Part 15. Opening of Volume 2 — Seeing Music through Lessons Learned from Games

The Genealogy of Payment Habits — A Historical Hint Book for New-Content Business Models Volume 2 · Part 15

What Came First Collapsed First

When Napster appeared in 1999, the music industry was already undergoing a digital transition. File sharing began, and record companies were helpless. Even after Napster was shut down by court order in 2001, the problem did not disappear. Similar services kept emerging, and a legal digital distribution channel would not arrive until Apple launched iTunes in 2003.

The game industry experienced a comparable shock much later. Steam appeared in 2003, while cracks caused by free-to-play became visible in the 2010s. Games went through a decade later what music had already experienced.

Volume 1 traced changes in payment habits across the game industry: arcade coins, package purchases, monthly subscriptions, free-to-play, gacha, and battle passes. We confirmed that every one of these changes inherited an earlier habit-space.

Volume 2 examines industries that had already confronted these problems before games were even born. Music comes first.

Three Principles Confirmed in Volume 1

Three principles ran through the fourteen chapters on the game industry.

First, a business model is not invented. It is transferred. The habit of inserting a coin in an arcade machine led to mobile micropayments. The habit of buying records connected to purchasing packaged games. The habit of buying tickets to live performances transferred to subscriptions for fan platforms. No era has produced an entirely new payment habit.

Second, anything that enters without a space inevitably drifts. Google Stadia was technically impressive, but no habit-space existed for “watching games through streaming.” Its weak launch lineup, a pricing structure that still required full-price game purchases despite being a streaming service, and distrust that Google would shut the service down early compounded the problem. Axie Infinity introduced the new idea of P2E, but its internal economy was unsustainable. The 3DO’s $699 price failed to land in the existing habit of buying a console.

Third, failures matter as much as successes. Napster, the Sega Saturn, the Overwatch League, and Anthem: examining why they failed makes the spaces in which successful cases landed much clearer.

These three principles reveal different things when applied to the music industry.

Why the Music Industry Is Fundamentally Different from the Game Industry

Games are interactive content that works only when users operate it, so the reason to pay lies in “the experience I play.” This makes it easy to divide and stage the experience through playtime, levels, character upgrades, and other units. Monetization points can be designed inside the flow of the game.

Music is non-interactive content in which users have nothing to operate while listening, so the reason to pay lies in “the sound itself.” How to turn that sound into a product is a problem the music industry has wrestled with for more than three hundred years.

Sound is difficult to own. A painting can hang on a wall. A book can sit on a shelf. But sound? Until Edison’s phonograph in 1877, sound could not be stored physically. It vanished when the performance ended. This was the first music-business-model problem: “How can people be made to pay for sound?”

The phonograph put sound into a physical medium for the first time, fundamentally changing the music industry’s business model. Payment transferred from the habit of buying an admission ticket to the habit of buying a record. Every subsequent change in music business models derives from that first transfer.

Long before the game industry existed, the music industry was already experimenting with every major business-model type: package sales, licensing, advertising revenue, performance revenue, and subscriptions.

What Music Experienced First

The history of the music industry is an advance laboratory for what the game industry encountered later.

Piracy. The music industry had already experienced piracy in the cassette era. Recording an LP onto cassette became possible in the 1970s. The game industry began taking piracy seriously in the CD-ROM era of the 1990s. Music faced the same problem twenty years earlier.

The shock of digital transition. The Napster crisis of 1999–2001 was the music industry’s first large-scale shock from digital transition. Its closest counterpart in games may be Steam sales changing purchasing habits in the late 2000s. Again, music came first.

The streaming model. Spotify began service in 2008. Xbox Game Pass did not popularize download-based game subscriptions until after 2017, and cloud streaming was added in 2020. Music had experimented with the same model more than a decade earlier.

These advance experiments are the core of Volume 2. The music industry offers clues to what the game industry may experience next. The same clues apply directly to people creating new content.

Why the Korean Music Industry Is Special

Korean cases carry two meanings in Volume 2.

One is as early examples of global experiments. Korea led the world in high-speed internet adoption in the late 1990s. As a result, MP3s, file sharing, and streaming models became established there before they reached the global mainstream. Melon began paid music streaming in 2004, while Spotify launched in 2008, meaning Korea ran the same experiment four years earlier. The failures and successes of the Korean music industry repeatedly became advance cases for the global market.

The other is K-pop’s business model, unique anywhere in the world. It sells an album not as content but as a right to participate in fandom; album sales paradoxically increase in the streaming era; and photocards and voting rights refine the units of payment. The original form appeared in Japan with AKB48’s handshake-event entry tickets and general-election voting rights in the late 2000s. Korea alone, however, developed it into a global-scale export-industry system. K-pop’s business-model structure therefore requires independent analysis.

Soribada was Korea’s Napster, but it reached a different conclusion. Korea had a different copyright law and regulatory environment, and Melon emerged as a solution within that environment. It is a case in which the same technological shock met different regulation and produced a different business model. New-content planners need an eye for how their regulatory environment determines a business model, and the history of the Korean music industry develops that eye.

How to Read Volume 2

Volume 2 covers the music industry in Parts 15–21 and the video industry in Parts 22–26. Keep asking the same questions when looking at each industry.

What was the previous habit-space? Before a new business model appeared, in what similar space were people already paying? Before the phonograph, people bought admission tickets to performances. That habit led to record purchases.

Which one found a space, and which one drifted? In the same era, some players landed in an existing habit-space, while others entered without a space and disappeared. What made the difference?

What clues can be applied to my new content? Is there a precedent in the music industry’s three-hundred-year history for what you are trying to create now? The habit-space in which that precedent landed is your clue.

One point deserves advance notice: the music industry has a far longer history than the game industry. Arcades emerged in the 1930s, but charging admission for performances goes back to ancient Greece. A longer history means more transfer patterns—and more clues.

This Part’s Hints — Before Beginning Volume 2

Checkpoint 1: Is your new content interactive or non-interactive?

If it is interactive, the history of the game industry provides more direct clues. If it is non-interactive, the history of music and video is closer. Read both, however. As technology advances, the boundary between interactive and non-interactive content becomes increasingly blurred.

Checkpoint 2: Has another industry already confronted the same problem before yours?

If so, study that industry’s history first. The problem you believe you are encountering for the first time may already have been solved. Or you may discover that it remains unsolved. Both are clues.

Checkpoint 3: Could what is happening in the music industry now happen to your industry ten years from now?

Some things happened to music before games, and others happened to games before video. These advance experiments may reveal the future of your industry.

The next part begins with what first persuaded people to pay for sound. From admission fees at performance halls to the phonograph, from the phonograph to radio, and from radio to record labels, these transfers became the prototypes for every music business model that followed.

Kim Dongeun WhtDrgon@MEJE.kr 2026