Do CDs have a future in the developing world?
‘Doomed’ in music album covers rendered by Amaztype – check it out
In Canada, PWC forecasts that music downloads will exceed physical music sales by 2011. That’s no longer amazing, though it would have seemed so to the music industry five years ago. Now it’s just further confirmation of what we already knew – the music industry is undergoing change at of such magnitude and pace as to be almost indistinguishable from extinction.
It’s not so much the fact that it’s happening but the rate at which its occurring. In 2007, the Canadian download market was less than a quarter of the size of the physical sales market, yet in only four more years the minnow will overtake the whale due to the rapid rate of change – the decline in Canadian CD sales, for instance, was 11.9 per cent in 2006 and 19.8 per cent in 2007.
So far, all shocking stuff that no longer shocks. The unanswered question is: where will the CD market bottom-out? How many CDs can the industry still expect to sell in, say, 2020? And where?
Remember, the music industry still supports a small but healthy market for vinyl records. It’s still possible to buy movies on VHS tape. Everything we’ve learned about new media in the past 30 years tells us that no medium becomes extinct; it just assumes a minor niche in a richer, more diverse marketplace of media.
Could CDs become the default medium for servicing developing markets such as Africa that don’t yet have the disposable income and mobile carrier penetration to support a mass market of mobile handset downloads? Could the physical music production component of the music industry cushion its fall by repositioning to focus on servicing developing markets? My guess is no; that either the disposable income won’t increase fast enough or the penetration of mobile carriers will make the window too narrow and short-lived.
Having done some work in mobile content and mobile social networks, I’ve seen for myself how quickly African consumers have leapt onboard and adopted mobile technologies. Even (and perhaps because of) in cities where there’s almost no terrestrial internet access and where mains electricity is available for only a few hours a day, mobile handsets have become the communication tool and social glue for not only resident communities but the broader diaspora created by the guest worker industry, refugee resettlement and overseas study programs.
Instead I’d expect developing nations to create a new class of music consumer; one who wants to mix western top 20 artists with a melange of local artists and music genres.
For the next decade or so handset storage on low-end phones will be limited to a few gigabytes so this consumer won’t be able to stay loyal to a small set of artists or brands. Instead they will delete/download/delete/download, choosing new content over keeping old content. You’d be wasting your time trying to build a multi-song or multi-album relationship with them.
Music and video content will be intermingled and video will be listened to as much as watched since content will be chosen from mobile portals that tend to blend the two together to increase the odds of a download from limited screen real estate.
Distant future? Hardly. Here’s a living, breathing example of the music consumer of the future, who I found on a train between Delhi and Chandrigarh last July, grooving along to bangra dance music on his mobile while his battery held out.
Bangra on the train to Chandrigarh from bigyahu on Vimeo.
