I recently conducted a little survey among my network, most of them from india geo, the survey is about who is buying music, and who is downloading music from internet, the finding is little anticipated one, it seems like 80% of them were downloading music from internet, not the legal copies and another 20% were purchasing legal copies of music, those 20% were hard core music fans, wont compromise on audio quality and majority of them are in early 40′s. And i dont think i have to explain this 80%, they dont follow particular artist/band, most younger audience, they just care if the music is good for their taste.

this left me thinking, how this music industry is surviving with mere 20% of the audience who is giving business in terms of purchasing records and leaving out 80% of their potential market in loose.

Actually, music industry isnt surviving by those 20% audience, they are just good people they can count on for their lunch money, big money is flowing in using their 80% audience, how? Read On:

Music industry these days operates similar to our social media/search engine marketing method, say for example you are running a blog, there you write very awesome blog posts on ‘cooking thai food’, that means whenever someone search for help on cooking thai food, they will end up in your blog site, whats happening here? You are like a music super star of thai cuisines.

How you monetize (make money) as super star of thai cooking?
You know who are all your visitors are, they are eg: thai food lovers, who will buy thai food ingredients, who will probably will like to know thai cultures, who will like to go to nearby thai restaurants.. etc, now imagine you place thai food ingredient selling website url in your blog posts of thai food cooking, arent you promoting that thai food ingredient selling website? Thats promotion/marketing and you make profit out of it. Also if some website want to place your cooking tips on their website, they place the content and in return they will leave a link back to your website.

Similarly, musicians and records co’s prepare there content under their label and let it available to public, 20% of them buy, and 80% of them download, they make their content available to general public via radio and tv etc, they probably will get paid in terms of royalty, if they are popular enough and built the audience base, they can make use of the audience in terms of adverts, promoting brands etc.

Keeping the above profit aside, its bad that 80% of audience is taking away the content for free, without generating direct profits, music industry cannot fight this 80% and make them buy music records even if they are selling the content dead cheap, they should monetize using the affiliate methods, say for example to download a track person have to sign-up for adverts, and adverts pay the record company some commissions, so instead of giving away music free to 80% audience, they can place adverts and make some money.