There’s only two things the music business should be concerned with
If we have any ambition at all.
It’s already been another year of change for music. The launch of Apple’s streaming service, and a coincidental recovery in digital music revenues have offered optimism but whilst the cultural value of music is as great as it has always been, there is still a frustration that the recorded music industry is ‘not what it once was’. In fact we are lucky this relatively recent phenomenon still exists at all.
As an industry we have been given ample reason to gaze deep into our crystal navel and consider how things are shifting. Firstly with the Rethink Music report, followed quickly by REDEF’s insightful piece on revenue in the music business and now with the Music Managers Forum’s report ‘Dissecting the Digital Dollar’.
Consumers have never had it so good, streaming services offer music as a utility, but this has created an abundance issue for the business. In the age of the celestial jukebox, ‘New’ no longer carries the value it once did and Artists now have to maintain a consistent relationship with their fans to keep their careers rolling.
All this commentary offers useful perspective into the music business, but what’s to be done?
A leaked email exchange between Dave Goldberg and Sony exec Michael Lynton in 2014 is close to pragmatism. But a year on, we have even more insight.
It boils down to two fundamental issues. We should consider how we are contributing to these themes if we intend to help. They are the most important challenges for the music business.
- More revenue from new sources.
- Greater efficiency and transparency.
Here’s how.
Some mistakenly regard music as a zero sum game. We feel shortchanged since streaming services took hold, downloads changed the abundance mechanics and streaming removed the friction. We should accept that this is how it is. For now. Consumer attention is diffracted across a multitude of competing products and these will need to be nurtured to grow and eventually consolidate into valuable ways to make money.
As well as this, new revenue models still need to be offered the opportunity to innovate and growing revenue streams such as Subscription Revenues, Advertising, Sync and Licensing (which grew by 8.4% in 2014) and Live Music will need to be supported.
Just as any company is a collective of people, the ‘music business’ is a community of passionate creatives. This is not traditionally a contingent that is necessarily pre-disposed to software, technology and data. But to become more efficient we need to accept that software has a greater role to play in the music business, not less. Technologists and the Music Business need to come together.
Whilst the ears of both consumers and professionals lie at the heart of the solution, many areas of the business can be made more efficient and transparent through auditing technologies which can redistribute royalties faster, with greater transparency and create more efficient workflows to help us produce, curate and work with our existing music using less units of energy, so we can focus on creating better work and deploying it better to areas outside of the business.
We should probably release less ‘new’ records and try to generate a longer, deeper lifetime value for each song. Songs are valuable. We should work globally on releases and spend less time being territorial. We need to accept that there might be a long-term redeployment of jobs (things might get worse before they get better). Your existing job in the music business might not exist in the future, you might find something else you feel passionate about, or your style of work might have to change.
None of this is new, but we have a chance to orientate ourselves around building something better. If we can somehow work together on the goal of being better business citizens and can relinquish some control to software we have a chance to grow the music business to match the cultural value that everybody believes is in music.
At Synkio we’re committed to contributing to both. I’d love to hear from you, in the comments below — or via email ben@synk.io. If you enjoyed reading this, please ‘recommend’ below so that it gets found by others.
