The music recording industry is often wondering why people prefer radio services (terrestrial or over the Internet) or buffet-styles services (Rdio or Spotify) over buying albums. Many jump on the conclusion of cost, because often radio services are free, but I slightly disagree with that.
What makes buying music albums so prohibitively expensive is the cost of mistakes. For example, you buy an entire album because of one of its hit song you heard on the radio, only to discover that the rest of the album is crap. So, then, services like the iTunes music store lets you buy individual tracks, but that's still too expensive. How does one discover if a song is good enough before buying it? Is a 30-second preview good enough?
Discovering new music should be as inexpensive as possible. Radio services is an important mode of publicity to bring in new listeners in a genre they would have not considered before. Restricting too much the variety of music available on radio creates the perverse situation that people that are keen to discover new music genres, and potentially becoming ardent customers on niche genres, have to revert to piracy just to discover new music they might want to buy in the future.
This is something that always boggled me about music stores. In book stores, you can easily browse around and read a bit a book before buying it. In many music stores, the process of sampling a CD was cumbersome to say the least, and often you'd end up browsing, what? Album covers? Yes, there's a risk that somebody goes in a book store, reads random books for hours, and ends up buying nothing. The same could happen with music streaming services. But then, book stores now often sell coffee, so maybe there's a potential equivalent revenue stream for a music discovery service...
Published on November 29, 2012 at 21:17 EST
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