wax&wires

Music: “The Hottest Currency Of The Digital Age”

Hot off the heels of yesterday’s news that the RIAA cannot base penalties on the cost of copywritten property itself, the net is buzzing with talk on the state of the music industry and how to make money in it during these tough times. Labels are looking for new and better ways to make money besides simply selling music itself.

Howie Singer from Warner Music said his company wanted to see “compensation and not simply control”.

“It’s interesting to be in a business where there’s no issue about creating demand for your product,” he said. “The issue is finding a way to get paid for it.”

What Singer is saying is that they have no problem selling people on the value of music. People want music so badly that they steal it. The problem is, WMG is sitting on the hottest currency of the digital age, and can’t figure out a way to exchange that currency for cash. Music will always be in high demand, but the whole “supply and demand dictate price” model doesn’t really apply with digital content. When you have to compete with “free,” it’s tough to sell your product.

I found this article on BBC this morning, check it out here. There’s not a lot of new or ground breaking info in the first 80% of that read. Towards the end, the author lists out various methods that artists have tried in order to make money these days. I thought some of them sounded pretty innovative, and could be useful for you to consider.

Read it.

Do you have any new ideas on how artists can turn a profit with their content these days?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 3:40 pm. It is filed under wax and tagged with album sales, downloads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.