Every business mouths and knows this - “Customer is KING”. For start-ups like us this is especially true since we need to provide a product/service to which truly adds value. Yet, my brothers and I have been debating recently about whether the KING really knows what he/she wanted. What if the problem we are trying to solve with MuSMo does not exist?

A MBA class will teach us the benefits of market research - a focused group and survey. Yet, all this work will only point us to an incremental innovation, at worst, the results will scare us away off MuSMo. I draw encouragement from Xerox (Joe Wilson), Bill Gates (Microsoft) etc.

MuSMo strives to be the primary access to music! Free Music!

Until 10 years ago, we bought LPs, tapes and CDs. We paid with hard cash to purchase the music we like. Anyone with a collection of over 200 was considered a big music nut! Chances of experimenting different music artists or genres with these purchases - close to zero!

During the dial-up era, MP3s were freely available and FREE. During those days, I remember looking up sites to download the latest chart hits. Chances of experimenting different music artists or genres were higher but still close to zero. Why? The download speeds were slow and not much music were available except the latest hits!

In those years, we discovered music through friends or radios. (I am talking about the general public)

Now, with a combination of P2P technology widely used, and the speed of internet broadband high, we are now able to download music with much ease. No longer are we just downloading singles but venturing out to downloading albums. We are now able to experiment with different kinds of music by ourselves because of this convenience and the ease of locating different types of music.

This has also changed our music listening behaviour. We are now able to command a huge list of music on our PC and portable devices (iPod, mp3 player etc) literally at our finger tips. No longer do I need to select A CD, play it on a CD player! What a hassle! No shuffle feature, no mixture of songs in a “playlist”. With me, I have folders within my MP3 folder ordered by types not genre, language and artist. I also have a folder which consist of my most recent downloads. With a recent music collection in my laptop at over 10Gs, it is now difficult to plough into my collection to play my music. This results in an overused of the random and shuffle feature. So how will I listen to my music in the next 2 years?

Purely my own observation!