Free idea for the music industry

The music industry is a dinosaur that is devoid of new ideas, and that fact is keeping it from fully capitalizing on an era that should be enormously profitable for them. Given that, I'm going to share with them and idea that may help them make a little extra ching.

Last night and the night before, the lovely Mrs. Jib and I watched some Time Life Music infomercials. Music infomercials hold a special place in our history because before we started dating, we used to sit up late in the dorms singing along to them. As we watched and reflected the past couple of nights, I started thinking about how bizarre it is that music industry continues to push CDs on a public that is less and less interested in CDs. While my wife and I are still largely in the the CD era ourselves, with her new PDA and an iPod somewhere on the horizon, that is changing even for us. Rather than buy 150 songs on ten CD's, I'd much rather buy an iPod pre-loaded with Time Life's "70's Greatest Hits." And why limit it to iPod? Strike a deal with the 5 top selling mp3 player manufacturers, and give customers the choice of a unit to preload the music on.

For those who already have an mp3 player, preload the music onto various memory cards or flash drives. The CD is no more secure than either memory cards or flash drives, they just require the added step of ripping the songs. If a company were really concerned with securing their songs, they could easily encode the music in proprietary formats that are only playable on the players they have agreements with. Customers would pay a premium for this over the 99 cent per song download because large song sets such as the Time Life compilations would still take some time to download. The one flaw with this option is that memory is still a little bit on the expensive side, but the price of memory is continually dropping, and the price for 500 megabytes of memory is starting to come down towards the price of 500 megabytes of traditional CD space.

This idea works fine for large compilations, but what about single artist CDs? Well, maybe it is time for the music industry to abandon the single artist, ten to fourteen track album idea. Either begin encouraging artists to release 20 plus tracks for an album (the traditional double album), or combine artists onto one release. One of the music industries most profitable gigs for the last century has been to get you to buy music you don't want in order to get the music you do want. The current digital music system is killing that a bit by putting an emphasis on singles, but by expanding the size of releases and selling those releases on inexpensive, low memory drives or cards, the industry could continue to sell you music that you don't want. It would also have the added benefit of allowing them to continue to profit off of hard, tangible products. That CD, cassette, eight track, LP, etc, had a nice mark up for its manufacturing-this would preserve that for the industry.

Are there some flaws in this? Yes, but I'm just the idea man, working for free, here. They are flaws that could be worked out by those more technical than I, though.