Music Is Late To The Party Again As MySpace Sells “Free” TV
TV has once again trumped the music industry by cutting a deal to sell episodes of Fox’s "24" on MySpace.(Reuters) For $1.99 they are selling something available free on TV and Bit-Torrent to the millions that spend hours a day on the site.
The music industry would rather sue kids who aren’t willing to spend $10-15 on a new release than figuring out how to give them something worth paying for. Along the way, has the industry made music, which helped fuel much of MySpace’s incredible success, something that can only be given away for free?
So far initiatives to monetize music on MySpace has been limited to selling compilation CD’s which have flopped.
Instead of staying stuck in a "give us 99 cents or sue ’em" paradigm why not look at MySpace as an opportunity to monetize music discovery. "If you like what you heard for free; here’s a link for a 25 cent (or even 10 cent) high quality download"
or "Give us $5 and here’s 8 songs and an interview with the band plus a coupon for $5 off a t-shirt bight at a show". "Buy something and get a ‘ticket’ to an ‘exclusive’ MySpace online listening party with the band answering questions in chat room". In other words, use the technology rather than fight it.
And even this kind of thinking is old school. The cool kids – the ones that start the trends and then tell their less cool friends about them – are already bored with MySpace and onto something else. Will the new music industry be smart enough to follow them?
The industry would rather sue people who aren’t willing to spend $10 to $15 on a new CD rather than give them something worth paying for?
That sounds more like frustration than an actual, serious statement.
Between digital downloads and the new Napster site, there are definitely a lot of options to not buying a CD.
If you’ve got a beef with the RIAA because it hasn’t embraced file sharing or 25-cent downloads, that’s true, neither of those are big with the RIAA.
Then again, I wouldn’t get behind 25-cent downloads, either. Music should be worth more than that. This shouldn’t be a race to the bottom to let people buy as much as possilbe. It will cheapen the product. Also, that would require a different wholesale cost to MySpace than what is charged to other online companies, and I can’t imagine that would go over well.
MySpace does, by the way, offer up to four streams and downloads per MySpace page. It’s up to the label/band. If they want to give away downloads they can do so. Most don’t and offer the songs as audio streams. The technology is already there, though, if they want to give away downloads at no cost.
And who are these kids who have moved beyond MySpace, and what are they using? Can you point to any research (and not to all the PR-driven articles about Facebook that have been popping up all over the place)?
While I agree with a lot of what Glenn said, I have to call him out on one real howler: “It will cheapen the product.”
Given the state of the music industry, and what passes for a “composition” or “popular music,” reducing the selling price of a track to a quarter or dime may reduce the expense, or lower the cost, but nothing can further cheapen the product.
But, sorry to blow the same note again, it can not be about the per track cost – it never has been for the real music fan – it’s about a monthly budget.
The sellers of recorded music need to come up with a monthly pricing structure that allows real music fans to listen to, and keep (if they really want to) all the music they would like.
As long as musicians continue to deliver compelling new material, people who would have paid will continue to pay, regardless of how much catalog and long tail material they scoop up in between new releases.