Music futures - iBay, not eBay

This is responding to a blog post by Ian Delaney re a conversation we had last night, the context being the weird distribution (to me, anyway), of stuff you can find on Blip.fm.

If you had to do a 2x2 matrix of "Great Music / Crap Music" and "Old Music / New Music", you would expect - in a freebie system - to see a lot of "Great / Old" music - but you can't at present on Blip.fm (Only one song by The Who, for example - and even the great bands who there there have the weirdest selection of songs put up - not a "greatest hits" compilation in many cases). However, the thing that interested me was the over-representation of "Crap / Old" music. (Think of any 70's Crap Glam Pop Band and check it out for example.....)

Anyway, while batting ideas back and forth as to why this was so, Ian used the gaming term of "Abandonware" in this context, which i thought was an interesting - riffing on from my response to Umair's "Platforms are Markets" post, I wondered if this was a manifestation of an emerging "Freemium" model for music.

In other words, if iTunes were a bidding market, you may see a premium for Great Music, and a premium for new music, but Old/Crap would be effectively free. In other words, imagine if the 79p / 99c standard rate on iTunes was left to a market mechanism. The eBay for music as it were (aka iBay)

Now I realise this is not a new thought per se, but it is in the context of trying to find a way through the impasse of the Industry / User standoff today. We know that:

(i) Its by and large easy to get anything for free
(ii) It is illegal, however
(iii) iTunes has shown that most people are happy to buy good quality, crap free music, at a reasonable price.

By crap free I also mean sans DRM, and by reasonable I mean a price that deducts the redundant physical transport and clear profiteering costs in the sold good

iTunes broke the bulking of songs into albums, the next logical step is the pricing of music to market value.

This would leave the industry free to price the elements that had value, and admitting that there is a slush pile of abandonware (heck, look at the $2.99 compilations you can buy) would also allow it to move forward.

This market would also allow the "niche" musicians in the long tail to extract value from their clientele, rather than have to rely on offset - and non-scalable - funding from for example T Shirts and Gigs.

(Niche here means the lesser known stuff I do like, Crap is the lesser known (and better known) stuff I don't like )