Looking at how people discover music, people seem to fall into one of two broad categories. There are those who take an active approach - let’s call them the crate diggers. They used to spend hours flipping through the racks of vinyl/CDs at their record store and reading music magazines. Today they’ve likely moved their attention online – where they read blogs, share music with their social networks, and sample music from a variety of sources (YouTube, MySpace, P2P, IM, subscription services, etc). Regardless of the shift, the crate-diggers invest their time in looking for new music, are willing to sample lots of new music, and generally take pride in discovering something new and sharing it with their friends. They enjoy the music discovery process itself.
The other category takes a more passive approach to music discovery. While they enjoy listening to music and are open to new music - they don’t enjoy the process of looking for new music, they don’t know how to go about it, or they simply don’t have the time to commit to it. Let’s call this group radio listeners, because by and large that’s how they’ve often discovered music in the past (and continue to do so today) – through broadcast radio and video channels, and increasingly online radio.
These two groups aren’t mutually exclusive. Crate-digging is very much a lean-forward media experience while radio listening is lean-back. If I have a few free hours on the weekend, I may want to spend some time looking for new music. But when I’m busy at work, I may just want to hit a button and turn some music on. So for any individual, music consumption may be a mix of active and passive, a mix which also will likely shift over time. A college student may easily find a few hours a week to dedicate to active music discovery. But a middle-aged professional with a family with limited free time may not have the same luxury.
It’s no secret that a majority of music consumption falls into the passive category. As Pandora has pointed out, 85% of music consumption in the US is radio listening (http://bit.ly/cItRIn). We7 in the UK recently switched it’s focus to a radio focus from online streaming. In doing so, it announced that 55% of its tracks where being access via it’s radio feature. Similarly, a look at the iTunes or Spotify charts shows a high correlation with radio airplay – suggesting that a large % of consumers still discover music through largely passive means.
So what? There’s still a significant community of passive music consumers that aren’t discovering new music, which represents an opportunity for those services which address this need.