The music industry is now emerging as a global phenomenon and attracting a lot of interests from people and the music lovers. In every music business, digital disruption play an extremely important role to help the business develop and go up. Just a flick through, many people think that the term ‘disruption’ refers to something that have a bad impact on the music industry. But actually, it only have bad influences on the business if you choose to ignore it or try to fight it. So what is the real meaning of digital disruption? Digital disruption is the modification that happens when new digital technologies and business models involve in the value proposition of existing goods and services. In some specific context, digital disruption now has some influences on the music industry. So far, in my opinion, digital disruption is a need and also it has some great impacts for some record companies, musicians and music fans. According to “The Music Industry: Music in the Cloud” by Patrick Wikstrom, there are three dimensions of change for this ‘new music economy’. The first dimension is ‘Connectivity vs. Control’. In the old music economy, the network organized by music companies and music listeners had a moderately low level of connectivity. In fact, the weak connections come from individual members of audience. Recently, the influence of physical allocation and mass media reduce significantly and Internet media is now beginning to replace and improve as a new type of connectivity between music companies and the audiences. Now, the capability to upload is theoretically accessible to everyone connected to the network. The second dimension is ‘Service vs. Product’. Let’s take Spotify, one of the biggest music stream platform in the world. In the new music economy, we have to accept that music is now no longer a product in CD, disc format. Now, instead of that, we access the music via a subscription service in return for a monthly or yearly payment, and it is quite easy to notice that unlicensed downloading has decreased significantly around the world. After years and years, Spotify is showing us a very interesting example of a big change: the move from product to service. And the final dimension is ‘Amateur vs. Professional’. Perhaps one of the biggest differences between a professional and an amateur musician is “showing up”. In the past, the role of the creative artist is the most respected and admired in the music industrial ecosystem. Céline Dion is one of the most powerful brands that appeal to millions of fans all over the world. But now, as we can see, many musicians have their own studio and record their music and then get their fame, for example, Lil Pump… The increased connection of network combined with various kinds of music production tools enable ‘non-professionals’ to create, remix and publish content online.
