Below is the material from my presentation last night at Obsat. A few people said I was being too serious. That’s fine. The thing is, the digital era is a serious matter — I couldn’t help making a serious presentation. Read on. Hopefully useful.
I put together this presentation specifically for Obsat, to give an overview of the digital era as it’s actually unfolding, and what it means for the music industry — especially the recording side. The uncomfortable part: when asked for data and examples of digital music success in Indonesia, I struggled. I can’t pretend that digital music in Indonesia is working well. My honest view is that we haven’t done much yet. I hope I’m wrong, because if I’m right — I’d rather not think about what that means.
Two Facts
Fact one: we are in the Digital Era. There’s no hiding from it. Even if you retreat to a remote jungle with no signal, no electricity, and play a nylon-string guitar by candlelight — you’re still making music in the Digital Era.
Fact two: music equals commerce. Music and money can occupy the same sentence in almost every context. Without its commercial dimension, music would barely exist in its current form. Who pays to manufacture a piano? Who buys it? Who funds an album? How does the money come back? If music and commerce are this interdependent, why does the tension between “art” and “business” keep coming up? In my experience, music itself never had a conflict with its commercial side. What’s actually in conflict are the people involved — musicians who don’t understand business, labels that are greedy, publishers out of touch with reality, media that pretends to know more than it does. (Not always. I’m giving a perspective, not a rule.)
What we’re dealing with now is commercial music in the digital era. Just as musicians shouldn’t be afraid of “business” or “commerce,” they also shouldn’t be afraid of “digital.” This is actually the most interesting era for commercial music in history.
Five Media Eras
A quick step back to align on context. We’ve been through several media eras already. According to the theory, we’re now in Era 5. Each era changes how humans communicate, think, and consume — because as Marshall McLuhan put it, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
Era 1 — Oral Age: all communication is spoken. Era 2 — Scribal Age: the era of writing, where books were copied by hand word-for-word. The Library of Alexandria burned in this era, and much of ancient history was lost. Era 3 — Print Age: music first becomes an industry here — the sheet music industry. People could buy books of notation to play songs at home on their own piano. Era 4 — Electric Age: the recording and broadcasting industries replace sheet music as the dominant force in music. Era 5 — Digital Age: now. Exciting times.
Shifting Eras
Every time an era changes, there’s what you might call a Ratio Shift — industries slide, like sheet music giving way to recording and broadcasting. But what makes headlines is always some version of “THIS IS THE DEATH OF ___.” That framing is misleading. What actually changes is how people think, communicate, and consume. In music’s case: how people discover, buy, and listen to music.
McLuhan called the tendency to look backward when facing something new the Rear View Mirror Effect. Faced with the digital era, musicians compare cassettes to CDs, CDs to iPods, and so on. That habit makes it harder to understand the present comprehensively.
The real question is whether music will shift again the way it did from sheet music to recording. To answer that, we have two options: wait, or do something. By basic economic logic, option two is easier and cheaper.
How?
The fundamental principle is: Go Native. Every era has its own native behavior. This isn’t just “move your music promotion from traditional media to digital media.” The example of Kickstarter makes this clear — they didn’t build a website that mimics the traditional “few big investors” model. They built something that uses the internet’s ability to aggregate many small investors. That’s native digital thinking.
Understanding how people behave in the digital environment first, then building around that behavior — that’s the sequence. Don’t create any digital marketing plan before you understand this. Don’t be intimidated by “not understanding technology.” Think of it like learning to drive. The first time you sit in a car, the dashboard looks impossible. A few months later, you’re not thinking about technology at all — you’re just driving. The internet is the same.
The Music-Innovation Paradox
Here’s something worth sitting with: research has found that the most talented engineers in Silicon Valley are, almost without exception, active musicians. And yet, innovation in the music industry has never come from music companies — it always comes from technology companies. The very companies filled with people whom the recording industry blames for creating the file-sharing culture that “enabled piracy.”
Business Models
So what business model works in the digital era? That’s the interesting part: there is no single pattern that guarantees success. In the old days, you made a demo, got signed, got promotion, toured, built a career. How many Indonesian bands today can sell 10,000 copies? 100,000? 1,000,000? Not even close.
But the digital era has generated real creativity from people working in the music business — because music is reaching more people globally than ever before. Some numbers: iTunes hit 10 billion downloads. Torrent downloads via Mininova reached 7 billion per year. Angry Birds hit 500 million downloads — ten times the combined sales of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. In Indonesia, with 237 million people, there were 210 million mobile subscribers — meaning many people carry more than one number.
Access
There’s a concept worth knowing: Easy is Killing Free. The idea is that it’s actually easier to buy a song on iTunes than to search Google and download it for free. If that problem gets solved, it opens up entirely new business models.
Another foundational model: Connect With Fans, then Give Them a Reason to Buy. What does connecting with fans look like? Being excellent at what you do.
Some examples: Spotify — streaming, described even by Torrent Freak as an alternative to piracy. Bandcamp — variable pricing, where fans can pay above the minimum and apparently about half of them do. Microgiving — used by musicians to crowdfund.
There’s a lot more to cover, but a single session isn’t enough for digital. The good news is that Widi, Adib, Aulia, and Ario are willing to push this conversation forward.
The digital stage is still mostly empty. Who wants to step onto it?