Indie Music – The Substitutive Model.
Presenting additional variables to a model already restricted by many variables, may present an issue in terms of explanatory power. This data manipulation also has potential downfalls mainly by comparing indices that include differing bundles of products. Understanding that this article is a part of a larger article about the evolution of the indie music industry will help readers get a better understanding of the subject. You can read more about this in my series of blogs named Research Models on Prediction of the Indie Music Industry. I will follow up with a new article about different models used by scholars to study the effects of internet on the music industry. If you have been following my previous articles on Research Models, by now you should have a good understanding of the fundamentals. It might be wise to re-read those articles, or bookmark them to grab back whenever you encounter a subject that I have written about!
The actual substitutive power of products can also be called into question for several reasons. First, music, in its consumption, is a truly different product than video. It requires far less time to listen to a song than watch a movie, or show. At the same time, the consumption opportunities related to audio products are much greater as people can listen to music on the go in a variety of ways. Further, music can often accompany other activities, while movies are generally the exclusive centre of one’s attention. Still, looking at the descriptive data in the previous section, the concurrent falling price of video and record sales warrants further testing. Software is probably an even less likely substitute, but does include video games, another entertainment-related good. With the same, and even more extreme, consumption differences as movies, video games are still worth looking into as their prices, too, fell steadily. Another interesting facet that the price of software could capture is the lowered costs of producing music, thanks to more affordable applications for doing so.
Social media and online communities make it easier for consumers to connect with and learn about indie artists. In this way, the digital age has revolutionized the methods and lowered the cost of nearly every aspect of the indie music industry. Internet brought with it an increasing number of affordable and powerful software that made the production costs of music fall drastically in the 1990s, with new technologies making robust recording equipment available to indie musicians. As discussed in my blog Research Models on Prediction of the Indie Music Industry-4, today, there continues to be a reduction in the necessity of expensive studio time, enabling indie artists and musicians to take the DIY approach in creating music. With the invention of technology, new, generally economical recording instruments, more people can take part in the production of music than any time in recent memory.
The millennium variable is a simple time trend, from 1-12, beginning in the year 2000. This has been included to explain any other Internet and technology factors that might not be represented in the dependent variables. This could potentially cause issues with multicollinearity in relation to the Internet penetration variables. Considering the correlation matrix it has been noted that Millen is in fact correlated nearly perfectly with broadband penetration and very closely to the Internet as well. In addition, the Internet variable, as would be expected, is highly correlated with that of broadband. Since these correlations do not equal exactly one, though, scholars experimented all three, together and separately, in the testing.
The main shortcomings of this model come with the relatively small number of observations, possibly omitted explanatory variables and potential complex interconnections within the dependent variables. With only 12 values for the Internet and time trend variables, it may still be difficult to come to fully conclusive results about the impact of the millennium. In addition, the existence of general trends in response to the emergence of the internet could cause multicollinearity.
In my next blog I am going to write more about the impact of internet on indie music business as a whole. Please share your experiences and I will add them to my future blogs.
If you need help in creating and maintaining a website, HyperEffects can help you connect with your target audience efficiently. HyperEffects is one stop for your website, marketing and cyber development requirements. It helps you to create a website to display your talent or sell your indie music or indie art.
