My new Discovery Moment Monetization patent is not ready for filing; therefore my first few posts might be boring with limited essence.
As an inventor and longtime observer of the music industry, I would like to bring to the table some common sense ideas on how to revive the ever shrinking industry. After 14 years of being part of many startups and observing the theft and misuse of goodwill in the music industry, the critical mass has accumulated and now is the perfect time to make all players in the industry happy and profitable.
Now be patient because this might be a bit boring, but it’s a proof that we are in for better times ahead.
Back in 1999, on average it took listeners 3 to 5 exposures to a good song before they were able to identify the artist, the name of the song, or at least some lyrics that would allow them to walk into a store and purchase the CD. Listeners would have to wait for a DJ announcement to make a note of the song or scribble a few words from the lyrics in order to convert to a purchase. Those with musical talent could even rely on memory and just sing a piece of the song to a smart and devoted store attendant. For me and some of my colleagues, the solution was the Panasonic micro recorder. To have access to a desired song, you had to show up at one of the brick stores and purchase a CD for $15.99, having no knowledge of the music you were looking for or no stock of the CD on the shelf. To make matters worse, stores like Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Best Buy would not have competent staff to help solve the puzzle. To get most of your “tune hunt”, you had to show up in Coconuts or Tower Records and hopefully bump into the “name that tune” guy. Even then, the conclusion was less than perfect.
Even in those imperfect and pathetic times, 1999 was a record year for the Music Industry, with global sales at over 40 billion dollars!
So where is the problem? Today all music consumers walk around with cell phones and do not need the latest smartphone to shrink the 1999 purchasing process to a few clicks on the keypad. It’s very difficult to find proper parameters and compare the old and new environments, however there should be at least 30 times more sales transactions today compared to 1999. To conclude, if we would set the price of single song at just $0.49, we would be at almost 50 billion dollars in annual sales TODAY!
A typical CD had an average of 12 songs and sold for about $12, so 3.2 billion CD purchases made almost 40 billion dollars in 1999. Today, 30 x 3.2 purchases = 96 billion transactions that should be delivering $48 billion dollars in sales revenue. The future is actually brighter; today there are 3 times as many humans on earth who have the proper purchasing power and technology in their hands to put the Music Industry revenues over $100 billion.
