Music Industry Bottlenecks: Standards a way out

For long, music industry has been bogged down by piracy and high operational costs. Change in the purchasing behavior of music listeners from cassettes to CDs to digital downloads and now to digital streaming has further reduced average spending on music adding to the woes of the industry. This has all led to a fall in revenues of the overall music industry.

Music labels, independent artists and online OTT and download platforms such as iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon, YouTube, Google, Rhapsody, Deezer etc. needs to understand that music industry is a high volume low value industry. In order to survive the lean period and come out strong, all players need to co-exist and establish an eco-system which adapts itself to changes in music listener’s behavior and is more or less averse to piracy.

For now, digital streaming and downloading are here to stay and evolve. Next wave of disruption in music listener’s behavior will take substantial time. Legal measures to curb piracy will continue, but is a long term process. None of these things can be controlled by people in music industry. They can utmost try to convince governments to implement legal measures to curb piracy speedily. But what they can control is the operational costs involved in music digital supply chain. Streamlining the digital supply chain by adopting standards approach for the flow of digital assets will help save both time to market and operational costs. For a new release, quick turn-around-time will lead to higher topline. Using the same standard across platforms, will reduce the operational distribution costs, improving the bottom line. Hence a win-win situation for both music labels and streaming platforms.