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Harvard Professor Weighs In On Digital Music Bundling

4:53 p.m. · December 2, 2009 · by Chris Bosman

Anita Elberse is a Harvard Business School professor who does a lot of work for the entertainment industry. Currently she's working on a paper entitled "Bye Bye Bundles: The Unbundling of Music in Digital Channels." In it Elberse tackles the problems labels are seeing with selling digital albums as a whole while also selling each track separately.

Elberse says her research has found that "each album no longer bought is "traded in" for one, perhaps two, individual songs," which the labels see as a loss, given that a customer would have had to previously buy an entire album.

She offers a few different solutions to the problem, including increasing the price of individual songs so that labels can match profits for selling a few songs with selling an album, encouraging artists to move away from the album format, and simply not selling individual songs through retailers like iTunes.

The entire interview, while interesting and informative, is certainly from the point of view of someone concerned strictly with the business aspect of the music industry, rather than the art. Little consideration is given to the way artists or consumers may feel about Elberse's suggestions, which may make her research more academic than applicable. [The Daily Swarm]