The South African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO) protect the rights of music creators both locally and internationally – sounds good but then, why is there such a huge outcry in the music vicinity? It is not an open secret that there’s been a huge outcry from various sectors of society over how artists are being treated in the music industry. To worsen the situation is the advancement of the digital technology space, which posed serious threats to the decline of revenue streams owing to the persistent reliance on using traditional and outdated business models in the music industry.

The primary question is: In the wake of revenue erosion within the music industry, as an artist, how to profit from a world of digital music driven business models? For traditional business models, the technological change in the digital space has created more questions than answers. In a world of disruption innovation, there has been a significant shift on how the music business is conducted – disrupting existing markets and displacing established leading firms, music record labels and alliances.

Streaming services like Apple Music are stepping in to oversee traditional label responsibilities themselves, giving artists more direct access to their distribution and data. In addition, an entirely new collection of marketing tools and investment schemes (crowdfunding, investor-agency partnerships, accelerators like Zoo Labs and Techstars Music) has entered the business, making the future of artist development even more cryptic. – Cherie Hu, Forbes CONTRIBUTOR.

The secondary question is: As an artist with a considerable number of followers, how would you know as to which continent, country, region or city is more music adventures in the world? Most emerging artists rely on the social media channels for their music marketing, distribution, promotions and bookings. However, there is still a huge challenge owing to the music piracy and ownership aspects of the music content. A new business model is required to consolidate disparate channels including social media channels to a single view thereby giving artists a complete control over their content productions. The fundamental objective is to hold the user experience seamlessly across various channels, measure and monitor how the target audience relate with the touch-points designed to improve user interaction with the artists.

The above two questions serve as a rationale to introduce what is referred to as the Digital Experience TeleVision box, a type of Interactive Mobile Web Platform designed to help emerging artists within the developing economies to sustain their music business. The main objective is to help freelancers in the music industry to sustain themselves without spending huge sums of money through advertisements, marketing and promotions of their contemporary music productions. These are emerging artists or musicians who cannot afford to pay even a slight percentage of income or a salary to the managers of their music business.

Leading artists across the globe are taking major steps in embracing the digital space and further consolidate their revenue streams through the adoption of modernized business models driven by analytics experience in the music industry. The world’s top music producers like Jay-Z has recently decided to pull his music library from Spotify and Apple Music. One of his key projects Jay-Z more passionate about is Roc Nation, which he founded in 2008. Roc Nation is like a hub of entertainment and the home to diverse recording artists, writers and producers including Rihanna, Shakira, J. Cole and other talented artists.

The introduction of the Digital Experience TeleVision box in the music industry is intended specifically to help artists in the entertainment industry to build data competencies for their small businesses. This includes empowering artists with the tools they need to run their businesses whilst embracing the digital music space through the adoption of analytics – the modern way of doing business.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. – Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn.

Data has proved to be the strategic assets for major industry sectors across the globe. Therefore, in the music industry, data will revolutionise the way artists interact with their audience or followers. The artists that embrace data as a strategic asset will thrive in the digital space towards the establishment of the 4th revolution in the music industry. The adoption of analytics helps artists to identify strategic data needs, build useful business metrics, create better value propositions, established proper planning and methods to be used to collect more music data. This includes the interpretation of such data to provide insights while enhancing the user experience, business decision making and performance for the creation of superior competitive advantages against well-established players in the music industry.

In the following week, I am going to presents the technical components used to implement the Digital Experience TeleVision box. Although the implementation of the platform is based entirely on the adoption of open source ecosystem, there are other few components that have been used to comply with the user experience design practice. Without going into too much detail, but some of these components comprise five diverse cloud computing settings for video streaming, music streaming, uploads, downloads, backup and storage file systems implementation.

The platform is still a work in progress. Please don’t hesitate to share what you have experienced while viewing the platform – things you like about the platform and more importantly to highlight the areas that need further improvements.

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