The Elevator Pitch
Seenster is for independent musicians who bootstrap their efforts on their own dime, the Prolific Compilation Card is a recommendation tool that gives artists the opportunity to get paid for recommending music in real life, at their gigs. Unlike Last.fm, iTunes, and Myspace our product brings the social music network into Real Life to sell recommendations as a tangable commodity.
The Problem?
For many years the music industry has formatted their product onto physical media to sell it as a commodity. Successive generations of such physical media improved quality and storage capacity while lowering manufacturing costs, increasing availability, and maximizing convenience to end users. Popular acceptance of physical media storage devices has changed from records, to eight tracks, to cassettes, to compact discs, with a few alternatives along the way. As the physical design of devices changed, the media changed from analogue format to digital format.
Digital storage of music has been a part of the physical media of music since the introduction of the compact disc into popular culture. Since then, the willingness to pay for music by consumers was tied to the accessibility of digital recordings via physical media. The historic success of the commodification of digital media can be attributed to the difficulties of storage and distribution of such large quantities of digital data combined with the convenience of storage on a physical medium. For these reasons, the most appropriate way to access high quality digital recordings, until recent years, was to purchase recordings on a CD.
The development of the Internet has removed the barriers of storing and transferring high quality music files. Consequently, the market's willingness to pay for digital media stored on a physical medium has declined drastically in recent years, especially in Canada.
So what?
Well, the benefit of physical media such as CD's and records, is that they capitalize on the willingness to pay at the point of purchase. The consumer can make a decision to obtain the music at a point in time where an agreed upon price can be paid which captures the market's motives for parting with their money. There are benefits to e-commerce distribution methods whereby listeners can find and buy music on the Internet using services such as Pandora.com an iTunes. However, attempts to commodify digital music distribution in Real Life have not been successful enough to compensate for losses in music sales.
This is Where Seenster Comes In
Seenster is a combination of digital warehousing and distribution of digital audio with Real Life distribution can capitalize on the desire of listeners to support recording artists and tap into the Long Tail of the market by increasing availability and appropriately pricing music.
It means that with seenster's products, musicians can create Direct Download Cards or Digital Content Packages to sell music in a physical property to their fans.