The future of music. It’s the network, stupid.
It occurred to me that in the future the music industry could very well look like the webblog network. Bands will publish their music on their websites in the same way that bloggers publish their words and consumers will download it just as they read blogs today. Bands will become popular in the same ways that blogs become popular- through linking and word-of-mouth. The middle-men of the record companies and music stores will be cut out completely. I think this is inevitable.
When you break down the cost that a consumer pays for a CD you find that very little goes to the artist and very little goes to the cost of physically producing the product. The bulk of the cost goes to paying for the network on which the music is distributed from the artist to the consumer i.e. the so-called ‘music industry’. They provide us with two crucial services: they make us aware of particular artists and they provide the means for us to access those artists.
But now digital storage and the Internet have popped out of Pandora’s box to provide a cheaper and more efficient alternative to the music industry network. The traditional network that we know and loathe has begun its inevitable decline and will soon be replaced completely by an Internet-based network. The only thing holding it back is the lack of widespread availability of broadband. When this comes all hell (or heaven) will break loose.
The most progressive companies of the old era have reluctantly embraced the Internet with various payment models to allow consumers to download music legally. And although this seems to hold some promise it really is just postponing the day of reckoning. The Internet has already reduced the monetary value of text-based content to zero(1) and something similiar will happen with music once it becomes less time-consuming to download.
Technological advances have reduced the cost of producing and distributing music to the point where almost anyone can do it. In the future there will be no money to be made directly from producing and distributing music. This won’t affect the welfare of artists that much. The most of them make very little from this process as it stands, relying instead on live performances and merchandising to make a living.
The simple fact is that we don’t need the big record companies anymore. Good riddance to them. They have ill-served both the artist and the consumer.
Footnote:
(1) Shirky: “The price of content has fallen and it cannot get up.”
Mark Waters marked time at 7:36 pm on November 13th, 2003 .
