While the entire humanity is adjusting to new ways of living due to COVID-19, many people are suggesting different ideas about how the world would look like after the Coronavirus pandemic. 

One interesting prospect about the aftermath of Coronavirus pandemic is that the contents business will start being sold as physical goods.

Where has this idea come from? We can find the answer to this question by looking into the current music industry.

During the early 2000’s, physical records used to be the main source of sales revenue in the music industry. Compared to the sales of physical albums amounting to $25 Billion (USD) in the early 2000’s, the sales of the current digital album streaming only amounts to about $6 Billion.

This clearly demonstrates that music consumers are keener on spending money on physical albums that they can actually keep, rather than spending money on intangible music streaming. 

Due to this, albums are still sold at a substantially high price of around $10 to $50, whereas digital streaming generates only a few won per streaming.

However, we currently live in a smart generation where CD players are no longer present and smart devices are used as new replacements. Considering these things, contents suppliers have no choice but to rely more heavily on digital streaming.

In the end, it has become extremely difficult for the industry to embrace a continuous growth with the small sales power of digital streaming. As such, contents providers have chosen to fill out their lost sales with offline performances and other additional products.

Nonetheless, COVID-19 has put a halt to all offline activities for survival, and it seems unlikely that this global pandemic will disappear any time soon.

Due to these arbitrary circumstances, contents providers are faced with tasks to come up with a new way of generating profit. This is why some people are predicting that contents providers will turn to the sales of physical albums for their survival because it generates a higher added value than the digital streaming.

Meanwhile, Adele’s album ‘25’, which was released without a music streaming service, recorded a sales figure of 22 million albums. This proved that music fans are well prepared to buy their favorite artists’ albums, and that the market for physical goods created by artists such as an artwork or a book still exists.

Considering that offline performances and additional products are no longer available for sales, and there is a consumer demand for purchasing an artist’s album for their own keeping, many people predict that the contents providers will focus on selling high value-added albums rather than music streaming.

However, we live in a generation where CD players have already vanished and smart devices are replacing their places.

Then which type of music record would become the new innovative vaccine for the music industry during the era of COVID-19? Who will lead the new generation to become the real post CD?

A physical media that is demonstrating the most promising outcome as the new music record is an item called ‘KiT’ provided by MUZLIVE. A KiT Album is a type of music record that uses KiT, and more than 120 different K-pop KiT Albums have been released already.

KiT stands for ‘Keep In Touch’, and comes in a square cube with a length and width of 6cm. It works on all smart devices by delivering an encoded ultrasonic wave communication to the device. The album operates simply by clicking the KiT on the smart device without a separate activation or pairing process, and it can also prevent illegal reproduction of contents. By presenting a wide range of different innovative creations, it is highlighting its value as a new type of media.

KiT also collects and analyzes the usage data of the customers that have bought physical albums, which are the customers with the strongest royalty in the music market. KiT then provides the database to the album makers, and this is something that the existing medium such as the CD, LP and cassette tapes could not do.

Many popular K-pop music have been released through the KiT Album and the sales figure currently amounts to more than 1 million sales worldwide.

A staff working in the KiT Album business has said, “While it is hard for the music industry to incur growth with music streaming, we are trying to solve this problem by creating a virtuous cycle in the music market by providing a media service integrated with IT so that the value of the original contents can be maximized,” and that “As a contents provider, releasing new contents will be difficult especially during the time of the Coronavirus pandemic. Moreover, it’s going to be hard to re-sell the already existing records into a CD album. I personally think that re-releasing the existing records into a KiT Album can be a good alternative considering the uncertainty of the current market situation.”

Currently, MUZLIVE Inc. is negotiating with the global music providers in order to enter the global market with KiT.

In the post-Coronavirus music market, many businesses will attempt to create new types of media such as the KiT Album.

In the end, ‘Which type of new physical media will be linked to smart devices with which type of creative method’ will become the key to success and failure of the global music paradigm in the future.