Essay3-The future of music

Digital music industry has gone through the experiment of ditching DRM and new mobile offerings in 2007.Along with Nokia ‘comes with music’ service appearing to the market, the whole music industry are looking for new and strong business models. Universal music group cooperate with Youtube which creates a mutually benefical business environment.

As far as I know, there are now five alternative business models in music industry according to a report ‘Digital Music: 2007 in review’ written by Steve O’Hear. A) free (maybe with advertisments) Universal has tried open DRM-free window last year and end it this January and all records come on abroad. B)Subscription which means music works is a service rather than a track. And now there are two main cooperations of this model and one is to cooperate with carriers the other is to cooperate with handset makers. Universals’ cooperation with Nokia’comes with music service’ is one example. C) pay-by-what you want which has been experimented by ‘Radiohead’. D)pay-by-populartiy which is to start off free, then the more tracks get downloaded the more price increases with a top-limits. E)’Music tax’ which is now experimented by Universal music group as I know.

From my point of view, there are some trends in digital music space. The first one is that music style catalogue are becoming more and more specific and segmented and the possibility of huge hit worldwide only made by one song becomes less. The second one is that since mutual share is the essence of internet and depending on DRM won’t be the end of this industry. The third one is to transform huge profits into mutually benefical with more content creators.

I have some interesting ideas in digital music:
a) In the huge and fast-growing mobile music space, Universal music Sweden could consider cooperate with Tele2 with subscription method which is similar to ‘buffet’.

b) Coperate with SonyEcrissson with their future product PSP Phone which maybe next generation entertainment terminal.

c) Interactive music is may be also an innovation with advanced technology support like PureData to make users get involed and even become content generators.

d) With the development of web 2.0, social network could support major labels to customized recommendation of music according to audiences’ taste.

I also strongly recommend that labels should cooperate with the P2P web service EMULE to make P2P downloading legitimate. The logic behind this action is that instead of treat them as piracy which threaten our record sales, why not cooperate with them and make them legitimate? EMULE has high downloading speed and huge music resources and in this way may turn EMULE into a big competitor with iTune store. For major labels, the benefits are cost reduction with releasing and control search engine with keywords which could help labels to promote their artists more easily. Also EMULE has queue and credit system which can actually support and realize benefical business model.