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"Bowie Bond" auctions to sell the latest music, videos & books
One area where stakeholder ownership could be useful is in music sales, particularly as the industry still seems to be struggling to develop a sustainable model that will protect and reward musicians rights' (especially smaller ones).
See: http://www.businessinsider.com/pandora-claims-steve-jobs-eviscerated-the-music-industry-2015-12
A potential way of applying customer financing – extending the concept of "Bowie Bonds"* – could be to auction songs to the most eager fans (before fully releasing the full track, i.e. by just releasing a short excerpt), who as owners/shareholders in the newly released songs could then help promote the artist's music via social media and share in subsequent sales & advertising revenue (including from subscription/streaming services).
This approach is similar to "crowdfunding", but an auction would sell the song to the combination of bidders that maximised auction revenue (all winning bidders would pay the auction clearing price below which those that bid lower would miss out). The benefit of an auction model is it enables better (or at least, more popular) songs and albums to attract a premium price compared to the low, standard payment made for all streaming songs (which fails to distinguish the relative value of different songs).
Loyalty schemes could be used to discount the cost of multiple tracks or an album bought from the same artist, or multiple tracks and albums bought through the same record company, or for shareholders in the record company (including those who are shareholders via their chosen superannuation fund, which might negotiate these deals).
Music lends itself well to this auction sales model as there is a tendency for fans to buy tracks as soon as they come out and then encourage their friends to get it too. After the auction is complete, the auction winners would then have an incentive not to subsequently give the music away to friends for nothing, since they could instead easily share a link that would enable other people to buy a cheap copy, which would reward them (the new song owners) with a portion of this secondary revenue and deliver at least a partial return on their investment.
New songs available for auction could be marketed as speculative investment opportunities through streaming platforms (which otherwise tend to play what people already know or is popular), if users requested it in their "random play" settings. Once sold, the owners (winning bidders, along with the band) could then share in subsequent streaming revenues when the song is heard by others.
The same model could be used for selling videos/films and possibly books. In the latter case, it would make sense for book sellers to bundle e-books with traditional paper books (for a small premium), so the many buyers who prefer a paper book can continue to use this at home, but also exploit the portability of e-books for sharing & travelling.
*Continued innovation of Bowie Bonds would be a nice lasting legacy for one of the most innovative musicians in history:
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