It's not the file sharing, stupid

[Mattmovies]

[Mattmovies]

I agree with your argument that super niche, more niche than before, is how music is working. There are good bands out there and I don't dispute that. But do you think niche means local too? Essentially, am I only going to hear a band if I live or travel near it? Does the new stuff have a radius limit?

I think there are people hungry for new music that may love something that a new band is cooking on other end of the continent, but they've never heard of that band and they have no way to find it. Maybe that's a problem some new app is going to fix, but I think it's a big problem. I joined Pandora to try to find new music, and yet they don't play much new stuff that relates to what I like. MTV doesn't play music videos anymore. All the ways the kids found the music before is different or missing, and there are a lot of music lovers that feel lost.

[Colonel Sun]

So with the fragmentation of music genres into specialized niches, perhaps only the most bland material makes it mainstream.

Have you tried to search for music?

[Mattmovies]

Thanks Colonel Sun, I'll try it out. Another instance of having to rely on the word of mouth of people with good taste.

[Yukon Cornelius]

Guys, I can't complain about radioparadise.com (there's an app, or just stream it off iTunes, too).

Good for jiggling the handle on what's out there. David Dye's show on NPR isn't bad for that either.

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

[Mattmovies]

[YMix]

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

The reality is, with file-sharing, pricing them like CDs is retarded. Sell the individual tracks for a quarter a pop and people will snap up music like mad, and at that cheap rate it's often easier to just pay for it than seek it out to download it.

The Music industry just hasn't recognized high vol low margin yet. They should.

[Sparky]

[Tinker]

Agreed Sparky. What the media industry needs to realize is that it's better to sell more copies at a lower cost than to sell fewer copies at a higher cost. This is due to the ease of digital delivery. I watch very few pay movies On Demand because $ 5 adds up. But if the films were all $ 2, I would probably spend more than the $ 30-40 per month I spend on $ 5 movies on $ 2 ones, because it's below my impulse threshold. When you are dealing with pure media, you need to think of your pricing in terms of its relationship to people's impulse threshold. I think of this in terms of the gumball machine. You'll pay a quarter for a gumball even though that's like 5 times as much as that much gum would cost you if you bought a pack of sticks of gum. But they do it because a quarter is below the impulse threshold. So the trick is to price things so that it's easy to buy them without regret.