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www.digitalmusic2008.com Before Edison, music had scarcity value. You had to be in the right place at the right time to enjoy it. Technology made it possible to distribute performances widely to be consumed at any time. With digital media, music is now ubiquitous. And its tougher than ever to make money from it. In an age of free music given away with your newspaper its hard to find a business model thats as popular with consumers as it is with labels and artists. Radiohead won praise for tackling the problem head on by simply asking consumers what theyd like to pay when they released their In Rainbows last year. If nothing else, this was a superb example of harnessing the webs potential for distribution and more accurately, PR. A year on from In Rainbows and the search for viable digital music business models continues. Despite a favourable reaction from consumers in the Digital Music Survey 2008, Radioheads experiment looks like a one-off. Even if it could scale, an honesty-box model is probably neither commercially viable nor appropriate for an industry that repeatedly (with justification) tells consumers how little it trusts them. Our latest research gives some valuable pointers as to what might work. Firstly, the fact that the number of consumers purchasing legal downloads is now in the majority bodes well for those models that seamlessly combine discovery and downloading. Convenience is key to digital music. Single-track downloads encourage consumers to cherry-pick …
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