The Future of the Music Industry
This is a short post that I could just about have made on Twitter, but I wanted to flesh it out a little.
I found this article about the ‘Future of the Music Industry’ by Mike McCready on the Huffington Post. It talks about a possible future model for the music industry (well, at least what was the record side of the industry) and about how we will all go about discovering new music when the opportunities for record label funded mass marketing evaporate even further. I won’t regurgitate his post here, but do go over and check it out.
All I will say on it is that I agree entirely that our future is about getting the attention of fans and building a relationship with them, in return for, in all likelihood, giving them recordings of your music for free. The pay-off will be that you will then earn by selling concert tickets, charging for related products (merchandising plus 1, if you will) and all kinds of third party endorsements or uses of your work.
Mike may have a certain bias as he is the CEO of Music XRay, a company that hopes to provide one of the systems that may become an answer to how we will all get our music filtered and recommended to us – a bit like a glorified Pandora or Last.fm. What Music Xray does is take your song and give it a specific URL, just like a video on YouTube, and also clothes it in a widget that contains a vast amount of information about the song – lyrics, what it sounds like, a cover image, artist pic and so on.
Putting your song in a Music XRay also puts it into their music recommendation engine, which Mike says, and I agree with him, is going to be the primary way that people will find your music in the future. You will need to be in as many of these as possible.
One added benefit for aspiring musicians right now, apart from the possibility of getting your song picked for a commercial or a movie just because you had it in such an engine, is that you get this very cool way of presenting your songs to people via the web or email.
As a working manager, I get hundreds of emails a week with a link to MySpace or an mp3 attachment. Either is fine, particularly the ever necessary link to MySpace that tells me a lot of what I need to know. But I really get the idea of receiving a Music XRay of a song straight into my inbox with all the info I need right there, but it didn’t clog up my email server.
And I think the (few remaining) A&R men, publishers, journos, agents, promoters etc that you should be pitching too will love it too.
I think you can tell that I love this idea. I believe that they will be charging $20 a pop for these (per song) in the future, but at this early stage, they are running at $2 a go. Sounds like a very sound investment to me.
We have already tried it out ourselves on a couple of sync pitches for commercials and people loved them. If it appeals to you, go over and give it a go at Music XRay.
March 17th, 2009 at 4:59 am
It’s not about a special device, tool or website. I’m sure that there’ll be a lot of interesting music web tools in the future. But the basic idea is right: It’s about making music available. Not exposing yourself to the web would be foolish. The web is where the people are. And the people are the listeners. Go to them!
March 18th, 2009 at 12:35 am
I agree with Alice to a certain degree, however Music XRay seems to give the end user a much broader experience than just an MP3, which is what selling is all about. The key will be to make the fan WANT that extra that XRay gives. If I’m just cruising the ‘net listening to random bits of bands I’m not really interested in everything about them other than their sound for now. However, if I happen upon an artist/band that really appeals to me, I’m all over their site, digging up who and what they are and where they’re coming from musically and personally. In the latter case, Music XRay would be right on target for me to have at hand immediately after my interest was piqued.
Ian,
You mention two prices: $2 and $20. Are either cost to consumer or cost to artist?
You might also want to check out a friend of mine’s new program Blip’d for review: http://www.blipd.com I’m not as conversant in the how of programming as you are so don’t ‘get’ the benefits to my network of bands as much as I know I should.
March 18th, 2009 at 9:27 am
Molly, that cost is to the artist, not the consumer. Not really sure how it works as a consumer model – as they aren’t at that stage yet – other than as a recommendation engine.
I was thinking of it much more as a tool for the Artist to use when submitting tracks to third parties, such as record companies or movie sync people.
Ian
March 18th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
“I was thinking of it much more as a tool for the Artist to use when submitting tracks to third parties, such as record companies or movie sync people.”
If that’s supposed to be the primary use, then why not try http://bandcamp.com/ instead. It’s free and you could sell your songs etc. on it.
March 18th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
I’ll check that out as well, but, again, Music Xray is a different kind of thing really. More about specific promotion for artists to certain industry recipients rather than direct to fan.
Ian
March 25th, 2009 at 3:01 am
Great information Here!
April 16th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
I disagree that artists should give away their music for free and relying soley on ticket sales, its hardly a lucrative world to begin with, especially considering the abysmal treatment artists get in the UK. Musicians shouldn’t sell themselves short, as such, £10 I believe is a fair price for an album, perhaps most music listeners don’t agree with this – Declining album sales would certainly attest to that wouldn’t they? The problem is of course piracy. The bigger problem for me is that piracy has made more underground bands ’successful’ than it has killed off big names.
Providing a few tracks for free online is a good way to get some publicity, (not suing people who download your music illegally is a good route to go too) however, Itunes and the like have exploded massively and there are still a great number of people out there buying albums in either CD of LP format.
I haven’t got a prediction of how the music industry will go here forth, being generous (but not too generous!) could be a successful path to take