I just read a post of Canadian Marketing Blog, the title is Boomers Should Support More Recent Music from Lina Ko. In the article, Ko indicated that the baby boomers are still the biggest group of customers of North America demographically (our Marketing textbook says the same too), and their taste of music directly affects the younger generations’ taste of music too. Therefore, baby boomers should listen more latest songs to prove the music innovations.
I have the same feeling with that even though I wasn’t born in North America. When I was young I listened to what my parents listed, liked what they liked naturally, usually are pop songs which were more soft, tender and slow, love songs so to speak. (just like baby boomers always like Rock and Roil, from the textbook also.) Now I clearly see the great divergence of music development and innovation between eastern and western cultures. Last week when I went HMV to kill time, most albums displayed at most observable spots are rap, and fast songs (Lady Gaga again…) Although baby boomer era’s songs are still popular, I can see the trend of music is changing; on the other hand, the modern generation can download songs and albums without any trouble, so they don’t have a constant taste of what kind of music they keep listening, or music only become a tool of isolating noise on the bus or skytrain anyway. (Lady Gaga is very talented, but from my point of view, the ultimate reason of her popularity is her specialty of clothing.)
On the other hand, Hong Kong’s marketers in music industry are more conservative. Nowadays the most popular songs in Hong Kong are still love pops, and the only difference is that the present singers don’t know how to sing comparing with the last two decades’ singers. We do have rapers, rock bands in our music industry, but the more successful one are: rap with pop elements, rock with pop elements, and the others are not very popular. One reason is that we are more likely to stick with old stuff instead of accepting new stuff. (In dealing with Macroenvironment, should I classify it as Social of Cultural factor?) Other reason is the Karaoke culture in Hong Kong is too strong, so we always say Hongkongers are very busy and don’t have time to do any exercises because they have to go shopping, see movies, dining, dating and karaoke. CD albums, concerts and Karaoke definitely is a product line in which CD albums have the smallest importance because of the illegal downloading in China and Hong Kong are non-stoppable. Also when teens go to Karaoke, they tend to choose easier songs to avoid freezing their friends right? To conclude, I don’t see any big innovation in that music industry.
Businessmen always have many ways to make money; they can keep doing the same thing until a competitor arrive or all of their customers get bored. Also they can develop market segments and “grow” it, let it bigger and more profitable. How they choose, their call.
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