Music Metabolism & Its Consequences

I had dinner with a friend (who works in VC) this evening and we were discussing the music rental services.  He loves Rhapsody.  Indeed he pays more for it because he value its catalog and features more highly than Yahoo Music Unlimited.  Our conversation reminded me of a term I'd heard, first from Brian at Sony.

In describing his consumption behavior after having got an iPod, he said that his "music metabolism" increased.  Since having his collection digitized and easily available on the iPod, he listened to more 'deep tracks' that he hadn't listened to in a long time (courtesy of the shuffle function).  However, he soon got sick of his library of tracks and wanted to hear new/different music.

I think this is a widespread phenomenon.  Digital music players enable people to listen to more of their existing collection, but they soon get tired of it and want to listen to other stuff.   Music rental services like Rhapsody, Napster & YMU facilitate this.  My VC friend waxed rhapsodic about Rhapsody -- how he made playlists for parties of stuff he'd never buy, how he's sick of the MP3s he 'owns' on his hard drive, etc.

I believe music rental as a concept is here to stay, that it will become a sizeable segment of the music consumption landscape and that it will increase the music metabolism of its users.  One side effect is that indie labels & artists will gain exposure (since people will tire of the stuff they 'know').   If music rental becomes widespread, many artists and labels will make less money from recorded music and will have to rely on performed music and ancillary products, which I believe labels should get a piece of.   An example:  If you purchase a track from iTunes, to make calculations easy, let's say the artist/label gets $0.70 from that customer on that transaction.  On the other hand, in the case of music rental services, a subscriber would have to listen to a label/artist's tracks 70 times over their lifetime as a subscriber to gross $0.70 (assuming royalties are a penny per play).  Based on the unscientific poll of my iTunes play count column and that of a friend's, there are few tracks that ever get that much play. 

What other consequences have I missed from an increase in one's music metabolism?

Comments

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