ArsTechnica has a good look at what’s happening the world of big music:
“Five hundred top members of the music business gathered today in New York to hear that “music 1.0 is dead.” Ted Cohen, a former EMI exec who used the phrase, opened the Digital Music Forum East by pleading with the industry to be wildly creative with new business models but not to “be desperate” during this transitional period. But what is music transitioning to? No one seemed quite sure, except to say that it won’t look much like the music business of the last several decades.”
The music industry has really been the canary in the coal mines as far as the internet economy is concerned. It will be fascinating to see if they can save themselves before they’ve all choked to death.
Check out the whole ArsTechnica post for more on what was said at the conference and some good insight on what it all might mean.
ArsTechnica has a post about the growing number of artists licensing their music to be sold by indie website Amie Street.
“Interpol, Cat Power, The New Pornographers, Devendra Banhart, Belle and Sebastian, and Architecture In Helsinki are just a few of the artists releasing music through Amie Street today. And like everything else released through Amie Street, everything will start out as a free download. But don’t think it’ll stay free for long—the more people that download the songs, the higher the price gets. The popularity-driven pricing structure tops out at 98¢ per song, along the same lines as a song you would buy from iTunes or Amazon MP3.”
I love the idea of a popularity-driven pricing structure. It builds excitement in the process of buying. If you take a risk and get in early, you pay less. If you wait until everyone says buy it, you pay more.
This is another example of the sort of thinking that initially seems like it could never produce revenue but calls on new ways of understanding the economy and customers.
Yet more evidence that Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point might not be quite so valid. The anti-Tipping buzz began with this article in Fast Company that takes a good hard look at the work of Duncan Watts, who set out to scientifically test the theories set forth by Gladwell. What he found largely contradicts much of Gladwell’s thinking.
Now comes this piece in ArsTechnica:
“The amount of online “chatter” about an upcoming album release directly correlates to higher physical album sales, according to two researchers with New York University’s Stern Business School. Professor Vasant Dhar and former student Elaine Chang observed the trends of 108 albums released during the first two months of 2007 to see how different outside elements affected (or predicted) sales once the albums became available, and found that all of them had some effect or another. But certain elements of online chatter—namely blogs and social networks—seemed to be fairly accurate predictors of future success.”
While “influentials” will always have a certain amount of influence, the internet changes the dynamics so that many more people can be influential without ever being singled out in any significant way as “influentials.” The more small-world influencers out there, the more power they have when they agree on sometime – whether that be an album, a designer or just an idea.
Tags: arstechnica, blogS, company, duncan, fast, gladwell, influentials, point, tipping, watts
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February 10, 2008 2:35 pm | 
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