I believe the future of the music industry is streaming.
In the Global Recorded Music Industry Revenues 1999-2017 chart, Steaming and Performance Rights are the only two areas that have shown consistent growth since their introduction. In fact, most other areas are actually showing less revenue in comparison. As someone who does not subscribe to music streaming services outside of what is included with my Amazon Prime membership, I believe this speaks to the effectiveness and appeal of streaming services. I have friends who have said that they cut spending in other areas of their entertainment consumption lives because they could not live without the ad-free version of Pandora/Spotify.
We want specific music, but we don’t want to pay for the song to keep forever, because we recognize that we have differing tastes as time goes on. I myself have songs that I bought on iTunes as a teenager because “I love this song!” But I have not listened to them in ten years.
I also think of the facebook live phenomena that is taking over my generation and younger. It is a very real possibility, that my generation will embrace a virtual concert, where the artist streams their “live” performance, and people who can’t be there can enjoy it. You could set-up a payment system where a cheaper “ticket” gets access to a single camera in the back of the venue, a middle-expense ticket gets access to the close-up cameras on the performer, and the most expensive tickets actually allow you to be physically there. You could even have an additional expense where people can stream from their personal device through the app, and others with the app can pay to unlock that perspective. People could build a social following for being someone who goes to these events, and maybe they get a small cut of the profits generated by their personal stream.
The problem with streaming an event that tickets have been sold for is that people who didn’t pay get to experience the event can get some of the exclusive content that is being shared at the event. I think this weakness will be exploited by the music industry before too long, and then of course there is the expansion into other industries where live events have exclusive content, like comic-con.
Aaron Reger 