It’s Time For A Streaming Pricing Reset [Mark Mulligan]
By Mark Mulligan of MiDA on his Music Industry blog.
There is a growing realization that that streaming revenue is not growing quickly enough to offset the impact of declining download sales. It is an eerily familiar echo of the recurring narrative of the noughties that download sales were not growing quickly enough to offset the impact of declining CD sales. The situation is very different now in that the industry licenses the disruptive force.
Back in the noughties the combined impact of changing consumer behavior patterns, growing piracy adoption and the loss of content scarcity were factors the industry had little control over. Yet this present shift is more fundamental and will have much bigger long term impact. This is the shift to the consumption era. Streaming happens to be the tool of the moment for harnessing that shift but with current pricing strategy the industry’s toolset is woefully unable to fully harness the massive potential that exists.
Zero to 9.99 Is Too Big A Leap
The single biggest issue is the binary nature of streaming pricing: 9.99 or free. (Sure there are desktop versions for less but the desktop is yesterday’s consumption platform and is no longer a useful differentiator for price.) The leap from zero to 9.99 is simply too big. Even a 30 day trial still leaves the consumer with the same zero to 9.99 leap at the end.
Streaming pricing strategy is simply not aligned with consumer music spending (see figure):
- Super fan aficionados tend to spend between $10 and $30 a month but many are now shifting down to $9.99 a month
- Mainstream music fans spend less frequently and at best average less than $10 a month, most typically just a few $. $9.99 is just too much for them as is regular spending, so they end up streaming for free
- Passive fans used to spend occasionally now typically spend nothing and are core users of free streaming, YouTube especially
So streaming is bringing down the spending of the super fans and missing the spending of the mainstream fans.
Most music fans (i.e. not the super fan aficionados who by definition most of the people reading this blog are) engage with music in a very event driven manner. They have their favourite artists and they engage with them when they are in cycle with a new single, album, tour etc. That used to mean buying an album or some tracks, and it still means buying concert tickets. But these days for the digitally engaged mainstream fans it most often does not include buying anything. Instead they stream for free from YouTube, Soundcloud, Pandora.
Just to make things worse, the super fan aficionados are now spending less because of streaming. 23% of them used to buy more than an album a month, now they spend 9.99 a month and that spending is spread across a far greater quantity of music, meaning a smaller pie is being divided into even smaller slices.
Three Ways To Fix Streaming Pricing
It wasn’t meant to be this way. A high tide was meant to rise all boats. Mass market music fans were meant to increase their spending to 9.99. The aspiration is reasonable enough, these same consumers have been persuaded to pay for mobile phone subscriptions over the last decade, and many have adopted Netflix and Amazon Prime too. But it will take some time to get them there and they need a helping hand in the meantime.
There are a number of tactics that will set up streaming to capitalize on the mainstream music fan opportunity:
- More price tier differentiation: this means cheaper tiers ($2, $3, $5) to capture spending across a broad a range of consumers as possible
- Reduce the main $9.99 price point to $7.99: to capture the upper band of mainstream fans, while adding a $12.99 tier for super fan aficionados who want extras like high quality audio, bios, photos, exclusives etc.
- Introduce PAYG / Top Ups: the mobile phone business needed PAYG to take phone subscriptions to the mainstream – they were an unfamiliar concept consumers needed to experience to understand the value of. The same applies to music. But also it gives tentative consumers the benefit of the long term relationship without the commitment
Universal’s Lucian Grainge stated at the WSJD conference this week that revenue from subscription services is simply not enough to stem the decline of downloads and CDs. As things stand he is absolutely right. But fill the chasm between free and paid with a diverse range of pricing options and that will change. Virtually every consumer market, whether it is phones, supermarkets or cars has a segmented pricing strategy, now it is time for streaming to benefit from the same approach. The alternative is leaving most of the potential spend on the table.
Or maybe, just maybe… music is meant to be free. It started out free and for thousands of years it *was* free. The majors have already adopted their “360” deals and have shown us that they are only interested in producing music for the lowest common denominator, one that has very little tastes made up already or just a bad pallet anyway. If they can’t support and back music of many different genres and tastes that foster the idea that not only material things have worth, then it’s their own fault. There is nothing set in stone that says people have the should and will always make a profit from music sales.
http://www.chancius.com
Yeah, music is meant to be free. Only corporations like Google should have the right to make money out of it. Not the musicians who make it. Google&co have worked very hard to implement the slave mentality into creators, and they have apparently succeeded.