The album is dead they say, or at the very least, the CD is on it’s way out. A few months back Forrester Research released a report that argues for an alternative music release structure (you can check out the original report here). One that more closely matches the predominant music consumer’s behavior, buying tracks one at a time online. I think this is the way forward for independent musicians and will look at Forrester’s take and then later in the week will outline my own “adjusted for reality” strategy for independent musicians.
Forrester’s Independent Music Release Structure
The old way of business was to work on an album for a year, finish it’s 10-15 tracks and then have a single event, a release, in which the product is finally for sale. In today’s world a year is an eternity. All that time spent out of your fans’ minds is time lost. Mark Mulligan at Forrester and many others argue for a steady stream of output to keep fans engaged. Mark’s model follows:
Here is Forrester’s explanation of the chart:
“At the top of the release window chain will be highly convenient services that deliver real premium value with the best content first. At the other end will be services that are less convenient with less content last.”
I think this chart is a little off, as most bands don’t have the ability to “bundle” their music with phone makers or mobile carriers, BUT the gist of it is this: A stepped release structure in which “premium” members receive the goods first. This tiered approach could take many forms. Refe Tuma over at Creative Deconstruction makes the case for a subscription model. Either way, you’re looking at restricting distribution of your music to some channels and, in effect, trying to create scarcity.
Next comes the online retailers and the physical CD. Again, the chart is a bit off. In my experience, using CDBaby as a digital distributor, it takes about 1-4 months for your music to hit paid digital download sites. There’s no way it can happen in 3 weeks. And add to that the even greater unpredictability of manufacturing a physical CD, it seems an even bigger stretch to be continually running this release structure.
Lastly, are free services or ad supported music streaming services like Last.fm or Grooveshark. This is fine according to the chart as users can control when music is uploaded.
Conclusion
Forrester is attempting to create value through restriction. This used to happen naturally when the only way to have music on demand was to own a physical copy of it. But with the digital age it is no longer possible to create scarcity of your musical product because it can be copied and shared infinitely. There are just too many ways to “get” music. I respect this attempt to rethink a musical release strategy and agree with the over-arching idea that output should be a smaller steady stream rather than a larger once a year event. However, I disagree that Forrester’s attempts at restriction will actually work. So next I will be putting forward what I believe is a more practical music release strategy, in which I shuffle the various output channels a bit into something that ordinary independent musicians can actually follow. Stay tuned!
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[...] week I did an analysis of a music release strategy put forward by Forrester Research that generated some buzz a month or [...]