Music Industry

The New York Times wrote this really good article about what the internet has done to and for the music industry. Check it out here.

Consumer Taste Sharing

Mike Mcguire and Derek Slater from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society recently published a 12 page analysis of how recommendation sites could potentially increase a wider variety of sales (I found it on Chris Anderson's blog..I seem to be finding all my resources there). Not only will recommendation sites boost the more popular items/commodities but they should also help boost the "niches" of the market. You can read the article here.

This article is great because it gives some actual statistics to their findings.

• Nearly one-fourth of frequent online music users say that the ability to share music with
others in some fashion is an important criteria when selecting an online music service.

• One-tenth of early adopters stated that they often make music purchases based on
others' recommendations.

• One-third of early adopters of digital media surveyed by Gartner stated that they were
interested in online music discovery and recommendation technology that is actually
powered by their taste in music.

• Some of the most-regular users of online music services, whether free peer-to-peer
(P2P) or paid services, are the most interested in consumer-generated recommendation
tools.


Predictions
• By 2010, 25 percent of online music store transactions will be driven directly from
consumer-to-consumer taste-sharing applications, such as playlist publishing and
ranking tools built into online music stores or external sites with links to stores.

This article is excellent because it examines the potential these recommendation sites might have. One part of the article states "[recommendation sites] seem to be a requirement to maintain market growth in licensed online music services." They also take a look at the copyright issues that prevent a lot of these sites from actually expanding to greater heights.

I love the last part of the article because they argue that recommendation sites encourage the possiblity of people in our cutlure to "think for themselves." I'm not saying that we don't already, but the article makes a great point ---

recommendation tools in particular could help make a more participatory, democratically defined culture, taking influence from powerful legacy tastemakers and encourage creativity...the more varied ideas and forms of art that people are exposed to, the more they are forced to 'decide' for themselves how to think and act.

Recommendation sites are a way for individuals to spread a piece of their individuality to a potentially limitless amount of people. This ability in turn allows a constant exchange of individual tastes, and could allow for much larger, more creative culture. I'm not really sure who is against these types of sites, but I do think that we as consumers, and participators in this culture should be allowed to spread our individual tastes, and should be allowed to learn about others. I do feel that sites like pandora and last.fm will not only increase a market for artists, but also increase the pool of creativity and individuality. We no longer have only a handful of radio stations to find our music, we have a limitless store at our fingertips.