By James Pew

Short answer…NO!

This is the biggest concern I hear from most of the artists I work with and meet. It’s echoed in countless blog posts and the discussions that follow. The saturation of music seems to be on every bodies mind these days. But I have a few thoughts that will hopefully ease some of the resulting anxieties caused by the “market saturation jitters.”

First off lets rewind to the late 80’s up to the mid 90’s. Was over saturation a big concern back then? Not really. At least not at the level it is today. So what has changed? Well the easy answer is technology (especially the internet). Yes I know we had the internet in the mid 90s, but that internet wasn’t so hot. That was Web 1.0.

Web 2.0 is a whole other ball of wax.

Its companies like Myspace that have shown us just how many zillions of brands there actually are out there. Myspace is free and easy to use, and has become a cultural phenomenon. But other factors are also responsible for the ubiquity of musical artists. Technological innovations make up the the bulk of these factors. Getting your brands music produced in the late 80’s to mid 90’s was difficult and expensive – today it’s less expensive and easier. Same story with distribution and promotion.

Tech innovation is responsible for this. Everyone knows it, as we’ve all been over over this before. The result is artists are scared, actually petrified, that tech innovations have made it to easy for other artists to join the music biz game. And now the competition is massive.

They’re right of course. It is easy, exceedingly so, for uncountable numbers of brands to join the music biz. And competition IS massive. But lets look at the music industry from the perspective of the consumer. Things are easier and less expensive for them too. Could it not be argued that more consumers (fans) will also step up their interest in music as well?

Music is becoming easier to produce, promote, and distribute – its also becoming easier to find and enjoy.

I know many people who I consider “fence sitting” fans of music. They like music. But not enough to go out of their way to find a music retailer and sift through countless racks of CD’s until they find something they like. Most often they end up listening to the music they bought years ago, or whatever is being played on the radio. With the music biz steadily moving to the internet, we now have a ton of innovative filtering and recommendation engines that are helping people find the music that they like. Look at Amazon, or Last FM, or even Facebook. It is becoming easier to see what your friends are listening to. And its becoming easier to cut through the saturation and find the music you like.

The long Tail exists and innovators are inventing things to filter and make sense of it. Its getting better all the time. Once these new music consumption behaviors become established norms they can only grow. A “fence sitters” first experience with, Last FM for example, serves to whet the appetite. After that first taste of great music you never knew was there you naturally want more.

Don’t sweat the over saturation issue. Just make great music and leverage new technologies designed to connect your musical niche with the audience that’s looking for it. Or soon will be.

Good Luck.

Should Bands Be Worried About Market Saturation? by James Pew is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, Facebook, James Pew, Last FM, long tail, Market Saturation, music distribution, Music Production, Music Promotion, myspace, studio manifesto, web 2.0

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 11:03 am and is filed under Music Culture, Music Promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.