Following up on my last post, I would like provide updates on some recent developments within the digital music retail world. First - and quite a personal dismay - is the new website Made Loud, which is a digital online music retailer for the independent artist / social networking site. Obviously, the developers of Made Loud read my most recent post that covered this exact business opportunity and stole the idea from me (wink, wink). Despite my personal resentments, after perusing the Made Loud site, its apparent that they have put a lot of thought into the project. Artists can create a page, upload their music and set a price-per-download rate, and then commence with reaching out to fans. It is a win-win situation for the artist who owns all of his or her own master recordings. In fact, according to the FAQs section of the site, "Artists keep 80% of all digital download sales and 85% of all merch sales. Artists also choose their own pricing." (par. 3). Purchasing is made almost too easy through Pay Pal. In a music world that has been dominated by conglomerates and umbrella corporations for decades, Made Loud and sites similar to it are paving the way towards the future of this industry.
The second exciting development that caught my attention is the new digital music retailer LaLa, which offers 10 cent downloads of songs as well as a full, free preview listen of the whole song prior to purchasing. The catch: one can only listen to his or her songs via a web browser, meaning an internet connection is required at all times during use. At first, this sounds like a major annoyance, but in a tech-obsessed world dominated by internet phones and computers, the idea makes a lot of sense. With all of one's data stored electronically on the company's servers, there is no need for the information to be stored on a personal hard drive; all one would need is a phone or computer with an internet connection. According to this article by Michelle Quinn, a staff writer for the LA Times, the company also offers an MP3 download for an extra 79-89 cents, which of course can be store on a hard-drive. Quinn further states that, "Lala has a deal with labels that lets it scan a user's music library and offer the user those same songs via any Web browser [...] That gives Lala information about a person's tastes so it can target music suggestions" (par. 15-16). Additionally, according to the "How It Works" section of LaLa's site, the service can "quickly match the songs on your computer to Lala's licensed catalog [...] Songs you already have and playlists you've created are instantly added to your Lala collection for free" (par. 2).
It is important that these sites continue to develop and spawn multiple imitators. For too long, the music industry and its consumers have had only one option for the purchase of music - the record store. With these recent developments, the industry and its constituents are finally adapting to new, simple methods of e-commerce, albeit light-years behind other industries. With the major setbacks brought on by the pirating of digitized music and the state of the U.S. economy in general, things for awhile were looking quite bleak. Yet, these exciting new websites prove that there is light at the end of the tunnel for the music industry.
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