[cyrano]

All markets used to show a Gauss curve. One bump, the vast majority of buyers in the middle.

These days, there are two bumps on the chart. One on the low end, one on the higher end. And that's true for most parameters. It doesn't matter if you plot sales figures, or price, or age of the buyer. Two bumps. Almost for every product, including music.

I think that means you no longer market for the average buyer, but you need to decide if you market for the low-end OR high-end. Marketing for both with one brand is impossible.

I have a friend whose band is fairly popular and amassed some followers over the years. He's been selling cassette tapes for more than a decade, with some succes. I don't know why his audience likes these, but they do. CD fails, vinyl fails.

We organize one or two small festivals yearly. These are small, non-profit and targeted to a genre. That works. Every time we try to expand, we loose money. Last time, 8.000 euro. That's a lot of money for a small non-profit like we are. But the smaller festivals thrive. And so do the bigger ones. But those aren't ours ;-)

IMHO, the music industry has lost a BIG opportunity. If they had pulled together and created one big database of music years ago, we wouldn't be in today's mess. They could've allowed everyone a free preview, with a paying download. Of course, licensing for other "radio's" included. But they didn't. And that's why it's a mess.

Why didn't they?

Well, it's a common practice in the industry to sell a title with exclusivity, change the name and sell it again with exclusivity. That's crooked. It's also standard practice to make the calculation of royalties as complex as possible, clearly to avoid oversight from creators, taxes and competition. Translating a crooked system to a linear system is impossible. And as long as there are crooks in the industry, this won't be solved.