Mar

12

Rice-priced music: how to compete with “free”

March 12, 2008 |

The IPFI - the body representing the international recording industry [www.ifpi.org] - recently reported that total income from legal on-line music downloads in China amounted to only £40-million: that’s about half the value of Robbie William’s deal with EMI. The implications are not good for music-makers seeking revenue from Asian markets. Writing exclusively for ulstermusic.com, Nick Fitzsimmons takes the story further and argues for a new mindset when it comes to making gains from internet-distributed music… Nick Fitzsimmons writes: It was one of the most common complaints heard at numerous music industry conferences in 2007: “It doesn’t matter what new business models are generated, you can’t compete with the billions of tracks available for nothing on P2P networks. You can’t compete with free.” In fact, you can compete with free, and to survive in today’s music industry, you must. Saying you can’t compete with free is like saying you can’t compete at all. The simple fact is that the internet, at it’s most fundamental, is a copying machine. And when the number of available copies of something (for example, a song) approaches infinity, copies become worthless. Not only that, but when cost of distribution of copies approaches zero, the economics of abundance state that one should use that distribution system to distribute copies for free.

The challenge is to find things connected to the copy that cannot be duplicated, the things associated with the copy that are scarce, and then sell those. In the case of a song, that might be the live experience of that song (hence the recent surge in the live music sector) or merchandise connected to that song or artist. So, copies of your music are worthless. What are you going to do about it? Feel free to comment!

Read more: The Economics of Free (via Techdirt); Better Than Free (via The Technium)


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Eddie on March 24, 2008 12:57 am

    Definitely some good points here. People’s demands have changed and the music business model needs to change too. It’s time to get creative!

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