Music new business models

The music industry is facing essential changes and challenges, and the turning point is happening now.

The digital channel is allowing a much easier distribution. The old business models are disappearing, little by little. In a similar way that watches became a decoration item, as anyone can easily check the time in the phone, CDs are also becoming almost a collector item as customers can get the music they want, song by song and wherever they are, in their handsdet.

Enrique Dans, one of my teachers at Instituto de Empresa and probably the Top IT guru in Spain, has reflected in his blog an analysis of the current music value chain (it is in Spanish but worth reading):

http://www.enriquedans.com/2008/11/musica-y-cadenas-de-valor.html

All the steps in the chain can be done nowadays more efficiently in an online way than offline way: selecting the talent, production and recording, distribution, and marketing and promotion.

If new talents want to promote their music, why not doing it through a digital channel? Record your songs at a low cost, upload it at almost zero cost and promote it using online and mobile marketing. Once you achieve a relevant success and viral effect, directly sell your songs through the same channels. This is actually a concrete realization of User Generated Content (UGC), one of the fields that we are working on for our future vision. Please feel free to share with us any comments or ideas that you have on UGC!