The music industry is saved!
No, I’m not talking about Radiohead’s recently delivered reality check for Ms. ‘Entitlement’ Miley Cyrus. Although, that is a step in the right direction. So, too, are these adorable cheap mp3 players!
What I really mean, though, is the actual dollars and cents of it all. But if you’re not immediately wiping your brow in relief, I don’t blame you. After all, how many times have you heard a similar announcement in the last decade? Ten? Twenty? One hundred?
Let’s do a mini history review of the US music biz:
Between 1999 and 2007, the industry shrank from $14.5 billion to less than $10.3 billion. And blame for this massive loss remains unassigned.
Record labels point to the illegal-file sharing craze that began in the 90s, and in 2008 still comprised 95 percent of all music downloads. But then there is the other side, who lambastes the greedy, remote music executives.
After all, it’s not bad to steal if you’re stealing from the bad guys. And you could always just buy a concert ticket to support the artist, right?
Now add the technological advances necessitating the consumer portability of music and the entrance of Apple’s iTunes Store to the digital scene, and this much is evident. If the source of blame is murky, then the need to completely revamp industry methods for revenue generation is crystal clear.
Last year, 39 percent of US music sales were digital, with single tracks alone up 27 percent from 2007. Digital album sales, on the other hand, represented barely one-sixteenth of the track sales, illuminating the fundamental change in how music consumers shop. Simply put in iTunes terms, the average listener finds spending 99 cents per song a lot easier than $9.99 for the whole record, especially when most people only end up listening to a couple tracks per album anyway.
Now to me, this is sad. It’s just another example of our Adderall nation’s addiction to the quick-fix. Musically speaking, an album should be considered as a cohesive whole, an entire work of art. For example, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon is widely considered one of the greatest, complete albums of all time, but iTunes’ piecemealing, sell-singles strategy has evaporated this concept even in the face of one of music’s fiercest anti-commercial bands.
The Dark Side of the Moon. Now sold bit-by-bit on iTunes.
At least the Beatles are holding strong. Just try going to iTunes and searching for one of their albums.
Although this decline in the artistic appreciation of music saddens idealists like me, what is the industry’s most pressing concern (and understandably so) is the need to make money again. Labels need to be able to find music that is profitable, the next top-40 single. Artists need to get their music to their audience. And consumers need to be able to find the music they want. The current digital models are both ineffective and inefficient. MySpace, the popular standard for artists to stream their music freely across the Internet, hosts millions of pages—making it nearly impossible to find anything new, except by accident.
Here’s where the new hopeful savior of the industry enters, capitalizing on the preference for single tracks over albums. The white-knight firm Music Xray claims to, “[combine] everything you need to measure, monitor and grow market demand for songs into a unique, ad-free song capsule called a Music Xray.”
The future of music consumption?
There are a lot of fresh concepts within this scheme, and what first struck me is that “you” is aimed equally at the artist, the music executive and the consumer. The same Music Xray can be adapted for all three, very different market segments.
Each Music Xray corresponds to a single track with its own embeddable URL and dropdown information modules. These modules convey key song information, such as lyrics, number of global downloads, number of mentions in blogs and Twitter, and similarities to preexisting songs. Perhaps the most ambitious of all, though, is Xray’s projected market-potential score, which statistically predicts a song’s chances to become a hit, a classic, or a dud.
With these modules, users can create filters to find the songs that they want to hear, and artists can make their song more findable. This is a really exciting example from the company’s CEO, Mark McCready:
“Imagine you’re an advertising executive and you want to license a song for your next ad campaign. You want something that sounds like “Brown Sugar” by Rolling Stones, which has 130 beats per minute, has the words “Russian roulette” in the lyrics, that has at least a 50 percent chance of becoming successful in a particular market, that already has a growing number of fans and an available license. The filtering system at Music Xray will soon provide that level of detail and that level of filtering ability.”
Wow, sounds both innovative and forward-thinking. And of course that same detail carries over to the consumer. You want music that sounds like Bob Dylan, perhaps you will stumble across The Walkmen. It’s like a Pandora and Last.fm combo, but exponentially more personal and intimately catered because you can set your own filters to exactly what you want.
Love top-40 singles? Make the market-demand score one of your highest priorities. Don’t? Eliminate that module entirely.
The music industry desperately needs a radically new direction for the future. Various labels, whole countries around the globe, and tiny album stores have tried their own correspondingly different ideas to remain economically viable. But even the Sony-Rubin creative partnership, one of the most avant-garde actions taken so far, seems to have failed. Or at least, is not succeeding.
It is crystal clear a revolution is necessary. Perhaps Music Xray is the change we need.
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