crashroots

Take the music industry. You come closer to spelling out where it’s going to go.

A: Music’s already there. We don’t have to guess about what the future of music is; we can already see it. It’s interesting as an analogy. We wrongly correlated, or equated, the music industry with the record labels. It now turns out in fact that the labels are now the least important part. If you look at the rest of the industry now, from the bands to the fans from Apple to tour promoters, everyone’s doing OK, except for the labels. So there’s really nothing wrong with the music industry; we’re just redefining what it is. And I wonder whether we’re going to see a similar fragmentation and reformation of media. Right now, media is defined as those who own the presses – the presses meaning either the physical presses or broadcast towers or whatever. We’re beginning to see a new class of professional media which operate on internet economics. They’re still small, and they don’t make anything like the money. Read the full article. (via dailyswarm)

Business models are a tricky subject. There is an old saying among entrepreneurs that there is no real value to writing down your business model, as it will have changed by the time you commit it to paper. The joke has truth to it; I can personally attest to its veracity. But there is something brewing in the larger world of Internet business models that has wide implications: freemium.

Fred Wilson, famed VC and blogger, originally came up with the general concept of freemium, which he explained this way:

Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

This concept, building an audience, then implementing paid features as later expansions, is slowly becoming the de facto model for online companies. Of course, there are many successful Internet companies today that avoid it entirely. However, they all seem to lose money. Digg, Twitter, and the other media darlings of the Web 2.0 world still live in red ink, even after scaling to mass market size. Read more at bulding43.com

Michael Masnick’s (founder of Techdirt) recent presentation at the NARM 2009 conference is great. It summarizes a few key new music 2.0 business models in a entertaining way. Read more at Createdigitalmusic.com

There’s some fantastic resources out there and some inspirational writers like Seth Godin, Andrew Dubber, Gerd Leonhard, Derek Sivers and even digital distributors Tunecore all offer some brilliant insight and the best news is its all out there for you to grab free as a bird. And legal too! Read the full post at Buzzsonic.com

Here are two great blog post about the ever evolving landscape of new music business models. I can not tell you how much i LOVE the vibrance and creativity the internet is injecting into the music biz. “TOTAL MADE THIS MONTH USING TWITTER = $19,000 / TOTAL MADE FROM 30,000 RECORD SALES = ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.“ Read more… and How Musician can make $19,000 in 10 hours using Twitter. Read more…