It’s called MusicDNA and it comes with the promise to change the digital music world (once again). From the people that gave us the mp3, MusicDNA is a new attempt by the traditional music industry to protect their business that has been suffering, year after year, financial losses or so they say.
This new move, supported by the music industry, is a new attempt to apply a old business model to the digital revolution and to the way artists are reaching their audiences. MusicDNA is nothing more than a mp3 file on steroids that can reach up to 32GB per file and will include anything that has an URL on it. From the artist’s blog to a twitter stream, album covers and/or promotions.
To put it in a nutshell, MusicDNA wants to be a one stop information hub for anything about any artist while offering labels a way to keep tight control on who is buying and sharing what, with whom and even where.
Why does it matter?
We have heard it all before: the fact is that the music industry (not the artists) is taking a huge blow on revenue. The usual suspects are always the pirates that download music illegally only to share it with others but this argument couldn’t be more flawed: the numbers are actually up and artists are making more money while the major labels are making less money. (Read this excellent post here to understand it all). The fact is that the industry is at loss and unable to adapt to us, the consumers, but the artists are more flexible and understand their audience and reach out to it. And I’m not referring to artists you never heard of: Like them or not, names like RadioHead and Nine Inch Nails have already embraced this model and the results were very positive. MusicDNA matters to understand how desperate the music industry is and gives, all of us, an understanding of its inability to react and downsize a business that is hugely dependent on a business model that no longer makes sense.
Why will MusicDNA fail?
Forget about the privacy concerns that such by-products of MusicDNA, like MusicGPS, may raise. MusicDNA wants to put information that is available on the public domain into a mp3 for a higher price. You will still be buying the same song, with the same quality but because of all the added value the file will bring with it there will be an additional cost. Apparently the music industry thinks that we are all lazy, unable to find information by ourselves, unable to create trusted sources of information and it also thinks that we will be willing to pay more money for something we can get for free. I, for one, am not willing to do that.
What about you? Let me know in the comments!
Picture Credits: j / f / photos under a CC License
Strategist, Sound Designer, Electronic Music Producer, New Media Artist, Activist, Blogger, A&R of the 
