What everybody can get – nobody wants

What only a few can get – everybody wants

The Music-like-water concept will crush the value of recorded music completely. This would naturally lead to a sharp rise of demand for music, that is not recorded – i.e. live concerts.

We have already seen the concert business more than double since Y2K – that happend as a consequence of the value slide of recorded music after Napster / Kazaa / bittorrent filesharing was introduced.

I think iTunes works good. Especially because you don’t have to write your credit card data every time you buy. It is just one click – buy. If more shops just copied Apples ideas, things would in the end work out just fine.

the most sensible thing I’ve seen in recent years was Apple’s introduction of pre-pay cards for iTunes – as I see it the only hurdle for the effectiveness of the current models of buying single tracks is the need for credit cards – especially as such a large portion of music consumers is still teens

In my opinion this is the only solution needed – things like myspace, itunes, beatport etc are great and they are a perfectly acceptable model IMO – people clearly do use them

it’s interesting though – how much these opinions are based on assumptions about people and their behaviour – for example “people will download x….” – trying to predict how people will respond to these models – but I think this is much harder to predict and there is only the option to look at current behaviour

Radiohead have really raised the bar recently, and if Wired’s published estimates are correct then in the first week they sold (from memory) 1.2 mil and 500k were still d/led on P2P

now to me that seems like a pretty good loss leader – they have earned a hefty income by providing it themselves, and that makes the illegal P2P side almost irrelevant

of course, new and unknown artists wont get anything like that kind of response, but in my opinion it’s time musicians started to accept they are not super human and cant expect overnight platinum sales any more by signing to “the man” – they need to work hard, build a name and most importantly keep at it for years – like ANY OTHER BUSINESS

Andrew – you really got me thinking about the implications of the flat rate system, and I totally see your points – however your points 3 and 4 seem to contradict each other – talking about people opting for ‘path of least resistance” then at the same time they are ‘interesting and complex’

the thing is people have been prepared to pay for niche items and music merchandise forever – people like to collect and people like music to be part of their ‘identity’ – i dont think that will stop – hence the 1.2 mil in the first week who PAID for radioheads album, compared to those who didnt

I have been copying music since I was a 10 year old kid in the 80s with a double cassette deck – it is nothing new, and to be honest I find downloading albums from limewire or whatever frustrating – variable quality, missing tracks – it always feels a bit “dirty” – so I’d rather by the real thing when I have the cash

I think Chris Anderson’s long tail articles and the strength of Niche is a really, really important point – ebay almost functions on collectables, Amazon sells more than half of it’s books from outside the top 130,000 – these are clear indications people dont actually want the mainstream and are prepared to go searching

I’m not convinced about music like water either – in fact I think the music industry is shaping up quite well as it is – the only ones losing out are the BIg 4 and that’s a good thing

most of the listening I do now is to Last FM, and myspace – most DJs I know get all their tracks through myspace and beatport

admittedly they use soulseek too, but I think probably beatport moreso

I think people are prepared to pay for music, I just think we need to retrain ourselves out of the 20th century thinking in terms of ‘hits’ and start seeing sales of a few thousand as success

illegal downloads are a loss leader and help artists more than hinder – people will still pay for a live show and merchandise, and I think a lot of the time for recordings too

musicians shouldnt let the anxiety of ‘the big 4′ overflow onto them – it’s really their own fault they are in decline

As the music biz transitions from a ‘push’ environment to a ‘pull’ model – where the user selects the music he/she is exposed to (see my site re. this), the flat rate tax model completely misses the boat – this is typical shortsighted music label thinking – they see music losing its value, so go the whole hog to a system where it has no value.

This is missing the wood from the trees. Falling value is a temporary symptom of a much bigger transition; it’ll last just as long as the infrastructure isn’t suited to the new model. Once Music 2.0 ‘institutions’ have become established and legacy systems – illegal p2p filesharing of traditional music label output, the iTunes store/Amazon MP3, the high street CD shop, the (traditional) music label itself, etc – have been abandoned, margins can recover and equilibrium restored.

Nobody says that in a ‘pull’ economy, margins can’t be high. In a ‘music like water’ environment, the only way the industry is ever going to get its margins back is if the music it’s outputting costs them very little to make. Oh dear.

In my opinion, the music industry should try and ACCELERATE the revolution, get to a consolidation period where push has become pull and the users are governing the music you’re producing, and then put your marketing minds to the task of extracting financial value from the newfound (increased) value the user is likely to attribute to music which is perfectly tailored to his tastes.

No point in mincing words. The industry’s being turned on it’s head. This is a revolution. Whereas the music industry used to operate on a push model, it looks as though it’s becoming a pull economy – where the user goes out and selec…