Essay 3 – [The future of music]

When we talk about the future of the music, we cannot avoid having a glance at the history of the music development. Initially the main income of the music industry largely depended on the revenue of the tickets of live concerts as well as the record economy. The battle against the piracy to protect the intellectual property has started since then. As the development of the internet technology, more and more people can get access to lots of music by downloading them for free. At this time, many music companies found they experienced a large shrink of the record revenue. Therefore, they attribute the declining of the revenue to the newly developed social media technologies. Music companies thought the consumers downloaded music illegally through the internet for free so that they don’t want to buy the music any more. Unfortunately, as the response to protect the intellectual property, some technologies such as Peer to Peer Technology are banned in some countries including Sweden.

A debate has risen regarding whether we should blame the piracy behavior to some technology or shall we consider the transforming of the revenue model of the music industry. All of these require us to think about what is the most valuable stuff on earth when the consumers purchase the music. Is it the physical music CD disk in the past that they buy in the traditional music stores, or is it the digital code that they buy through the online music stores? The answer is neither of them. What the core stuff they purchase is the intellectual property of the music. Although we should protect the intellectual property, shall we just simply prohibit the related social media technologies such as the P2P technology? Is it fair to the technology engineers who develop such kinds of convenient technologies? The answer is no. A case in point could be the printed industry. Can we just ban the usage of the duplicating machine in order to protect the intellectual property of the book authors? As we know, duplicating is allowed in many libraries, you can duplicate some pages or even some chapters of the book to read; however, you cannot duplicate the entire book. Hence, the root of solving the piracy problem is not to ban some technology. Instead, the contents providers online should be well supervised. In addition, many surveys and investigates show that those people who often download the free tracks illegally are those people who often purchase the music and go to the concert. The reason for the illegal downloading behavior is that they want to make sure whether some songs and albums are worth buying or not.

I believe that no music companies would like to classify their potential consumers to be the people who offend the law. Hence the changing of the revenue model of the music industry is necessary. First of all, the successful reform of the supply chain of the music industry such as the online music library could be kept with the implementation of the long tail theory to satisfy all kinds of niche markets. As we know, in the past under the traditional music economy mode, the music disks CD or tapes should go through three stages before they reach the ultimate consumers, which are the manufactures, distributors and retailers. Under the digital music mode, the music can directly reach the consumers from the content providers.
To solve the illegal downloading problem , the content providers could buy the music from the music companies at a low price to build a music library where the consumers can easily search their required songs and download them for free so that they will be able to listen to them three or four times but with lower quality than the original tracks as well as with advertisement due to the fact that the people who purchase the music and go to the concerts are those who download free material actively since they should have an opportunity to know whether the songs are good or not. Hence, if music content providers offer such a platform, it will make a contribution to the music industry’s revenue, to which online ads can subsequently benefit. It should be stressed here that it is the large consumer base for music that the advertisers want to target, which is the real resource for the online advertisement business.

Finally, there could be another development trend of the future music industry, which is based on the value constellation and open source concept. Consumers are the providers as well. Such as YouTube, you can record your own album and upload them to share with people for free. And the economy compensate could be from the online advertisement also.