The business of music… Convenience and scarcity.
Music faces crumbling record sales, and all time lows in terms of physical goods sold.
For now, let me make the hypothesis that music is merely a specialized form of content. If we are willing to accept that premise, we can proceed to see if the path of content at large can help explain the trajectory of music in particular.
Money money, the mighty dolla dolla
Got to get my grind on, grind on, grind on
I don’t wanna be broke no more
- Bone Thugs n Harmony in Money Money
Content has been on a long and fairly steady march towards “wanting to be free”. From the creation of the printing press, to blogger, creation of content was being democratized further and further. More and more tools emerge every day to empower content creation – including but not limited to blogger, tumblr, wordpress, and any number of other publishing platforms.
Distribution of content has also gotten consistently easier with various technologies for syndication emerging, and then becoming the invisible force behind the features and tools we use everyday (think ~ RSS). Same with consumption – you can read content almost anywhere, and everywhere – including mobile devices, e-readers, almost any connected device possible. We even have time-shifting technologies like Instapaper to allow us to consume our content when we desire, and Readability that alters the form of the content before we consume it.
Everyday is my day I’ma do it my way everyday.
Everything about me what they love about me everything
Everywhere that I be feel VIP baby
- Fabolous in Everything, Everyday, Everywhere
So we’ve established that content today wants to be available everywhere, anytime we want it, and in any format we want it. There are very few limits around where and how we consume our content, and most attempts at controlling how, when, how much, and where we consume our content have been met with ridicule.
If we return to the earlier hypothesis that music is merely a specialized form of content – then we can safely assume that music will follow a similar trajectory and wants the same things that content does – to be available everywhere, anytime, and in any format we want it. So long as it is convenient, and customers get the above described ability, they will in fact pay for content. If the content is scarce, truly scarce – customers will pay significantly more – they will pay cash and attention . The trick is how to make content scarce – and how to monetize their attention.
Creation of music is becoming easier and easier every day. New ways to consume music appear every day – most meant to help satisfy some observable customer behavior, or arcane studio requirements etc. However, in the end, the best (read most convenient at market price) customer experience will win.
Music has a fantastic ability to be converted into an experience. You can hear a song, but you experience a concert. Books, blogs, and regular content have to work harder to do that – its tougher to experience the New York Times for instance, than it is, say Lady Gaga. Experiences, by their very definition are scarce. The content is merely the gateway drug to the expensive experience.
See Trent’s letter here to see exactly how scarce an experience can be.
Finally – what is to become of music – do applications like grooveshark represent the future of music, and how we consume it? I sense, as Fred Wilson puts it – music will eventually be like dial tone, and everybody will be able to access it whenever needed.
Music will continue to provide every generation to come the experiences that become the touchstones of their lives, much like it did for all the generations before. The actual physical experience will be different, obviously as we have already moved from the experience of pulling an LP out of its sleeve – to spending hours trying to take the CD’s out of their plastic straight-jackets – to clicking mice.
In the future who knows what it will be, but if the trajectory is accurate, almost anybody will be able to make music(thats not to imply that they would be good at it), and similarly, everyone will have access to almost every track ever created at their fingertips whenever they want it. As with everything else, curation will become important, and scarce goods will become even more expensive than they are now.
Finally, in such a world – the customer’s attention will be the scarcest good of all – and it’ll be very very expensive. Customers will continually strive to be free of exclusive arrangements, network exclusivity and any limitations on how, when, or where they can consume their content.