In the music industry’s first digital decade, efforts focused on converting 30-something CD buyers to digital downloads and trying to win over the file-sharing Millennials (now aged 16-24) with the wrong digital products. It’s still the dominant strategy (Spotify is one late but crucial step forward). The strategy left the Digital Natives un-catered to, because their needs differ so much from those of previous generations.
The Digital Natives give us a sneak peak at the future. Millennials looked like the future for a while but their behavior has a finite life span. For example, ripping and burning CDs, even downloading from BitTorrent and iTunes both recreate the analog behavior of getting units of music. This is because they started out in the analog era. They are the transition generation with transitional behaviors.
Digital Natives don’t have that analog era baggage. All they’ve known is digital. Online video and mobile are their killer apps. These Digital Natives see music as the pervasive soundtrack to their interactive, immersive, social environments. Ownership matters less. Place of origin matters less. Context and experience is everything. In a world beyond content scarcity, experience is now everything. With “free” infecting everything, the content itself is no longer king. Experience now has the throne.
Interesting article about the problems, the music industry has to understand (solve) if they don't want to die in the next years...
