the market by identifying the key customers who make up this demographic.
According to the “Digital Market Outlook” Survey Published in July 2015 by Statista,
(Digital music – worldwide |Statista market forecast, 2015) ,the majority of Digital
Music Consumers are under the
age of 34 with 41.43 million users
out of 148.7 million being under
the age of 34. This demographic of
the population are made up
generally of youths and working
adults, most of whom (due to
applications in work and school as
well as socially) are expected to
have a decent understanding of
modern consumer technology, IE:
Smartphones Laptops and Tablets.
These products are central to
everyday life of 16-
34 year olds in 2016 and are the vessels through which streaming platforms operate.
The appeal of such platforms is that they provide an enormous amount of choice of
music for a little price with a miniscule amount of storage needed from the device to
run. With new advances in wireless Bluetooth technology in home and car stereo
systems it has never been easier to connect your smartphone to a loud speaker and
play your favourite songs. This is my general target market.
In order to ensure the single is successful and fulfill its purpose of generating a hype around
my project it is necessary for my team and I to create that demand in conjunction with the
single release. In order to do this I will employ a business model known as freemium. Seeing
as this business model will play an important role in my career I feel it is appropriate to give
an introductory explanation to freemium before I continue.
Freemium is “ business model in which you give a core product away for free to a
large group of users and sell premium products to a smaller fraction of this user base”. (What
is freemium, 2114). In the music industry this is done through new free online
streaming platforms, the best examples currently being Youtube and Spotify.
Instead of charging a fee to access all the material that these sites offer, they allow
users to sign up and gain access for free. This is tolerable as the cost to do this is
relatively low for Spotify. However the free service that Spotify is deliberately diluted
by the use of advertisements in between songs and an inability of the user to play
music on demand and offline. The rationale used by Spotify in employing the
freemium business model is to lure potential customers in with the free service and
to then generate revenue from the customers who wish to upgrade to the better
service of Spotify Premium where they will have no advertisements, and can listen to
music that is of higher quality on demand and offline. The results of this mode for
Spotify have been staggeringly successful with the number of paying Spotify
premium subscribers jumping from 500 thousand to 30 million between July 2010
and march 2016 with an increase of 10 million subscribers in the last 9 months