New era in the music industry. Here’s what’s coming
The digital landscape is not only changing how people are producing, distributing, and consuming music, but also the way the music business is run, at its core.
If you want to pursue a career in music and be successful in the industry, you need to be aware of the shift happening and the characteristics of the new era. This is why we’ve compiled our own observations about the changes going on and placed them in a themed blog post for you to learn.
We’ll outline the key ideas here.
First, the new era of the music industry will end the megastar system.
Musicians will no longer become as big as the used to be and smaller musicians will dominate the scene.
The megastar phenomenon appeared for two reasons — developing connections between various parts of the world, easier and cheaper means of communication and travel made shows, appearances, promo campaigns, and music sales reach any corner of the world. But to promote someone across multiple countries, a large machine needed to be at work.
The perpetuated the need for a single star (or a band) to produce massive profits to keep the machine going.
Now that digitization made music and concert promotion even cheaper and more accessible (along with educational materials on how to do that), more and more musicians and individual managers, small labels and companies are interested to promote a musician/band to their niche audience and get profits without going superpopular and earning tens of millions of dollars off of tens of millions of fans.
This means that in the new era a musician will become their own CEO. They will be able to produce, promote, and market their work themselves or at least oversee the process personally by hiring individual professionals to help out with record mastering, merch production, concert management or paying for SaaS music solution services like music or ticket distribution.
The next characteristic of the new era is going to be direct sales. More and more tools appear online that allow musicians to sell their work to fans directly. On Show4me, musicians can sell their albums, singles, EPs, and tickets to shows to fans directly. Musicians can also offer Artist club premium memberships at $1/year, album pre-orders, concert ticket pre-orders.
In this situation, building a community around your work and art is vital. Fans can support a musician not just by buying specific goods, but through subscribing to them as well.
Ability to monetize your work is critical for any artist looking to make a living off their passion, and it is becoming easier for the music industry every day. The new era in music will make it possible for a musician to make a comfortable living off their music without becoming a nationwide or global sensation.
This leads us to the third way new era in music will be different from the time that came before — it’s going to be fully technology-driven. The only issue musicians will face when working in the industry will be choosing which service to pick to produce their music, record, store, and distribute. Where to best connect with fans, who provides the best live concert streaming, and where is the lowest commission on ticket sales.
For Show4me, we decided to cater to musicians by creating an environment for them to nurture a fanbase who can stay in their Artist club and consume all of their music and shows and merch without having to switch platforms. We believe providing fans a hub for all of musician’s work, news, events, releases, merch, and tickets is the best solution to build a sustainable music business where one can make reliable predictions as to the volume of sales an album or concert can attract.
The fourth and last characteristic of the new era is less optimistic. We go into more details in our original blog post, but we’ll sketch the situation here.
AI and VR are going to become big but they will both chip away at the profits mid-size musicians will be making. AI-generated music is already a very promising technology that many hail as the next big thing in the industry. It will produce cheap, quality music that does not need to be licensed. There’s enough competition in the industry with millions of tracks created by actual musicians, add in cheaper, faster, and just as good AI music, and the competition looks very rigged.
VR is another thing that will become a problem for small and mid-size musicians, but for a different reason — cost. Rendering VR environment is a costly endeavor for the foreseeable future. And while it will become cheap eventually, for the time being creating VR experiences, interactions, and concerts will be available only for the top starts (think Fortnite concert by Travis Scott or recent The Weeknd Experience with TikTok).
We hope these help you assess the situation and prepare your music business plan to meet the challenges and new rules of the new era in music. Read our full blog post on this for anything we might’ve missed here! Go.
