The Music Industry

I heard a very interesting segment on NPR talking about the problems of the music industry. As we all know by now, the advent of the Internet and peer-to-peer filesharing has hit the industry very hard. They have suffered loss of revenue and a grim future, if they don't adapt.

I have always maintained that the music industry firms are the Luddites of today. They are rebelling against technological innovation because of the change it is causing to their established business model.

The radio segment explained the reaction to the new technology using the Kubler-Ross model. Now how cool is that?!? Take the behaviors that people exhibit when dying and use it to dissect corporate behavior (which, can be seen as an aggregate of human behavior).

Keep in mind that the stages can occur in any order.
So the stages, and how they apply to the industry are:

• Denial - No way. The Internet can't affect our business model.
  
• Anger - Those bastards! Let's sue each and every one of them!
  
• Bargaining - OK OK OK. YOU can download to your PC. But for a monthly fee and you can't copy it to other devices.
  
• Depression - SHIT!! Profits are waaay down! We have to layoff people!
  
• Acceptance - OK we are fucked.

The link to the summary of Forrester research is here.

Interesting, veerry interesting...