The Curious Case of the South Korean Music Market

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Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ might have catapulted the South Korean music market into the global consciousness but to industry observers like myself it has long been a market of particular interest.  Being the first major music market to pass the 50% digital mark – in 2006 – South Korea has been held up both as a digital trailblazer and as a canary in the mine for the global music industry.  Strong growth over recent years hinted at a brighter international future, but just as ‘Gangnam Style’ was propelling South Korean music to unprecedented global heights the South Korea music market went back into decline.

The South Korean music market is one of contradictions and idiosyncrasies, but crucially it also holds many lessons that the global music market would do well to pay heed to

Bucking Global Trends

According to the IFPI’s invaluable Recording Industry in Numbers, South Korean recorded music revenues declined by 5% in 2012, breaking a run of four years of successive growth. But unlike the global market, it wasn’t the CD that was to blame for the fall but digital.  Physical revenue grew by 19%, the third successive year of growth, while digital actually declined by 25%, dragging the entire market down with it. The mirror opposite of the global music market where 7% digital growth wasn’t enough to prevent a 5% physical decline drag down total revenues by 1%.

2012 wasn’t the first year that South Korea stood out from the pack though, indeed the last 13 years have been vastly different from the global market (see figure):

• Revenue collapse: between 2000 and 2005 South Korea lost a whopping two thirds of its value while the global market shrunk by a more modest 18%
• Digital crossover: in 2006 South Korea became the first major music market to become more than 50% digital (the 2012 global rate was just 38%)
• Subscription dominance: a vast 74% of digital revenues were subscription in 2012, having hit 22% back In 2008 (the global rate was just 20%)
• Physical boom: physical revenues have risen all years but one since 2007, compared to a global market decline every year since 2000

A Tale of Booming CD Sales and Tumbling Download Revenues

There is no single explanation for the unique picture that South Korea’s last 13 years of music history paints, but there are a few key factors:

• Piracy: piracy is of course just one contributory factor to the downturn in music revenues (albeit a crucial one) but the effect was felt particularly keenly in South Korea.  The South Korean government was an ardent supporter of the telco sector in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, resulting in some of the best high-speed broadband infrastructure on the planet.  However this support came at the cost of the government effectively turning a blind eye to rights holder concerns.  Unsurprisingly piracy boomed with file sharers and networks alike operating with near impunity.   South Korea became a perennial fixture on the US Trade Representative’s piracy watch list but finally the government started to redress the balance from 2007/8, introducing new copyright legislation, including a graduated response initiative in 2009.  And since 2007 the market has grown by an impressive 58%, nearly reaching 2000 levels by 2011.  But just how much of this can be attributed to government action is open to question as music revenues had already grown by 84% in 2006 alone.   (The rate of growth in 2006 is however skewed by the fact digital numbers were not reported in prior years).
• Subscriptions: the central force in South Korea’s digital market is SK Telecom’s MelOn subscription service which was the first in the world to amass a million paying subscribers and now numbers 2 million paying users and 18 million registered users.  MelOn was competitively priced (less than $3.00) and included mobile downloads from the start, enabling it to have immediate impact.  South Korean subscription revenues more than doubled between 2009 and 2012.  Rights holders have not been entirely happy though, including Lee-Soo Man (founder of K-Pop power house SM Entertainment) who claimed that 1 million tracks consumed on MelOn do not cover the costs of making a music video for a single.  The pressure resulted in government intervention and in January 2013 MelOn doubled its subscription rate to 6,000 won (about $5.60).  Time will soon tell whether the increased revenue per user is cancelled out by the likely decline in number of users.
• Download collapse: MelOn’s price hike of course came after 2012 digital decline, which instead was caused by a collapse in music download revenue, dropping by a staggering 71% in 2012.  The download collapse was the single biggest driver of the overall decline in revenue in 2012.  In fact, if download revenue had remained flat, total revenues would have grown by 6% in 2012.  Much of the decline is attributed to a tough year for another of SK Telecom’s properties, the social network Cyworld.  Once the dominant Korean network, Cyworld enables users to buy music tracks to personalize their profiles but it has struggled to compete against Facebook and spent 2012 bleeding users.
• Physical longevity: physical revenues have bucked the global trend, with 2012 revenues 128% bigger than their 2006 low.  This compares to a 14% rise for digital (though the 2012 collapse obviously skews the rate down). It is not a unique trend though, with Japan also experiencing a physical uptick in 2012. What links these two markets is the way in which the respective local pop sectors (K-Pop and J-Pop) have created ardently loyal fan bases that eagerly buy lavishly packaged CD products, often with merchandize extras, and frequently resulting in fans buying multiple editions of the same release.  Thus for all the surge in digital, the South Korean and Japanese pop markets have found a way to deliver unique, tangible value with physical products.
• K-Pop: though the success of K-Pop has been key to South Korean market growth there is growing criticism of this highly manufactured genre. Artists complain of being ‘contract slaves’ while others point to the huge concentration of power in the K-Pop talent agencies. A cultural critique is that this industrialized pop methodology places too heavy an emphasis on presentation over content, and too strong a focus on ‘safe bet’ lowest common denominators.  A clear echo of the American Idol and X-Factor phenomenon in the West.  Whatever its issues though, there is no denying that K-Pop is central to the resurgence in South Korean music revenues.

Lessons for the Global Market

South Korea is a truly unique music market and, just as with Japan, one has to tread carefully when attempting to project trends onto western markets.  But even with that caveat there is clearly much that can be learned from the South Korean experience:

• It is possible for music revenues to return to 2000 levels (if only for a fleeting moment)
• Subscriptions can reach significant scale when competitively priced (sustainability issues aside)
• Physical revenues can be given new impetus with smart product strategy (though don’t expect Westerners to start behaving like K-Pop fans)
• Concentration of any one segment of digital revenue in a single player can leave a market highly vulnerable

But perhaps most importantly of all, just like in the disclaimer of a financial services advert: music revenues can go up and down.  Even when a market eventually starts to grow again, don’t expect that to mean that the corner has been permanently turned.

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The Decline and Fall of the Top 10

The impact of technology on the music business is well understood, but it is also having a dramatic impact on the music buying population, which in turn is changing the face of mainstream music.  Digital music has so far been a journey for the more engaged, technology savvy music fan.  Some of these have discovered free music, others a la carte, others streaming.  All of these behaviours have eaten away at sales of the music industry’s core product: the album.   Yet the CD album remains the music industry’s number 1 global music product and in key markets like Japan and Germany it accounts for approximately three quarters of sales. The problem of course is that CD buyers are steadily falling out of the market (10.5 million people have stopped buying music entirely in the UK and US since 2008).  Though re-releases and discounted catalogue sales have helped bump up volumes in some markets, the net result is that new release album sales are dwindling.  Even more interestingly though, the abandonment of the album by engaged music fans is changing the face of the top 10 (see figure).

Looking at how the US top 10 albums chart has evolved since 2000 reveals a few key trends:

• Sales have tumbled sharply: the top 10 albums accounted for 56.4 million unit sales in 2000, by 2012 this had dropped by 38.7 million to 17.7 million (a 69% drop). 
• Some genres have fared better than others: the average number of sales per top 10 album for Rock, Pop, and Urban all fell by 75% between 2000 and 2012.  Country only fell by 66% and Adult by just 30%.  Adult, with artists like Michael Bublé, Adele, Susan Boyle and Josh Groban represent the new ‘safe’ market for album sales. These artists appeal to older music buyers who still predominately buy CDs and often rely upon mainstream outlets like Walmart. 
• Genres have fluctuated: although Pop is more pervasive than ever and now represents 41% of top 10 album sales, the sales for today’s Pop artists pale in comparison with those of the 2000 peak.  One Direction’s 1.6 million and 1.3 million sales and Justin Bieber 1.3 million in 2012 compare miserably with ‘N Sync’s 9.9 million, Britney Spears’ 7.9 million and the Backstreet Boys’ 4.3 million in 2000.   Urban has also steadily declined over the period, from a high of 50% of top 10 sales in 2005 to zero in 2012, while Country has steadily grown its share from zero in 2000 and 2001 to 19% in 2012. Rock, following a few strong years from 2006 to 2008 has been relegated to a niche of no more than 8% every year since, disappearing entirely in 2010.

Of course the top 10 album sales are not the whole music market, but that is sort of the point: the top 10 is becoming ever less of a measure of broader music buyer tastes and even further from the tastes of more engaged music fans.  Streaming and a la carte are empowering the music aficionados to deep dive, if not into the long tail, then certainly into the full torso of music, bypassing the short head of the top 10.  Leaving the top 10 as the pulse of the dwindling mainstream.

Why the Music Industry Needs Another iPod Moment

The importance of Apple to the digital music market cannot be overstated.  Without Apple the digital market would be vastly smaller than it is now.  With all of the talk of streaming services and the shift to the consumption era it is easy to think of Apple’s iTunes Store as yesterday’s game.  Such an assumption is as dangerous as looking upon the CD as an irrelevance in the present era.  The CD and iTunes combined account for approximately 78% of total recorded music revenue in the world’s 10 largest music markets.   And yet neither look like they are going to provide the momentum the music industry needs over the next few years.  Despite its vast importance to music revenue today, the CD is obviously on a fixed downward path.  And the download is not so dramatically different in profile in that it is the dominate revenue source yet is not delivering the dynamic growth the digital market needs.  Key to this is of course the role of Apple.

Apple CEO Tim Cook told us at the launch of the iPhone 5 that ‘Apple still loves music’ and so it does.  But music is inherently less central to Apple’s content and device strategy than it was 5 years ago.  When the iPod launched it had a monochrome screen and did little else than play audio.  Music was the killer app with which to market iPods.  Now games, apps, video and books show off the capabilities of colour touch screen iPads and iPhones much better than a static audio file (even if music remains one of the key activities on both those devices).    In the early days of the iPod Apple needed the record labels more than they did Apple.  Indeed, to begin with the iPod was far from a runaway success.  By the end of 2002, one year after launch, the iPod had only sold 625,000 units.  The iTunes Music Store changed the story, delivering not only unprecedented digital music milestones, but also record iPod sales. After the first full year of the iTunes Music Store, sales of the iPod had quintupled from 2 million to 10 million, and one year later they surpassed 40 million. The iPod and the iTunes Music Store had a clear symbiotic relationship.  Now though, Apple’s devices benefit from a much broader array of content and services from the iTunes Store, which pointedly is no longer called the iTunes MUSIC Store.

Apple’s diversification of device and content strategy heralded a brave new chapter in Apple’s history but it has also left the digital music market without the fiercely energized catalyst that kicked it into motion.  By the time Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, the installed base of iPods was already slowing.  Though sales were still increasing, the majority of those were either replacement or additional purchases.  So although iPod sales were booming still, the number of new iTunes Music Store customers was not.  Throughout 2008 I presented the data to a number of senior record label executives at the time and I argued that they needed to start planning for a post-iPod slow down.  Some of them didn’t take me too seriously, and who could blame them, after all iPod sales were growing strongly and iTunes downloads were growing at a stellar rate. But now, with a few years of market data behind us, the true scale of the post-iPod slowdown is clear (see figure).  As soon as iPod sales slowed, so did the digital music market.  Prior to 2008 the digital music market had grown by an average annual rate of 85.2%, after 2008 that rate dropped to 7.5%.  In many markets the 2009 slowdown was of falling-off-a-cliff proportions: in the US digital growth slipped from 30% in 2008 to a near flat-lining 1% in 2009.

Streaming services have started to bring some welcome momentum to digital music.  But much more is needed from them if growth is to be reinvigorated.  That growth may also be helped by new music formats like the forthcoming Lady Gaga album app.  Whatever the source of it, it is clear that the music needs another iPod momentum to kick the digital market back into life.

Bruce Willis and the ‘When Owning Doesn’t Actually Mean Owning’ Conundrum

Bruce Willis is reported to be considering legal action against Apple to enable him to bequeath his sizable iTunes music collection to his children.  Whether there is basis in the story or not it shines an unforgiving light not so much on Apple’s terms and conditions but the role of copyright in consumer music products as a whole.

Analogue Era Copyright Restrictions Rarely Left the Realms of Small Print

The issue at stake is that iTunes terms and conditions prevent the original purchaser from giving the purchased music to someone else. But this is not something unique to iTunes, it applies to virtually every single piece of music product that you have ever bought (assuming you have bought some at some time or another).  And not just to downloads, but also to CDs, vinyl, cassette, MiniDisc and just about any other physical format you care to throw into the mix.  With each and every one of those music product formats that you have purchased, all that you actually own is the physical packaging and media, and a license to play the music inside it.  You do not own the music.  And the licenses come with pretty specific restrictions, often including the number of people that are in the room when you are playing it, though the exact number of people who are allowed to listen to music in your living room is defined by national statute.  The restrictions also cover copying, lending and selling.  Of course (personal) copying, lending, listening at parties, gifting and buying used albums have all been integral parts of the music experience for decades.   People simply enjoyed the music how they wanted to regardless of the restrictions, many of which they simply were not aware of.

Take a look at the small print on the back of a CD album – if you still have any – and you’ll see a copyright notice.  The exact wording will vary according to the label and the country of origin or sale, but the same underlying principle applies across all of them: you don’t actually own the music on the album, instead you have bought a license to play that music.  In the physical era people rarely bumped into these restrictions, but in the digital age labels and other rights owners have the ability to enforce them through technology.

So should Bruce Willis really prove to be tilting at iTunes’ windmills, it will be decades of global copyright convention and practice that he will in fact be facing, and any potential judge will be made keenly aware of this.  Which raises the stakes in quantum leap proportions and builds a case for the industry to come up with common sense business solutions before the entire music copyright edifice is challenged.

It is Time for a Business Solution to the Copyright Problem

Copyright is the critical tool for monetizing content and ensuring creators and originators are fairly compensated.  But copyright is at its best when it serves those purposes without placing impractical and unreasonable restrictions on consumers.  Paying music fans are becoming an increasingly self-selective group.  In the analogue era most music fans were also recorded music buyers.  In the digital age music fans often opt out from music purchasing entirely.  Thus when analogue-era copyright legacies affect digital music buyers, it is the valuable, opted-in part of the population that is being penalized, not the freeloading opted-out portion.  A situation which of course has already happened once before online, with rights owners’ earlier insistence on all downloads being shackled with DRM.

 

The indies, and then EMI and iTunes finally broke the DRM hoodoo and one would hope that a similar outcome could be achieved here.  Changing the underlying copyright frameworks and agreements is not going to happen either soon or quickly, but just as DRM was solved with business decisions, so could the issue of transferring ownership of purchased music.  Rights owners and digital music retailers could create a framework agreement to permit certain behaviours within specific parameters or could simply agree to turn a blind eye in certain scenarios.

It would be copyright suicide to suggest that a music customer could ‘give’ their music to anyone they so choose, because a single digital copy can always be legion.  But a ‘fair use’ approach which supports a number of scenarios, such as Willis’ desire to bequeath to his children, would be an eminently workable solution.

Copyright should protect rights but not at the expense of penalizing legitimate customers over those who don’t bother to pay at all.

Five Music Predictions for 2010 (and Five Reasons Why 2009 was a Flop)

[Please note that this post first appeared on the Forrester Consumer Product Strategy blog.  Over the coming month or so I will be migrating all of my activity there.  I will soon be posting new information here for you to amend your feeds and subscriptions. Thanks]

Lots happened in 2009 but it wasn’t a vintage year for digital music (in fact it was the year it well and truly lost the digital buzz to eReaders). All in all I’d give 2009 a 6 out of 10, with the launch of Spotify accounting for at least couple of those points and the following as the 5 key disappointments:

1. Comes With Music under-whelmed (as did Play Now plus)
2. ISP services didn’t get off the ground (including unlimited MP3’s nearly but not quite moment)
3. Apple’s new killer music format was….oh iTunes albums
4. imeem gave a master class in how not to make money out of social music
5. The big boys (MySpace, Apple) snapped up the innovative competition (Lala, iLike, imeem)

So will be 2010 be any different?  Though I don’t think it will be the year digital music will really come of age (that’s at least a couple more years away) I do expect it on balance to be a stronger one than its predecessor.  Leaving aside the few specific developments I’m not able to talk about here are a few of my predictions:

1. Apple launches a major refresh to the music experience.  (I’ll caveat this first prediction with the disclaimer that Apple make a habit of proving wrong those of us foolish enough to try to second guess them.)  With that said, there are many things Apple could do with music in 2010.  Whatever they do, they have to do something significant if they are to stay on top of their game. They’ve spent much of 2009 collecting user data via the Genius app and they’ve acquired some top notch streaming and programming expertise via the Lala acquisition. And of course they’re busy developing with content partners for the forthcoming touch screen note book.  Here’s hoping that this will all add up to something like an integrated on-device, connected, interactive and immersive music experience where the cost is bundled into the price of the device (perhaps with the touch screen note book as the flagship device for the offering).  Apple wouldn’t be in the game of hiding the cost of music to the consumer (a la Comes With Music) but they may use content subscription bundling as a way to maintain premium price points and differentiation for their devices.
2. MySpace deepens its focus on music. Though MySpace will spend most of 2010 simply ingesting iLike and imeem, the acquisitions form part of a longer term strategy to breathe much needed new life into MySpace’s music role.  The new management talent is tasked with pulling MySpace from the brink of becoming a garbled also ran and dragging it by the collar into the 2^nd decade of the century.  Though they’re unlikely to admit it, the mainstream social networking race against Facebook is as good as over. By contrast they remain the #1 destination for artist communities online, yet without a major reinvention they’ll start to feel the competitive pressure bite there also.
3. Spotify scales back its US launch. Spotify appears to be paying the price for the major labels having second thoughts about ad supported on-demand content.  Those pesky US licenses have been proving tough to tie down and I’d expect to see Spotify’s US launch to be more strongly focused on the premium tier than it is in Europe.  If so, it could actually prove to be something of a blessing for the Swedish upstart, allowing it to consolidate the monetization of its core user base rather than building a US ad business from scratch whilst millions of free US subscribers add cost to the bottom line. Whatever the case, Spotify’s European revenue fundamentals should improve in Europe in 2010.
4. ISP music services don’t pack a killer punch. I’m a firm believer that ISPs will become established as a core element of the digital music value chain and the best way of fighting piracy head on.  In 2010 we’ll see more services launched both in the US and in Europe, especially the UK.  But I don’t see anything yet to suggest they’ll be adequately provisioned to flourish. It’ll take another year or two of revenue pain decline for the labels to adjust their license requirements sufficiently. What do I think will work?  5 pounds / euros / dollars a month for household access to near unlimited (i.e. fair use) MP3.
5. Semi-pro sites and services prosper. I’m not sure I’d go as far as to say 2010 will be their year, but it will certainly see continued growth for the likes of SellaBand, MyMajorCompany and Tune Core. These sites that create a route to audiences for artists either not good enough or not yet good enough for record deals, play to the strength of the Internet as a social channel for artists and fans. Which of course is all the more reason for MySpace to be watching its back.

To conclude, 2010 will be another year in which digital music continues to find its feet, but significant progress will be made.

HMV Interim Results and What they Mean for Music Sales

Interim results are out for HMV, always a good litmus test for the state of music and media sales.  I’m not a financial analyst so I’m not going to discuss the financial fundamentals, rather what this means for the music industry.

 

HMV stores sales (i.e. excluding Waterstones) are actually up over period.  But technology and gaming, rather than music, have been key to this growth, increasing their combined share from 18 percent to 23 percent.  HMV knows where its future lies.  HMV is plotting a course that brings it closer to European peers such as Saturn in Germany and Fnac in France and Åhléns in Sweden: it is not just becoming much more than music, it is planning for a future when music will no longer be a core product.  As you can from the chart below, music’s share of total sales is declining sharply and is strongly outweighed by DVD, which itself is now losing share to games and electronics.

 

So where does that leave music sales if Europe’s key high street music retailers are rapidly developing in other directions?  It would be nice to say that this is part of a process towards strong online sales.  But none of Europe’s major high street retailers have managed to steal any serious market share from Apple’s iTunes Music Store.   They should have been able to, as they have the decades of music retailing and programming expertise that Apple is just learning.  Selling in MP3 format is a crucial asset (which HMV now have) but they need to price as aggressively as Amazon is now in the UK and, most importantly, integrate heavily in store. This means that when you’re browsing the shelves in HMV you see most CD titles have offers for download discounts and bundles e.g. buy this album and get the other as a download for half price.

 

This might seem like a no-brainer, but it hasn’t happened because those responsible for in store CD sales are scared of accelerating cannibalization of their dwindling sales by driving people online.  It’s too late for those kinds of concerns.  The shift is already happening.  All that’s left now is an opportunity for HMV to help drive the process rather than continue to be dragged along, losing customers and market share all along the way

 

 

Why Apple Needs to Innovate

Long piece here on ‘Why iTunes Sucks’.  I don’t agree with all of it, but there are some interesting angles, such as the fact that iTunes is becoming a store front for iTunes Music Store.  I find this particularly interesting because it could well be an indicator that the ‘store guys’ at Apple are pulling too far from their leash.  Why?  Because the Store has always played a very distant second to the devices.  Apple is about selling technology, not media.  It uses media as a means of creating and demonstrating usage scenarios for their devices.  Not so long ago, Apple’s non-existent media strategy was summed up perfectly by their marketing message: ‘Rip, Mix, Burn’.  They didn’t care about selling content, simply that people would use content on their technology, regardless of IP considerations. 

 

Though the iTunes Music Store has become a fully fledged media (and indeed App) store, its remit firmly remains to help sell iPods and iPhones, and too keep people using them.  But if the software which is the lynchpin of the usage is becoming compromised in order to try to drive sales of content, the equation has become incorrectly balanced for Apple’s strategic priorities.  Apple would much rather that device owners were having a great experience and sell a little less content than the inverse.

 

So why has iTunes become bloated, so heavily focused on promoting the store and in some respects archaic? I’d argue a lack of competitive pressure has been key.  My colleague James McQuivey has developed a concept called the Convenience Quotient that Apple would be well advised to understand at the moment.  His thesis centres on the principle that removing barriers and increasing benefits drives convenience and thus adoption.  Apple nailed the usability part of the ‘Barrier-Benefits=Convenience’ formula with the iPod / iTunes combination.  It was gracefully easy to use.  Dynamic consumer adoption followed despite relatively premium price points.  But now, lacking strong competitive pressure Apple seem to be taking their foot off the pedal.  The iPod range lacks the simplicity it once had, but more importantly the usability is becoming less elegant also, thus reducing the ‘Convenience Quotient’. 

 

Also, the iTunes Music Store hasn’t had any significant innovation in years.  It’s essentially stuck to yesterday’s digital music model whilst the digital music market has evolved beyond recognition around it.  The lack of competitive threat (Apple has the vast majority the European digital music market) has enabled Apple to let iTunes Music Store stagnate whilst it’s technology has evolved. 

 

Now don’t get me wrong, Apple’s not about to get knocked off its throne, but it could really do with some increased competitive pressure to drive its innovation back up to its own incredibly high standards.  The near term future is safe, but the longer term needs more investment.