The Business of Wine and Music

Check out the latest offering from Crushpad, a San Francisco-based company that lets people create their own barrels of wine. It’s called TinyBottles: 50ml pours of wines that can be purchased for as little as 10% of a full bottle. Here’s the reasoning behind this new wine sampler size. From the Crushpad newsletter:

“In our ruminations on the future of online wine, we started thinking about similar “long tail” industries and how the internet has impacted them.  To me, music is probably the closest to wine – zillions of products, subjective evaluation criteria, and historically controlled by a small number of distributors.  While wine and music started on the internet about the same time, the music industry has completely transformed while wine is just about the same.  There are several reasons for this (and I’m happy to chat about them), but certainly one reason is that, online, consumers are able to listen to songs before they buy them.