This posting is a fascinating point in time graphic about the changes being undergone in the music business.
The death of the album (in handy graph form)
OK, here’s the interesting questions.
1. Does your library circulate CD-ROMs or tracks and songs?
2. Does your library circulate DVD or does it stream content?
What sort of experiments and pilots are you doing or following to see how things will change?
I find it interesting that the points of contact are increasing with music lovers – more songs, more ponts of contact versus olden times (my early life) when you mostly had to by full albums. If you wanted a mixtape it took a while, versus the point and click instant collections we can create today.
If a key component of your circulation data is lending music and movie physical objects, are you prepared for adapting to a change?
Stephen
3 Responses
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As far as teens go, I’m seeing a whole lot come into our libraries and watch movies and listen to music on the internet. Are our teen DVDs and CDs circulating? A little bit. But it’s not the teens checking them out for the most part…I’m seeing lots of adults coming into the teen area for these collections.
I would love some kind of in library device/site/service for my teen patrons that would give them access to more music and movies with their library cards. It wouldn’t hurt to try.
The current circulation model will be in jeopardy when the physical album becomes passé. People don’t want to pay $15 for an album, but will pay $0.99 for the song they want most. However, if the whole album is available at the library for free, they’ll go for it. Piracy is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room. The technology to rip, tag, and store music is ubiquitous. Apple brags about how the iPod manages albums, with cover art and all.
From what I see, people are abandoning physical media as a means of playing music, but not as a way to acquire it. On a related note, CD and DVD circulation are not decreasing, but theft is. People no longer have to keep the disc to keep the content.
BitTorrent and other free/illegal download stats might be more telling than Tunecore’s numbers. It’s just so easy to download the whole album that you don’t need to be selective about what specific songs you grab.
Many public libraries’ circ numbers have been driven by DVDs over the last few years. If circulation is the big metric that success is based on then we will be in trouble very soon when streaming takes over. We either need to redefine circulation to include other things or deemphasize circulation as a metric of success. Circulation can be a useful indicator but it is such a poor metric of quality and effectiveness on its own. Other metrics are needed.
Any service that comes from a library vendor will be riddled with technical hurdles for users to jump (DRM, configuration issues, 3rd party software, etc.) and it won’t be as good as what is freely available.