Markets Always Change.
At a seminar about the future of music, I heard a provocative suggestion. If every cellphone owner were prepared to pay an average annual subscription of $10 for unlimited music, the numbers would look like this.
4 billion phones x $10 = $40 billion.
Current size of music industry = $20 billion.
Crisis, what crisis? Of course, the specifics are debateable, but the point is undeniable. Change the way you look at your business and all sorts of discoveries will follow. What's this got to do with marketing. Well not that much if you view marketing solely as promotion, but when you remember that it encompasses the P of place (aka distribution) you'll agree that marketing really has to be approached with a long-term perspective. Its short-term practitioners are the problem, not a symptom.
Markets always change. Always have, always will. It's a crucial marketing discipline to anticipate and, where possible, lead those changes.
posted by john dodds @ 2:36 PM
2 Comments:
Go deeper. Would you expect that 40bn to be invested into more cultural production?
The task is not to mimic the existing music 'selling' business but to evolve how cultural productions utilize exchange values instead of economic currency models.
Distribution and markets may well be linked, but if music was 'free' (free as in freedom to reuse freely), distribution becomes part of the productions ideology, rather than it's marketing needs - which tend to ensure music has a 'market' and then you end up with disposable pop rather than useful frequencies.
If we liberate the assets within the music industry, we'll find many more cultural platforms; migrating all the 78, 33, 45, mp3s to the mobile platform is not the solution, it's just another form of destination based distribution.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the reason for making music is a clue to why commercialization is an issue; if you wanted to be heard, you would drop the charges. Relistening is not replaying; with infinitive streams of music, the need to revisit is dissolved and tools for filtering, adapting, mutating the (audio) stream increases.
The music industry needs more music and less taxes.
@zeroinfluencer How else do you indicate value of something?
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