MUSIC INDUSTRY FACES DIGITAL FUTURE

“The price of recorded music is falling, and the hope is that increased digital consumption will compensate for this. Digital technology enables more media and more choice from more suppliers, with each item costing less. The revenues of the old world were deep, concentrated and supported the media cathedrals. The revenues in the new digital world are becoming wide and shallow and support smaller and more independent institutions... because the traditional benefits of marketing scale are a little less relevant in a Google age.

Power is shifting from aggregators to navigators. In other words, those that collected creative works and stood between the creator and the audience—studios, broadcasters and record companies—are losing their primacy to those that help you find the content.

For the music industry, the new digital technologies with their vastly reduced recording and distribution costs are a harbinger of industrial restructuring. Their problem is not the oft-quoted piracy, the length of copyright term or falling CD sales. The problem is whether the intermediaries between artist and audience can change their cost base to fit this new world. This puts music in the same place as coal in the 1970s, steel in the 1980s and TV in the 1990s.”