The Currency of Music
Category: Thinking pieces
About the Author
A year or so ago David Byrne wrote a really great piece about the various new routes open to artists who wish to distribute music. These will seem familiar stereotypes now; the Radiohead route, the Madonna route, the Starbucks route, a plethora of routes that claim to empower unknown artists and so on.
He put a couple of points very eloquently;
Firstly what is called the music business today is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases and that business will soon be over.
Secondly "Music"; what is it we're talking about here? In the distant past, music was something you heard and experienced - it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. You couldn't take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity, or even hear it again.
Humans will always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency. This betrays an eternal urge to have a larger context beyond a piece of plastic. Byrne suggests that this urge is part of our genetic makeup.
The currency of music is also the prevailing promotional currency. We generally don't suggest brands offer music CDs as rewards anymore and increasingly we treat downloads within a context of peer to peer file sharing and music subscription models.
Recorded music is fast being perceived as "free" in a similar way that we perceive TV to be free (although we most likely pay for it). It is likely that a subscription model of some sort will become the norm; in fact I already like the idea that for a set fee I could obtain all the music I want from Sky, especially when this becomes genuinely portable. I don't think that this fee is as much as £9.99 a month, so I don't believe subscription has been completely cracked yet.
So if recorded music is "free" then the original meaning of music as a social currency and experience is King again. This should be the cornerstone of our current thinking. Finding cost effective solutions isn't easy; although it probably isn't a "play us (or even worse upload) your band's music and we'll make you famous" concept, the absolute knee-jerk.
Rewarding customers for their own taste is one area we've been looking at in the social currency area; interestingly without making it "all about you". Finding routes into experiences this way is also bearing fruit. One industry that is currently entering the same sort of flux as recorded music was 5 years ago is ticketing, the gateway to experience. Like recorded music, you may have thought this to be a closed shop but the opportunity is as great - if not greater - than it was with recorded music.
Humans will always want to use music as part of our social fabric; so frankly the challenge isn't about to go away because recorded music purchase has.