I've argued before that the price of content is falling and will do so for a while. The latest example how this is taken on board by the industry is the recent example in the music industry. Guy Hands' plans for his prospective takeover of EMI includes getting albums sponsored by corporates, as reported in the FT. (Although the notion of Sudafed sponsoring cold play smells of a bad pun!). For some this may be blasphemous or patently implausible, but here's a couple of arguments for you. We all know the stories of decline in sales of CDs and recorded content with the growth of Youtube and P2P downloads.
So where then do content producers and owners go? Well, there's still value in News and live Sports, for example, and in evergreen shows which have an audience even after a decade of airing (Friends, Monty Python, etc.) but for the rest, there are some emerging alternative strategies.
The first is that people still pay for the experience, not the content. Of course we do, that's why movie halls still sell tickets at vastly higher prices than the best DVD rentals. Madonna's deal with Live Nation, away from Labels shows how this works. As this article in the Times points out (thanks Raja!), you can buy Madonna's entire output of recorded music for the price of seeing her live for two hours on stage. Still think it's all about content? Incidentally, the article also looks at why Tony Blair can charge £ 500,000 for a speech or why the Led Zep concert sold tickets on the web at an average of over £ 7,000. Bottom line - bands used to do concerts to sell their CDs, now they do CDs to sell their concerts. Is that change enough for you?
Other interesting fall-outs include examples such as this story in the Prospect Magazine which suggest that bands prefer to sell their T-shirts rather than their CDs. The t-shirts cost nothing and sell for $ 20. The CDs sell for half, but costs double of the t-shirt to make, and cannibalizes sales of t-shirts. Enough said.
Of course, when all else fails, there's always advertising. Doesn't seem all that implausible now, does it?
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