
A Nigerian Startup on Path to Solving the Digital Music Distribution Problem - tefo-mohapi
http://www.iafrikan.com/2016/05/05/this-nigerian-startup-is-on-the-winning-path-to-solving-the-problem-of-digital-music-distribution-in-africa-2/
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jasode
_> While other players go down the streaming path, MyMusic offers users the
ability to download music for ₦30 ($0.50) per track. _

I can't tell from the article if the story has relevance to the USA market. If
record companies today can get $0.70 cut from Apple for a $0.99 song on
iTunes, it doesn't look like they'd take less than $0.50 from a startup.

Last I checked, Amazon Music downloads is also 70/30 split for 99 cent songs.

 _> The team invested a lot of time [...], while mending those with record
labels and artist management companies._

My notes to any programmer that's interested in selling music for 50 cents or
less:

Before investing a ton of time writing any code, get on the phone with the Big
3 record labels Universal+Warner+Sony. See if you can get favorable licensing
terms so that they'll take $0.35 and let you keep $0.15. I'm skeptical you'll
get such terms because Spotify/Pandora tried to get better terms so they could
turn a profit. They couldn't make it happen. Maybe you have better negotiation
skills and charm than the Spotify executives. Napster's Shawn Fanning & Sean
Parker didn't have the business chops to wheel & deal with record labels but
Apple's Steve Jobs did.

~~~
jheriko
You have to remember as well that cheapness matters, especially when piracy is
actually the norm to the point that genuine copies are considered a frivolous
luxury... which is true for the vast majority of people on this planet.

I'd easily take 10M units at 10c profit a piece over 50k units at 70c profit.

Imagine your lunch costs 5c instead of $5... not everywhere has the same
economic values.

~~~
PeterisP
You can reduce your margin, but you can't really reduce the wholesale price.
If the big labels expect to take $0.70 from you and your target audience is
not willing to pay a dollar but rather something like $0.50, then you can only
make negative profit.

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virmundi
The best way to do this is to legally stream people's personal libraries. The
software would be a legal version of Napster. How, you may ask?

File locking.

Imagine a system that allows you to see a list of music available from your
peers. If you stream a song from your peer, a file lock engages on their copy.
That peer is unable to play the song. If they need to get to song, they could
end the stream.

Such a system exactly mirrors sharing physical media. You are bereft of the
item. You don't get the item back until the person to whom you lent the item
returns it. Return occurs hen the file lock is relinquished. As such it should
be perfectly legal to share.

The difficulty with such a system is that there is little place for profit.
The software does provide a serivce: indexing and suggestions and playlists.
You could do ads. People might not join because of it. You could charge a low
flat fee. Just hard to monetize it.

~~~
pessimizer
This file lock cannot exist outside of some intensely locked down binary blob
which will be cracked in minutes. Your idea might make sense legally, but it
doesn't make sense physically.

~~~
virmundi
Actually Java NIO locks the file at the OS level, if the OS provides that
feature. Windows does. I played with the idea a bit at IUPUI during a
distributed systems class. You're correct that having to do the locking in
userspace would be difficult.

Some one could crack it. That doesn't mean much legally. Look at DRM: it's
crackable. The industry still uses it.

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coldtea
Kids under 12 have grown up in an era without physical formats, and with
YouTube and Spotify etc as the main means of listening to music.

They could not care less for owing their music collection as digital files.

Of course some outliers will want it -- heck, some people even fell for Ogg
Vorbis and FLAC, but those are never going to tip the scales.

(And for the majority, unlike in the 50s-to-80s era, music is that not big
deal in their life anyway. They have tons of other diversions, mobile, chat,
social, 24/7 internet, youtube, videogames, etc).

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zappo2938
I was thinking last week how places like Nigeria will be the location of the
next start up bubble as they pass through the threshold of punctuated
equilibrium. They have unique problems that a bunch of tech geeks in the Bay
Area and hipsters in Portland would never think of needing to be solved.

~~~
vezycash
>They have unique problems that a bunch of tech geeks in the Bay Area and
hipsters in Portland would never think of needing to be solved

You're right about that. The tech scene in that country would remain paltry
until two things are solved.

First, the internet. The telecos have only built dumb pipes to Europe. There
is no peering agreement amongst local telecos. It's better to host a website
in the US than locally because the roundtrip time would double rather than
decrease.

Thus, that initial low cost barrier to building something that allowed the
internet to blossom like a flower is absent. Remember how Google and Facebook
leeched off their university computers and network for years? It can't happen
because of this factor. And because usable Wifi simply doesn't exist. It's
either passworded for University staff use or insanely slow. (I've visited at
least 3 Nigerian universities and Two in Ghana.) I've spoken to several
students and the situation is the same.

The second issue to be tackled would be payment. The major players are tied to
the banks. Thus, they can't reorient their thoughts to what's required to make
online payments smooth, easy and cheap for users.

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ejanus
Thanks for your comments. I have visited so many universities in Nigeria and I
think that the drive is not there at all. However, I heard that private
universities are far better equipped and oriented(I have not visited such
schools). I just noticed one thing among Nigerians, my people, they would
prefer to blame the system instead of working to overcome obstacles. I operate
an online shop and my target market is universities.I only accept bank
transfer(awkward you my say) and PayPal. I hope to network with you in the
future.

~~~
vezycash
My email is visible on my profile. If it isn't. It's my profile name @live.com

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mjevans
The only problem to the distribution of music /IS/ the legacy distribution
industry. They refused to adapt and therefore the best thing for everyone else
is that they die off.

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blue_dinner
The music industry is so large, nobody will be able to defeat them or their
pack of lawyers in court. Napster was supposed to be a revolution, but all it
did was put all of the indy artists out of business and create the environment
we have now where music is virtually worthless and the only way to make a
living as an artist is to sign with a big company and tour.

Music sharing took away all of the power we had to defeat the music industry.
You need big money to make big changes, and now it's way too late.

The only real way to change the music industry is to start your own label, get
the rights to all of the musicians' work, and then charge what you feel is
right for the music and give them their fair share.

Nobody wants to do this because it will take years of sacrifice and money. I
suspect that most people that start out with this intention, end up becoming
the exact company they aimed to stop in the first place, because they didn't
realize the cost and risks involved with the music industry.

~~~
coldtea
> _The music industry is so large, nobody will be able to defeat them or their
> pack of lawyers in court. Napster was supposed to be a revolution, but all
> it did was put all of the indy artists out of business and create the
> environment we have now where music is virtually worthless and the only way
> to make a living as an artist is to sign with a big company and tour._

It also halved or even less the revenues of the music industry.

It was indeed a revolution, but not necessarily good for the indies. Plus,
technology lowered both recording and distribution costs to nearly 0, and so
everybody and his dog is an indie now and people just don't care. If you have
10.000 indie artist, each might have a following. If there are 200.000 of
them, it's much more difficult.

> _Music sharing took away all of the power we had to defeat the music
> industry. You need big money to make big changes, and now it 's way too
> late._

Only if the idea of "defeating the music industry" was "and get to make a
living as indie artists".

If it was "fuck the industry part, let's just have music from people who don't
do it for profit" then it was a wild success. We now have more music from
people who couldn't give a rats arse for profits than ever before -- all over
Bandcamp, CD Baby, personal sites, small vanity pressings and more.

