A recent analyst?s report divided the music industry into three eras.
Forrester Research described 1999 to 2000 as the pirate era, 2001 to
2002 as the promotion era, and 2003 and beyond as the commerce era.
The pirate era hardly needs elaboration. In the promotion era, old
dogs learn new tricks: record companies, experts in pre-Internet era
promotion, must rapidly evolve their techniques to make commercial
recordings visible and accessible to consumers online.
The commerce era kicks in when the public has been presented with an
easy, appealing, wholly satisfactory avenue for acquiring music
exactly the way they want it, and online sales move to dominate the
music market.
Exponential growth is forecast for the sale of music in digital
format. Estimates vary from the size of this market being between
$900m and $1,500m by 2004 and up to 19% ($12,000m) of the overall
music market within 10 years
Why will consumers buy music digitally?
The fact that consumers will download music is indisputable. Current
estimates suggest there are over 4 million downloads of MP3 tracks
each day and that this number of growing exponentially. Clearly one of
the main drivers for this is that the majority of music on the web
today is free.
However we contest that once high quality music is available at a
reasonable price in well presented packages, and it is easy to
purchase, then a high percentage of consumers who currently purchase
CD?s online will choose to purchase some tracks for download.
There are a number of clear advantages to digital delivery:
* Instant delivery
* Wide choice of specialist recordings, that may not be available on CD,
e.g., live records, etc..
* Cheaper as the current trend is towards $0.99 per track, compared with
$2.99 for a single
* Ability to bundle, images, video, interactive multimedia presentations, and
extensive artwork with the digital product may lead to new types of music
products, i.e. the CD album is only one way of delivering music |
