Digital Natives: The Generation That Music Product Strategy Forgot

Digital music product strategy is in urgent need of a reset. While tumbling CD revenues and stuttering digital sales continue to highlight the diminishing relevance of current music products, a second generation of music fans is following the Millennials out of the music-buying marketplace. Efforts have focused so heavily on wooing Millennials and the last of the CD buyers that current music products are failing to cater for an entire generation of music fans. Worse still, this generation — the Digital Natives — should be the future of music product revenues. So, while the Millennials' demographic time bomb blows up in the record labels' faces, the fuse has just been lit on another. A radical shift in music product strategy is the only feasible defense. As the canary in the mine for media businesses more broadly, the experience of music companies presents lessons for product strategists across all content genres.