A few things I’ve come to believe in my years in music tech
The business of music essentially started as a way to sell preaching and alcohol, which in turn monetized real estate investments (bars), and then it was used to sell little blobs of plastic and cardboard with pictures on them, t-shirts, instruments and some lessons, and then maybe matchmaking at concerts and festivals. Music is the sizzle, not the steak. It&#x27;s the sound of gross margin, but it&#x27;s not the product. We just keep letting musicians believe it&#x27;s a problem to be solved and they keep producing music more and more cheaply, while businesses find new tchotchkas to sell into the channel that a listenership creates. Digitization decoupled the attractive sounds from the merch, and now we&#x27;re trying to find a way to couple them again.<p>Bandcamp has done some very interesting stuff with merchandising. Same with the resurgence of vinyl records as a luxury item. Selling cosmetics and endorsements is the main play for making money with music I think.  I looked into whitelablling cannabis products for bands (like the song? experience the complete vibe with X branded prerolls, etc) and this is explicitly banned in legalization legislation because it&#x27;s such an obviously good idea.<p>There was a dating site that matched people based on their music preferences and playlists, and that was one of the best hypoethesis I&#x27;ve seen tested in a product. I don&#x27;t think it dominated the way one might have expected it to.<p>I agree with the advice, that discovery isn&#x27;t a product, and the big question is how to tie music back to merch, or move on to new artforms if that&#x27;s not going to happen. Otherwise it&#x27;s like trying to sell math.