Context

The music industry has a love-hate relationship between music labels and artists. Traditionally many music creators have given away the rights to their music to big labels to achieve the distribution required to become famous and reach scale. 

This leads to the following problems for creators –

• Lack of control of their own music 
• Stringent contracts
• Revenue sharing with music labels 
• The winner takes all models where a select few creators get all the attention and other creators have to struggle. 

Music fans generally have limited knowledge of the music label’s role in an artist’s career. The fans want to support the artists and engage with them directly. Some streaming services such as Spotify are a step in the right direction to empower creators to reach their audience directly.

Objective

Your goal in this project is to propose a solution that empowers artists to 

• Monetize their work
• Keep the majority of the revenue generated from their work
• Keep control of their music
• Build a direct relationship with their fans

Deliverables

Your project deliverable would have 4 sub deliverables – 

• Music industry business model overview (Maximum 4 slides)
  • How do labels and artists work together?
  • What are the revenue streams?
  • What are the unit economics for each album?
  • Anything else that explains the current industry
• Create user personas for artists, fans, and music labels (1 page for each persona)
• Propose a solution by creating a product requirement document that explains (2-3 pages)
  • Key product features
  • Key metrics
  • Execution plan
• Create a low fidelity mock of the product based on the product requirement document
  • Showcase user journey from start to finish
  • You may use tools such as Figma or Balsamiq to create designs.

Resources

• How does the music industry work?
• How do musicians make money?
• Record labels 101

Timeline

• Group members are advised to have the first two deliverables ready by mid-project review
• The last two deliverables should be shared with the expert coach for penultimate review
• The final deliverables should bring all 4 sub deliverables together to create a 10-page document or 15 slide presentation.

Group project guidelines:

• Teams will be responsible for evenly distributing the work among all team members
• An expert coach will guide you through the product development journey but will not provide a solution
• Team members will evaluate one another at the middle and end of the project
• The final project evaluation will be done by an expert other than your expert coach
• All team members will be able to add the project to their portfolios