At the Leadership Music Digital Summit yesterday there was a session on investing in new music opportunities. On the panel were Chris Fralic, a partner at First Round Capital and Paul Santinelli, general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners.
Today Digital Music News put up a post about this session that contained this quote: "The next big thing is going to be music discovery," Santinelli boldly predicted. That was echoed by Fralic, who pointed to related investments in companies StumbleUpon and Aggregate Knowledge. "
Here are a couple of data points on how people discover music.
The first is a chart from The Infinite Dial 2008: Radio's Digital Platforms and the second a passage from The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada.
I draw a couple of conclusions from this data.
The first is that people don't seek to discover new music - it just happens. They don't listen to the radio, watch TV or talk to friends for the purpose of discovering new music. This is a byproduct of the intended object of the interaction. The Internet music discovery sites, even with their social networking skins, assume the primary object of interaction to be music discovery. This misunderstanding of consumer behavior will be fatal.
The second conclusion I draw is that historically the number one source for music discovery - terrestrial radio - is a type of ad-supported music. The extent to which music discovery becomes a successful Internet business is wholly dependent on the success of streaming ad-supported music, as it is the on-line equivalent of terrestrial radio.
Since downloaded music provides a superior user experience to streaming radio, I will argue that downloaded ad-supported music will be the superior vehicle for music discovery.
8 comments:
You My sir are incorrect.
Haha, you mean to tell me the hours I spend daily scouring the internet for music, the messages of lyrics I put in my phone so I can look up songs later on, all of that just happens, eh?
You're completely wrong guy!
ummmm...no.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever read.
Job? Get a real one.
i don't listen to the radio because its garbage. they play music i can't stand and, more often than not, play the same band/song every hour or every other hour. there's little opportunity to discover new music with that format. i look to the internet for new music or through word of mouth. the same stands for the majority of people i know. this "study" you've done is incorrect unless you're applying it to the masses who only care about what the media tells them to care about. fail
". i look to the internet for new music or through word of mouth."
Well I had a music site that a big company was about to pick up with that contained independent latin music artists.. and we were right on the cusp of getting funding until... they did some market research
and discovered that "people weren't really into discovering new music". That they wanted to hear music that they recognize.
So that pretty much caused me to close up shop because it was getting to big to run it with my own limited funds.
I think you have a point when you refer to interaction as the bases for discovery, just like most people will prefer company during there vacation. Over 50M internet radio listeners (and growing) prefer the social internet radio discovery channel because there is much more interaction there then over the traditional radio. Another advantage (when black and weight are not the only shads you acknowledge) to discovery tools is ones freedom to choose the amount of discovery vs. familiarity there station will provide. I have been using a web radio by the name of meemix.com lately where you get to choose your station "surprise" level, that reflects my point perfectly. Soon enough you (and I) will discover the truth (:
hmmmm, how old are u and in which century do u live?
never read such a stupid garbage about music business.
unbelievable!
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