There’s a lot of doom and gloom in the predictions being floated around as the dinosaurs of traditional media battle and play catch-up with the rise in new media alternatives. Some say the newspaper is dead, compact discs eventually will be resigned to be coasters and before we know it, we’ll all be getting our media from companies that earned their keep thinking more about algorithms and less about creative aspirations.
As CD sales continue to plummet, many veterans in the music industry aren’t finding it difficult to decode the writing on the wall. Yet some music industry stalwarts are still grasping for straws as the empires they’ve built face growing competition from an army of new kids on the block.
Predicting how things will shake out is up to the eye of the beholder. And it’s not just the hipsters and tweeners who are increasingly shunning the record shopping and collection experience. It’s quickly become less of a phenomenon and more of an attitude among the general public.
Berg Insight recently forecast that digital music sales will overtake physical music sales in Western Europe by 2011. “Rapidly increasing digital sales are expected to offset the decline in physical sales and push the European music market back into growth from 2008,” the report concluded.
Boxed sets
Ted Cohen, chair of the Mobile Entertainment Forum Americas, said his 6,000+ collection of CDs is collecting more dust than rotations in a CD player nowadays. MEF Americas General Manager Karen Allen said her CD collection has been in boxes for at least a year and she has no plans to bring them back into her daily cycle.
“I think mobile is most poised to deliver … unfortunately, they haven’t done a good job with it,” Cohen said. “Mobile is already having a big impact on music, but it’s going to be even bigger.”
One thing is certain: cellphones play a part in this evolution.
“Music-enabled handsets already outsell portable music devices massively,” said Hanna Hallberg, an analyst at Berg Insight. “We expect that the handset is going to become the primary portable listening device. Once consumers are provided with unhindered mobile Internet access, these devices will increasingly be utilized for accessing online music content.”
Access vs. ownership
Cohen agrees with Berg Insight’s prediction and takes it one step further. “I would agree with that assessment, but I would also be so bold as to say that music as a service will overtake music as a product,” he said. “I don’t think it’ll be about buying songs for $1.99 or 99 cents. I really believe, based on what I’ve seen, that access will trump ownership.”
Cohen, who’s been a steady force in the music industry, said he’s been thinking along these lines for the past 18 months. He’s passionate about moving the music industry fully into the mobile environment, adding that it “closes the deal” by freeing listeners from a desktop listening experience.
“If I have access to it all the time, I don’t need to own it,” he explained. “Anyone that experiences the subscription, all-you-can model, understands it.”
Critics usually lob concerns about quality and the lack of ownership, but Cohen says those concerns eventually will be flushed out as applications improve and make discovery easier on the subscription-based models. For him, there’s already enough innovation to warrant a crossover.
“I don’t think we do as much passive listening as we used to. I think if we did, quality would probably be more important in my life,” he said.
“Subscription allows me to experience music in ways I can’t in the physical medium,” Cohen said.
“It’s instant gratification . I think anything that can get the music I like quicker is a win,” he added “Getting to what we want isn’t hard, getting to what we didn’t know we wanted is the real trick.”
As for what these changes might do for up-and-coming bands, Cohen and Allen are confident it only improves things for them.
“It’s a great time to be an independent band right now,” Allen said. “I think actually it opens up the universe to them,” Cohen added.
The changes aren’t exclusive to any facet of the industry; indeed two songs currently enjoying heavy rotation on the airwaves (Green Day’s “Working Class Hero” and Linkin Park’s “What I’ve Done”) were delivered to radio stations via Musicypt Inc.’s Digital Media Distribution System, cutting out the need for postage, lag time and another CD to add to the shelf.
