Lets flip the music business model on its head!
Now here’s a really disruptive idea…
Why should we pay for ANY music??? Maybe it should be free to consumers?
Digital rights management (DRM) is dying, no doubt about it. It was invented by record and film companies who wanted to restrict an amazing new distribution opportunity instead of embrace it. But, as King Canute discovered, you can’t stop an incoming tide, you either find a way to benefit from it or you drown trying to resist it.
There never was any DRM on vinyl or tapes, and people ripped them off left right and centre. What scared the record companies into creating DRM was how much wider the ‘problem’ became with the ease of communication and distribution enabled by the birth of the internet, email, MP3, P2P, etc, etc.
But these days business never stays static, it changes faster than ever and companies, no INDUSTRIES, must be agile enough to respond to the change and not try to prevent it. The companies that embrace the inevitable chance early, run it alongside their existing business perhaps as an experiment, hedge their bets, will win out over the old school – they will outshine them, outpace them, out-innovate them, and outlive them.
So, here is the idea. Music is media content right? It attracts and engages people, it excites people, they live it, they love it, they mould their lives on their stars. For years the music industry has licensed its music content to the media channels, who have been happy to pay for that license in order to offer engaging content via their distribution channel, to a bunch of consumers, in order that they can either charge people to watch it, and/or charge advertisers to place ads between the media. Why can I turn on the radio and listen to a commercial radio station for free? Its because they make their money from the advertisers, not from me.
Now, years back when I was in supply chain management at the birth of e-commerce the buzzword was disintermediation. The new technologies collectively described as e-commerce enabled businesses to move up and down the supply chain much more easly than before, taking a larger piece of the commercial pie, attacking new markets, increasing margins, creating greater efficiencies, and the natural consequence of this was disintermediation in the supply chain – the removal of entire links in the process – business and whole business models died as new ones were invented.
I see similar opportunities. How about a producer doesn’t sell their content to us. How about they give it to us, but make their money from commercial sponsors? That way you can forget DRM, in fact its in the producers’ interest to make it even easier to share the content, not restrict it. The technology exists to track the distribution path or digital media around the web and that paves the way for producers to monetize their content by ‘selling’ those impressions to advertisers. Its what happens with UGC content, blogs, etc. People produce the content and distribute it for free, the payback being the advertising dollars.
Everything changes. I see no reason why we music producers, and most likely other types of professional media content won’t go this way. In the future we won’t pay for music, it will be sponsor-subsidized.