The Future of Digital Music Looks Pretty Simple as Seen from Research Report Digital Music Reloaded Web 2.0: beyond Downloads

WebKnowHow
Thursday, June 22, 2006; 05:33 AM

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c38455) has announced the addition of Digital Music Reloaded Web 2.0: Beyond Downloads to their offering.

Apart from a few notable innovations such as paid-for and ad-supported music subscription services, the consumer's conception of recorded music has not changed a great deal following the arrival of digital music.

For example, consumers have been conditioned for years to think in terms of purchasing and owning records such as CDs. Hardly surprisingly, most consumers now want the same with digital: they just want to own the equivalent digital files. From this standpoint, the future of digital music looks pretty simple.

Meanwhile, in parallel with the emergence of digital music, progress in the wider internet has been accelerating and an entirely new service category has emerged that provides an unprecedented range of opportunities for established companies, entrepreneurs and ordinary consumers - including those in the music industry.

Rather like how the arrival of web tools such as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors allowed non-programmers to create websites, we are now seeing the emergence of API-based toolsets that allow a range of different services to be 'knitted together' into an overall, customised offering. Critically, these opportunities are now available to corporations like IBM as well as 16 year-old school kids.

This report looks at the possible implications for the music industry.

The report first outlines what Web 2.0 is and then describes a range of possible commercial and consumer applications that could benefit all players in the value chain as well as the music industry as a whole.