A Few Oldie but Goodie Posts I Came Across on Freemium Models and Business Models in the Music Industry
While doing some research and waiting for our latest video to render and compress, I came across a couple of older but goodie posts on a few other blogs that I wanted to share, including a slideshare slide deck by Alexander Osterwalder from businessmodelgeneration.com. The first post I wanted to mention is “The Music Industry – What’s Broken” from the Freemium.org blog where the author calls attention to this presentation from Business Model Generation:
This is an awesome slide deck that does a great job at visualizing the old and the new paradigm. Its a quick view with just enough insight to plant a few ideas in your head. You can get a copy of his book on Amazon:
The Freemium Blog incidentally is also a fantastic read with a lot of good concepts and ideas that aspiring artists would do well to contemplate.
Another older but great post I wanted to point out is from Music Industry Blog, “Why the ‘Music As Free’ Argument Just Doesn’t Hold Water” where the author argues in favor of the old school model. He makes some good points, basically pointing out that artists need a revenue stream in order to eat and ditch the day job to focus on music professionally. I disagree with his argument that a major record label record deal is a prerequisite to be sustainable. I think the reality lies somewhere in a combination of the concepts in the slide deck above, the concepts on Freemium, mixing it all together and driving revenue in new ways to be sustainable. Most musicians and bands don’t think that way though, they “need” a record deal in order to supply the infrastructure to get their music distributed, although this is changing more and more with the advent of so many social networking tools and a generation that has grown up with these tools as status quo. But of particular interest in the Music Industry Blog article were a few great comments. I liked the comments by Miguel Caetano, his blog is at Remixtures and is in Portuguese so I can’t read it, but his comments are still valid today I think. I also particularly liked the comment by Martin Atkins from Tour Smart where he highlighted a few cool interesting ideas some artists tried:
“an artist called Moldovar created a new cd with the song titles made in circuitry and the jewel case contains a light sensitive therimin he is making himself. i was happy to pay $50 for the release. he has, so far sold 500″
“Shogun Konitoki have a vinyl release embedded with dots, to see and hear the release in all of its spectacular glory you have to first assemble the battery powered strobe light kit that comes with the release…..and watch a video showing you how to do it. By the end of the process, I guess you are unable to make an objective decision about the music after investing all of this time in preparing to be amazed – you probably will be. cost, $69.00″
Hope you find some of this interesting, maybe it will get you thinking.
