Online music retailers have been enjoying a great deal of success in recent times. Online shopping of all kinds has been popular for years now, as people have taken advantage of the great convenience it offers. Online music retailing comes in two forms: provision of physical product and provision of digital product. It is hard to speculate which of the two is the most popular of the two as there is not a great deal of price difference here. Each has its advantages; for example, if you were to buy a CD from an online store such as HMV, you would have a hard copy of an album, however if you bought the M4A version from iTunes you would receive it instantly. On the flipside, both options have their obvious disadvantages. Swings and roundabouts as always.
I cannot think of any big high street music retailers that do not have an online presence… except maybe Music Zone. And look what happened to them – they ceased trading.
I remember 3 or so years ago there was a lot of media attention regarding online music stores such as CD Wow undercutting supermarket CD prices. With the advent of internet shopping this was always going to happen. Supermarkets had to change with the times or get out of the music retailing game. Who would pay £5 extra for a CD when they could get it for £7.99 from a website such as CD Wow back then? Not me. But then I rarely buy CDs.
My consumption of music is quite unfair when I think about it. I download most of my music from a torrent site named ‘oink’. This is quite an exclusive community as you need to be invited by an existing member who has gained a good sharing ratio. The only time I buy music is when I value an album enough to purchase the same album on vinyl. I figure, what’s the point of buying a CD when all I’m going to do is rip it to my iTunes library and carry it around on my iPod? I think about this sometimes and feel a little guilty, but then I pay to see bands live and I pay for merchandise.
This brings me to the idea of the ‘iPod Generation’. Digital music and portable devices have changed the way everyone consumes and indeed gets hold of music. iTunes has had such massive success because of its obvious ties with the iPod, but music purchased from the iTunes store is not exclusively played on iPods. A great many portable jukeboxes are able to playback licensed M4A tunes.
Years ago, Napster was at the forefront of an online music panic but now it sits alongside the likes of iTunes providing legal digital downloads and can communicate with a lot of the portable devices on the market directly. At last, people are willing to pay for digital music and it has become a lucrative – nay, ESSENTIAL business practice.
Get online or get out of the way.
October 5, 2007 at 9:27 am
An interesting article, thanks for sharing Adam.
Now, some people who perfer to download music from torrent site but they will still like to purchase music from music shop in high street, because they think the quality of the music is different or sometimes they meet some difficultly with download music, eg when you spend half hour to download music from torret but finally you find out it is not work.
BBC news website May music lover’s sesearch, Brindley,P (headof digital music analysts): ‘That is the trouble when you are presented with a product that lacks the physical nature. It won’t feel it has the same sort of value.’
I think digital rights management system (DRM) is important when you talk music retailers, as they were still the most pressing currently facing the digital music industry.
Ref:
BBC Online music lovers ‘frustrated’(online)
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4474143.stm viewed at 5 October 2007]
October 5, 2007 at 9:44 am
I’d like to hear your take on the differences between purchasing digital music online, and purchasing physical music online. The shopping experience seems to be more or less the same, but the consumer’s motivation for choosing one over the other seems to be different — and even though CD sales are dropping, they still outnumber digital sales 20:1. Why do you think that might be?
October 5, 2007 at 9:45 am
Interesting take on things Adam. I’m kinda with you on asking why I should purchase a CD if all I’m going to do is copy it to iTunes then onto my iPod, but then I think about wether I want to listen to compressed audio when I’m at home. I purchase a lot of CDs and vinyl, but I’m leaning towards your way of thinking, and starting to buy more records on vinyl and then downloading them onto my computer so I can listen to them on my iPod. I’ll support bands that I like by attending their shows and buying their merch when you come through my town.
However, I’m still a big fan of physically owning music, I love being able to look at the artwork and lyrics of a CD or record. I just wonder how long it will be before I’m the only one left who thinks this way.
October 5, 2007 at 9:49 am
“At last, people are willing to pay for digital music and it has become a lucrative – nay, ESSENTIAL business practice.”
Hi Adam, I think maybe you take some things for granted, like “people finally wants to pay for music”. I’m not quite sure that’s the case, I mean the music business still argues about piracy. I haven’t got the feeling that the amount of music piracy is dropping.
It could be interesting actually to go a bit further into the quality discussion and value of an album. It’s a fact that digital music hasn’t got the same quality as a cd for example or vinyl. Some artists even argue that digital music can’t produce the kind of sound that an analouge medium can. Does the music quality matter to us at all or is m3 at 128 or 256 kbps good enough?
October 5, 2007 at 9:56 am
To address Dubber’s comment, I think there is quite a big difference between purchasing physical product online and purcashing digital products. Personally, I would rather have a physical prodcut in my hands… something to show for my money, and something permanent. But the instantanious nature of an iTunes purchase sometimes outweighs that tangeable advantage. I usually only buy a digital track if I can’t wait to go out into the wild, scary world and buy it. Of course, that’s providing I feel guilty enough to avoid using naughty things like bittorrent.