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Mobile Music 2.0

The numbers are starting to come in and it looks like the iPhone, iPod Touch and other mobile gadgets are having a significant economic impact on the music industry - beyond their ability to simply store and playback your MP3 files. The devices also allow music fans to listen to streaming music in realtime over WiFi and 3G networks. These are still early days, but uptake numbers are looking significant enough to drive more innovation and funding towards these kinds of always-on, feels like free music experiences.

Earlier this month, CBS Radio Interactive’s President David Goodman revealed to Billboard that ”I’ll have to get the figures for Last.fm, but at CBS Radio, about 7% of our audience is now streamed through an iPhone. We’ve had more than 4 million people downloading the app”. That’s a huge amount of market awareness and stickiness.

www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i8c26f2cd61d269b86a96cc04c05b6648

And today we’re reading that perennial underdog Pandora will soon start to see some black. Founder Tim Westergren told Bloomberg that he anticipates Pandora pulling in $40m USD this year - and levitate into profitability for the first time next year. The Panodora iPhone app is currently being downloaded 20,000 times per day right now. That’s a hella lot of new customers. 

www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/pandora-predicts-first-ever-profit-next-year/

The other thing to learn from this is to keep an open mind in regards to your business models and channel strategy. There are three kinds of markets out there: the market you think you’re in, the market you want, and the market you’re actually in.

 

More Tim here:
www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i9ba0bc99fcd0242ca2490e04eb04af28

Brian Eno: “refreshingly democratic art”

Art rock god and accidental pop mega producer Brian Eno recently published an article in the UK’s Prospect Magazine. It’s rare these days to find credible people profess optimism for the state of the recorded music business, but Brian manages to squeeze out a little gem here:

The pressure is on to develop content that isn’t easily copyable—so now everything other than the recorded music is becoming the valuable part of what artists sell. Of course they’ll still want to sell their music, but now they’ll embed that relatively valueless product within a matrix of hard-to-copy (and therefore valuable) artwork. People who won’t pay £15 for a CD will pay £150 for the limited edition version with additional artwork, photos, booklet and DVDs. They often already own the music, downloaded—but now they want the art. They’re buying art, and they’re buying it in a new way. That suggests to me the possibility of a refreshingly democratic art market: a new way for visual artists, designers, animators and film-makers to make a living. So, as one business folds, several others open up.

www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10784