The Future of Music Consumption

The commercial distribution industry as we know it today has helped plenty of fans connect to their favorite artist by selling physical copies. From record stores to your local Wal-Mart we all have all touched a cd or record at one point in our time. With this new generation coming up we don’t know how common this statement will be 10 years from now At one point of time physical sales made up 60% of Music Industry Revenue, which is a billion dollar industry. Now streaming services are making up to 80% of the Music Industry Revenue. We see the power of streaming, of course it can connect artists to people around the world with the tap of a button. One thing that’s significant to look at within these differences is that, while physical copies are not common today like they used to be, you can track a lot of data from listeners. Streaming could seem like a rip off to artists only receiving a fraction of a penny per stream but with enough vision, demographics, and psychographics you could with persistence create a serious stream of income. In the future data will be king, the average artist will be able to target potential fans by just seeing who is listening. Not only will it create a revenue it will give the artist more leverage to create a listening environment for fans. Great examples of creating a listening space for fans is creating limited physical copies, limited clothing merchandise, to take it that extra mile or in other words play with the psychographics.

This type of influence will heighten the way we listen to music from here on out. We talked about the listening environment but what about the quality of how we listen to recordings? Spotify, Apple, Pandora etc, all provide the same quality of music 44khz 16 bit float, while DEEZER and Tidal offer Hi-Fii listening which means FULL CD quality. A lot of listeners don't pay too much attention to this as of recently. On the contrary with proper promotion, and time I can see listeners wanting to be more involved with the fidelity they choose to listen to their favorite artist. We have seen the rise of Tidal with Jay-z and Beyonce making their recordings only exclusive to Tidal, influence can go far. Not only do I personally love what Tidal and DEEZER is doing sonically.

I want to definitely point out what DEEZER is doing in terms of paying royalties out to artists. For instance a typical subscription is 10 dollars, let's say the expenses are 3 dollars for the DSP (digital stream platform) and 7 dollars are distributed to the artists fans are listening to. I think this is a great start in compensating independent artists for their music. Nobody in the market is making this type of model which I find very interesting. Artists being aware of this DSP would create a lot of good traffic. Also create more room for all parties involved regarding payouts. I think we are on a good run towards the future!