Change of Business Model (HK Music)?

Image from PCCW Netvigator MOOV

HK's Muisc Industry is extremely slow regarding the technological changes in the way of buying songs.

Recently, we can only find a few local music companies entering the digital music age. They still enjoy the past glory days in selling physical CDs and expect the huge profit. Song BMG, Universal, EEG are the famous local music companies which are poorly planning their future path for the hugely demanding internet world.

They would complain that the online people are most likely to download the songs freely, and of course, without any payment. They indicate that the downloading songs would ultimately damage the well-foundation of the music industry since ppl won't buy any songs online. However, this statement is absolutely untrue and exaggerated.

Let's look at the football gambling market in HK. In the past, ppl didn't find any legal channel to gamble on their favourite football teams round the globe. They would choose to gamble in those illegal gambling host and put great amount of money in the illegal market. HK government nicely investigated the problem and implemented a legal channel for football gambling in HK by setting a football gambling division in HK jockey club. What happen then? The football gambling division grows rapidly and attract many guys from illegal channel to use the legal gambling service. And of course, those illegal gambling host suddenly lost many of it's perfect clients and lost the market share. What's it? It's all about economics.

Then, come back to the HK music industry. What happen to them? People loves to download their favourite songs in their MP3 player. What do the companies react? Just avoid them and falsely neglect the development of the digital music in HK? This doesn't make sense. As long as HK didn't provide proper and legal channel for those music lovers, internet guys will keep on downloading illegal copies on the web since they got no proper and easy channels to buy songs. They would try many tedious effort to download songs. However, this doesn't mean they are not willing to buy songs and spend money on the market. If the market provides an easy way and reasonable price for the digital songs, ppl must welcome those services and enjoy it.

Also, the problem is not only for the music market, and affects the movie and all audio and visual contents in the market. If you just stay in the old-glory days, it will only push you to the edge of crisis and lead to the death of the business.

Currently, we see a few popular ways in buying songs in the internet. They are:

(1) iTunes - Overwhelming free digital content delivery platform with the unique support of ipod music players and apple TV. Unfortunately, no service in HK up to now.

(2) Amazon MP3 - an easy and open platform which generally supports for all different music player.

If Hong Kong local music industries can aggressively enter this market and sell their lovely songs for HK and international users. That would be mostly desired and benefited by all the people.

Actually, some music companies would like to enter the digital music market in another way to cooperate with the individual internet service provider, e.g. PCCW Netvigator's MOOV service which is greatly attractive as they provide all different local songs and digital content for their users with online streaming technology. However, that's another small market that people would love and enjoy since they need to get online and play it all over the internet with specific PC environment. This would hugely decrease the number of potential clients and pull them out of the proper and legal channels for the digital contents.

If you want to get to know the international trend of the digital song market, let's check the following web site for more idea:

When will iTunes replace Wal-Mart as No. 1 music retailer?
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9880001-7.html?part=dht&tag=nl.e703