Over the last 20 years, the listening public has spoken loud and clear: We’re not paying for what we can easily get for free. So Jay-Z and his cadre of superstar partners responded with a $20-a-month Spotify-style streaming service whose main selling point is uncompressed audio. Huh? TIDAL, which is about 10 years behind the curve, confirms just how woefully out of touch some in the music industry still are.
With the motivation to buy music at an all-time low, real change in the music industry, it seems, will only come when we adopt a sustainable, ecological business model based on collaboration, engagement, and a new value proposition for music.
That means initiating a genuine collaboration between the technology and music industries. Despite movement in this direction, we still hear complaints that the two don’t really work together. The fact is, we’re interdependent; music needs tech to grow and tech needs music to survive. If we truly joined forces, asking how we can help each other grow, what great innovations could be born?
One simple development could be improved performance metrics. As it stands, the Billboard Hot 100 weights sales at 35%-45% and streaming at only 20%-30% in calculating chart rank. Yet in the digital economy, likes, favorites and followers are like spending money for the masses. It seems, doesn’t it, that incorporating audience engagement into the ranking algorithm is as important, if not more, than casual plays or, the ultimate like, a sale.
Streaming has been woven into the fabric of daily life; it isn’t going anywhere. Purchasing large volumes of music simply isn’t realistic for the average consumer. A 64 GB iPhone doesn’t hold a fraction of my music library, and storing it in the cloud means both paying a subscription and data charges each time I access it. So like most consumers, I stream (legally) all the music I want. It’s simply a stronger value proposition.
If artists and labels want to continue selling product, we have to do so with an equally strong, or stronger, value proposition than streaming. That means we need to ask ourselves, what special benefit or feature can we add to our releases that will make them viable?
In the end, the music industry’s survival depends on whether we are up to the challenge of thinking outside the box we’ve imposed on ourselves.