The future of the music industry is discovery
The Wall Street Journal's "Mossberg Solution" yesterday looked into two new music discovery services from Apple's iTunes and Microsoft's Zune. The verdict went Microsoft's way, but the real winner in the services will be the music industry.
What should have been blindingly obvious before, what with Pandora, Last.fm, and other music discovery services helping consumers find music to love, was that the future of the music industry is discovery. Now that Apple has made it easy to purchase music, the next step for making a big industry even bigger is to help consumers find new products to consume.
The old model--expensive promotions through brick-and-mortar retailers and radio play--is giving way to instant gratification online, and I'm willing to bet that it's going to pay huge dividends.
As just one example, yesterday I upgraded my iTunes to version 8, which provided me with Apple's new Genius music discovery service. A day later, I've already bought an additional $15 worth of music--including songs from The Pixies, The Decemberists, and others.
iTunes' "Genius" in music discovery
(Credit: Matt Asay)Now that Universal and other music titans have discovered that digital downloads can pay off in industry growth, it's time to hypercharge that growth with efficient, online music discovery.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
(semi-off-topic)Spoon fed music through commercial entities is the real way to spread your musical seed. look at the M.I.A. record... it came out , it was praised and did ok... then it was the musical backing for the trailer of the movie Pineapple Express and it exploded. now it's all over billboard and in everyone's ipod.
I think people share music because they have not heard it anywhere else and someone plays it for them and they go hey why don't you send it to me. Well if the person wanting the music heard it first on Pandora or Last Fm instead of their friend they would buy it right there so they don't forget about it.
People have limited options discovering music on the net and Pandora and Last Fm are perfect options for the music industry, but instead the music industry wants to make it's money from these web sites causing them to close their doors. The music industry still does not get the future of music is on the internet and that physical compact disc are a luxury item and not the way people get most of their music today.
Ditch DRM immediately.Drm is anti consumer
I see the knock-on effect of music discovery (I'm addicted to last.fm) is that you rapidly get out of the mindset that only big, hyped bands are any good (apologies if you never got stuck in this rut - I did and I regret it), and then you're tempted to go and see some of the more obscure bands you've come across in tiny, intimate venues, and you become obsessed with live music, like I did. I think this explains why live music is getting so much more popular. (It doesn't follow that as live music gets more popular the venues necessarily get bigger - there are plenty of great bands to go round). And surely it's got to be good for music as a whole that there are a lot more bands who are getting a living wage, rather than a handful of bands who are getting gazillions, and the rest are starving (ok - so that's an oversimplification).
As I see it, the reshaping of the music industry in this way is one of the best things to happen - we are truly in a golden age of music at the moment. I for one have spent an order of magnitude more on music - mainly on gigs - in the last few years than I did previously, and I suspect I am not alone.
By the way, I'd love to be able to say that the Decemberists live are so much better than they are in recordings, but unfortunately I can't as Colin Meloy cancelled his last tour to the UK owing to sickness, so I never got to see them. It's also worth checking out Meloy's solo work. His cover of Morrissey's "Jack the Ripper" is truly spine tingling (and it is, or at least was, available as a free download on his website, but I can't find it now - it must be floating around on the internets somewhere).
- by Fire Balls September 26, 2008 2:46 PM PDT
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