Mark Mulligan's Music Industry Blog post shows that because of all these choices, people are actually listening to their favorite music less than ever before.
When people purchased music in the past, be it either vinyl, CD or download, they tended to listen to it over and over first because they paid for it, but also because it was the only new music they could get on demand. With new music now available at your fingertips, this is no longer the case thanks to the short attention span of just about everyone today.
What this seems to mean is that fans now have a shorter-term relationship with the artists they like than every before. If you listen to a song or an artist over and over, you tend to identify more. That's no longer the case, so it means that there are fewer deep fan-artist relationships now being built.
This has long term implications in that 5 or 10 years down the road there won't be as many artists capable of filling an arena or drawing a festival crowd - obviously not good for the business.
Mulligan also makes the point that because there is so much mediocre music now available, it's becoming more and more difficult for quality music to rise above the clutter.
The only saving grace is that music follows technology. While streaming may be the distribution method of choice right now, something new could completely rewrite the music business as we know it and make us throw the above out the window. Tomorrow's music and music industry will likely be quite different than what we see today.
1 comment:
To be honest I think the internet had somewhat of a negative impact on music in general. I personally used to use distro's a lot and got music from bands I had never heard of. The fact that the entry cost was fairly pricey for creating cd's, tapes etc the artist had to have a level of faith that the music they were producing had some credibility.
Unfortunately I find it harder now to find quality music due to the ease at which music can be created and distributed.
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