Just about everyone has noticed that the business in the music industry is changing, how it will end up is the hard question. There are some interesting experiments. The recent Radiohead album which allows customers to choose a price. A local band to me, the Wax Apples, is allowing fans to pre-fund the album in production through their "Honorary Executive Producer" program. (Good band, you should check them out)

The largest cost of "big media" production of music is marketing. From promotion to payola the costs are staggering. An interesting post on BSL talks about how current marketing concepts fail and today it is more about building community. I think this directly applies to music. Which means bands should spend more time developing their "cult" rather than convincing radio stations to give them playtime. The radio stations will play the music if enough people want to hear it in order to sell their ads. They should take a bottom up instead of a top down approach.

This isn't a new concept. The Greeks had a crazy idea where they thought that government should be bottom up, and called it Democracy. We've already seen the failure of the largest centrally directed economy ever. And, there's a small website called Wikipedia that is taking advantage of distributed production.

There are many things that the "Web 2.0" changes are about (yeah, I'm tired of that name too): collaboration, community and connectivity. A significant one is looking at decisions and production from the bottom up instead of the top down. This will effect the music industry just as it does everyone else. An exciting time to be alive!


posted Dec 14, 2007 | permanent link