If music executives sold bottled water, they’d be calling for a ban on tapwater downloads. But their industry is proving resilient

Source: guardian.co.uk

A great article found via Twitter (thx @afairweather and @janniemom). How true is this? In my opinion, this is the point record labels miss. Yes, you can find music for free anywhere. Yes, you’ll probably loose money when people download the pirated copied music.

You could effectively argue “This is a crap analogy since there is a big difference between bottled water and tap water”. Sure, you could argue that, but then you’re missing the point completely. Essentially bottled water is still just water. Some bottled water being sold here in our shops are in fact filtered tap water. So how then can they be so successful? Simple, they sell the improvements. You won’t hear of bottled water that is “straight from the tap!”. Record labels need to find that single value-add that would make people that wouldn’t normally pay for music, want to pay for the music.

What is also very interesting and important to note is the fact that they estimate that during the recession the sales of singles grew a whopping 33%! Why? The accessibility of single tracks. We can suddenly buy single tracks through iTunes and don’t have to buy entire albums. This opened up the market to kids and we all know they LOVE to spend money.

This makes me think that Nokia’s “Comes with music” strategy could be more successful than we imagine.

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