Continuing with the changes, I 've decided to put some music choices on my website. This week it's the Italian folksinger Gianmaria Testa, and the CD is called La valse d'un jour. When you open the page you will find the first track the journey, but remember this is definitely music sampling, not downloading. This approach is very much in the spirtit of the Gareth Lloyd analysis of how falling search costs mean more, not less, business for the music industry. I'm just contributing with some peer referenced input.
The internet has made finding good music easier. Online retailers, music reviews, artist websites and so on all help, but perhaps the biggest contributor to falling search costs is the massive uptake of easy to use file sharing software. This gave millions of users access to many songs that they would never otherwise have heard through a simple search and download process, and made it very easy for them to follow up some titbit of information about music they might like. The way that this replaces, to some extent, the purchasing of music is currently a huge concern to record companies. However, many users insist that they buy more albums, not less, since file sharing came along. This is very easy to explain using the framework we've established. Search costs have fallen and consequently, music consumption will rise.
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