Distributing Music

1. What are some the opportunities and challenges that come with new ways of distributing music?

Some of the challenges that come with the new ways of distributing music are, first there is a huge audience fragmentation, and by this it is meant that there is a division of audiences into what we would call small groups of the results of media, advertising, and marketing factors. Today there are many types of genres that eventually become subgenres, and so on. These subgenres make it a challenge for music to be distributed because for instance, let’s think about the United States, distributing music among the states has become even harder when the audience appears to be the same but varies is taste of subgenres and genres. In addition, targeting niche audiences is seen as a challenge too. This is because a niche audience would be a group of people that have a unique interest, for instance romantic country music. To target these people, a niche marketing should be done, not only would this be something expensive to do so, but it would only serve for a specific group of people rather than a vast majority, therefore its distribution would not be as big as it would be wanted to be in order to provide more benefits and profit. Also these types of people would be in constant need of niche marketing because what normally work for regular audiences, wont work for them. However, some of the opportunities are that it increases ways in which you can rely on fans to create noise out there. Social media becomes easily manageable and basically free to do so. Fans would take care of promoting and distributing the music without any real cost. In other cases, regular everyday things such as ringtones will also work as a way of distributing music, though it can be seen as a challenge because sometimes it may not bring profit.

2. Based on Wednesday’s lecture and Nancy Baym’s Berkman Center talk, what are