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| Get our free newsletter for the latest releases Contents Music Software Quick Reference Resources Online Ordering Software Authors Company Info | Shareware Music Machine News Give Your Music Away For Free Date posted: July 15 1999
The range of speakers included lawyers, academics and some of Australia's leading online trailblazers in the music industry. In this article, Hitsquad's General Manager Jason Horton says we should forget about selling music. Copyright © Jason Horton, jason@hitsquad.com, Hitsquad +61 (0)7 38444474. www.hitsquad.com Hitsquad was founded with John Perry Barlow's paper "The Economy of Ideas" in mind. I agree with Professor William Fisher in that the Grateful Dead model is inadequate for most artists so I'll give you some insight into what we at Hitsquad have learned from our experiences, and the business models we continue to develop based on that. Firstly I'd like to talk about convergence I don't mean anything to do with your television becoming your computer or your computer turning into a telephone, I mean the convergence between the producer and the consumer. Artificially intelligent software is making it more and more possible every day for people to create their own music, even without any musical background. This kind of software is currently one of the fastest growing sectors of the music software market. Consumers have not only become free to create their own music but also to take the music of others and re-work and re-mix it, sample it and include it in their own works. They can even take the music they've created and give it to their favorite artists for inclusion in the artists songs - there have already been several well publicized examples of this. Another phenomenon we are seeing on the Internet is in the area of publicity. Online, the consumer now contributes more to the promotion of artists than the artists and their traditional investors do. Hitsquad's Australian Music Charts has hundreds of silverchair and Savage Garden sites registered which are all devoted to celebrating these artists, and nearly all of them are run by fans. In fact in most cases the sites created by consumers attract more people and more chart votes than do the official artists or record company backed web sites. What we really have now is not two separate groups called consumers and producers but rather a continuum along which people are to some degree both consumers and producers to varying extent. Where does this lead? Artists now create their own media outlets online with the help of consumers, other artists, and media businesses. We are also heading ever deeper into an era where both artists and consumer prefer integrated services for the dissemination of music - radio, press coverage, sales - all in one series of integrated services. Web sites like MP3.com and Netradio are examples of this. But How Do You Sell Music? You don't. What I'm about to say is predicated upon the assumption that no amount of security and legislation will ever prevent the wide spread copying and dissemination of music online. This is something which has become clear to us in our activities at Hitsquad. I'm going to talk about pop music as this is the part of the market which drives the contemporary music industry. Now I'm going to hit you with a rather bizarre concept: The music industry has never sold music, we've always given music away for free - it's participation in activities around the music and the artist and its legitimacy that we've always sold. Let me give you an example... Say a kid a in the school playground says "Hey I've got a blank cassette onto which I've copied the latest Savage Garden album"... the other kids will just laugh. However if the same kid says "Hey I've got the latest Savage Garden CD/Poster/Concert Ticket"... the other kids will go "Wow!" You see it's not simply possessing the music which is important - the important thing is becoming a member of the tribe, showing you are a true fan by putting effort into your support of the artist which is generally done by buying legitimate tribal markings - EG authorized CDs etc. Blown away by this philosophy? Part two gets hotter. Find out about serialized songs.
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