As we've said before, the key to getting more and better content online and available to consumers will be experimentation. Sometimes, those experiments are successful, which explains the many platforms available for acquiring video, music, software, games, or books. Now we can add three more companies experimenting with digital music sales: eBay, Fairmount, and Live Nation. As Bruce Houghton reported last week at WebProNews, all three of these potential vendors have an advantage for digital download sales over a number of their competitors: "1) significant existing traffic and 2) on-file credit cards of potential downloaders."
In the case of eBay and Live Nation, there's yet another advantage: people visiting those sites are already looking for music related items, be they physical CDs, concert tickets, or fan gear. As Houghton notes, that's a "logical point of purchase" for music downloads.
Of course the other side of the experimentation coin is that not every venture works out as planned. Last week, TechCrunch reported that imeem, a music streaming service, was facing some dire financial straits, largely because the business model was based on compensating record labels on a per-stream basis. The company is renegotiating its deal with the labels, instead sharing revenue on a per-user basis.
There was no way for imeem to know going in which model would be better: it just had to experiment to find the right one. And that's what the future of digital content is all about: experimentation. Trial and error--and eventually, success. As long as the freedom to experiment is preserved, consumers, platform providers, and artists will find the business models that work best for all of them.
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