturbing one. We’ve all spent the last few years touting how the Internet has changed music distribution and flattened the playing field so that everyone has equal access to distribution. Traditional terrestrial radio, with ever-shrinking playlists that contain almost new music certainly aren’t designed to appeal to a future audience, they are designed to grasp onto a shrinking past audience.
Music Business Models tagged Distribution, Music, new music, pandora July 11, 2011 Every year there’s a rush in the music marketplace after one trend or another, and in the past year it’s been cloud services and the concept of ‘music as water’ subscription services. While the notion of selling music subscription like cable TV may be appealing at first glance, it is proving hard to monetize on for both the companies that launch such services and the content owners who participate in them. There are several reasons why I have always been very skeptical about the future of all-you-can-eat subscription services and cloud service models:
July 8, 2011 Much of the talk about the music industry in recent days focuses on future transformative changes in the way music is consumed. Will it be streaming or downloads. Will we be listening to music files from an app or from a cloud, and if so, who will own that cloud? The possibilities for content in the future are limited only by technology we create, and there will be even more changes down the road that are hard to imagine at this point in time. It is a very interesting discussion. Lost in this discussion, however, are the possible transformative changes in the companies that develop the artists that will make music in the new system, and how they can be positioned to easily change revenue models as technology changes the way content is presented.
May 12, 2011 By David Greenberg. Learn more about this outspoken industry veteran at the end of the post.
To the cloud. Google’s created MUSIC, a here-to-fore hush-hush (though everyone seemed to know about it) service to shunt all your music up to a locker in the cloud. Apple will soon have a Cloud iTunes too. Then you can play your music everywhere and anywhere on just about any device that the gods of I.T. allow it to. Though, right now Google’s only on Android and Apple’ll probably stick to the iPhone.
Here’s the best part: You may be able to share your music with your friends, family, step-children, and even ex-significant others. There will be an App for that. Maybe,
April 14, 2011 It was June 2009 when Radiohead and TOMS shoes produced a ‘love child’ in the business side of my brain. Flying from Dublin to New York on the US leg of, what has now turned into, a house concert world tour I was reading the inspirational story of TOMS shoes when the epiphany hit me….
April 7, 2011 Here’s a quick story about change that might surprise you …
Leo and Harry knew firsthand that new technology has the power it turn the status quo on its head.
They were part of an economic boom in the music industry that allowed songs to spread faster and more efficiently to more people than ever before.
The movement they were part of had the additional effect of encouraging amateur musicians to participate in music in ways they had never been able to in prior years. The wave Leo and Harry helped create affected the entire music industry.
However, within a short period of time, an even newer technology came along that disrupted everything. The stable business model these two men built and profited from began to crumble.
March 22, 2011 I got a slap in the face in Perth, Australia two weeks ago. I went there to talk about Apps, Foursquare, and advanced web marketing strategies.
I had many one-on-one sessions with artists and a vast majority had a big problem:
They didn’t have web sites.
When I say they don’t have web sites, I mean they’re only using MySpace and Facebook. Which is a critical mistake. See here why: http://bit.ly/musicadiumpaper
I’m not saying this to make anyone wrong or to be righteous. Websites, as I soon found out in Australia, are very expensive to build with local web designers. A few artists showed me quotes of $5,000 for a website. It’s not 1997 anymore and those quotes are not OK.
An effective website can be created $20 or less a month with no upfront costs.
February 17, 2011 How do you tell a businessperson that success in the music business…has nothing to do with business?
On Music Think Tank, where I have posted over eighty articles, you’ll find an overwhelming amount of advice on social media practices, fan engagement and conversion strategies, business planning, artist management, music marketing, music technology and enough similar sounding posts to make your head spin. One might even be misled into believing that the equation: decent artist + solid business support = success. However this formula is about as a sound as building a one legged table.
If you are ever thinking about financially backing or supporting an artist, you should know that there are two other legs of the table that are of equal or greater importance. In fact, if these first two legs are solid, the third leg, the business leg, almost organically grows itself.
Music Business Models tagged Business February 7, 2011 The latest version of MP3 Rocket (a media downloading app) now allows you to download YouTube videos as mp3s, so you can listen to that new Lady Gaga single whenever you want. MP3 Rocket claims this isn’t breaking any copyright laws, because their software is to be used only for “time-shifting, personal, private, non-commercial use”, which cites the same ruling that video tape and VCR manufacturers use to make home-recording of TV shows legal.
Huh?
The first argument that should pop into everyone’s head is that YouTube videos don’t air only once, on Monday nights at 7pm Est / 6pm Central… YouTube already provides the convenience of “time-shifting” because you can ALREADY watch or listen to the video whenever you want, as many times as you want.
January 29, 2011 One digital decade has ended and another has begun. Throughout these chaotic times, cloud-based music services have remained at the front of music industry discussions.
Are fans willing to pay a monthly fee to access unlimited music or will ownership carry on?
It has been argued that the era of à la carte music downloads is over – that the iTunes business model has been exhausted. Fans no longer desire to pay for each song or own them. Instead, they want to have access to everything for nothing – or, at least, a small fee.
Tech-companies like Spotify are betting that if they allow enough users to build music collections – for free – eventually, they will take ownership of their libraries and pay to access them through mobile devices. Meanwhile, rival services like Thumbplay Music, Rdio, and MOG offer limited to free trial periods. This raises a few important questions.
January 3, 2011 At the dawn of a new decade, the digital music sector remains unchanged.
Spotify didn’t launch in 2010. If it had though, would we be different now? I think so. Had it been made available in the U.S., an iPod type moment could’ve occurred. It could’ve.
And it still could. I’m not saying this out of blind evangelism either. Looking at the social features of Spotify more closely, I’m starting to believe Daniel Ek’s proclamation that music will displace photos on Facebook in popularity. Photo sharing is the lifeblood of Facebook, as are games like FarmVille and CityVille. Status updates and link sharing also play a big role. We like to see what our friends (and strangers) are doing and hear what they’ve been up to. However, a large majority of people do little with their accounts.
December 16, 2010 By now we’ve all at least heard about Kickstarter. Many of us have helped to fund projects. I’ve supported 5 or 6 myself. The best I can discern is that Kickstarter projects follow one of thee models. The explanations are a bit long, but I hope to tie this back into music and into why I believe the Kickstarter models are mostly not the correct models for funding recordings, but are great models for other types of projects.
Additionally, if I ran Kickstarter, I’d disallow projects that did not meet a stricter set of guidelines because I believe that many projects that are on the site actually damage the Kickstarter brand and the entire concept of microfunding. I end this post with a proposal for a new fan-investment label model that I believe is viable, won’t burn out fan interest in investment, and inherently creates a dedicated “street-team” to help bands promote their work. Let’s start with my taxonomic breakdown of Kickstarter models:
Model 1 - Donation / Support
These projects are designed to produce art, ideas, operations, movements, or objects that supporters want the world to have. These notions (I’ve decided to use the term “notion” to describe everything in this category) are not really owned by any of the supporters and the supporters’ only reward is that they get to know in their warm, fuzzy hearts, that they helped make an otherwise impossible notion come into being.
