What The Music Industry Can Teach The Film Industry

Great interview with Ethan Kaplan, the new VP of Product Development at LiveNation.com, on Tech Crunch last week. In addition to talking about what’s going to work for artists and the industry in the digital age, as well as the live experience and what the team is up to at LiveNation.com, Kaplan draws a parallel between the music industry 10 years ago and the film industry today. He explains that windowing strategies long used in the film industry (in short: staggering a product release, in this case films to theatres, then DVD, then Netflix, then premium cable, etc.) are now being introduced in the music industry as well. The problem, Kaplan explains, is that these models “work as a marketing tool to a degree, but they don’t work as a way of curbing piracy or increasing the value of your product.”