It’s Future Week On Hypebot
"The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time." – Abraham Lincoln
Much has been written about the current state of the music business. But what does the future hold? What will Music 2.0 look like?
This week, just after the last major label dropped DRM and EMI appears poised to drop 2000 workers and slash its roster, Hypebot will be taking a look at the future of the music business.
You’ll here from business leaders and visionaries; from naysayers and optimists.
Most of all we want to hear from you.
WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF THE MUSIC BUSINESS?
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The bandwidth providers (Cable, DSL) have made billions providing easy access to pirated intellectual property. They haven’t paid one cent back to the owners. Granted, many of them tried to acquire or pass along proper licenses to their customers and were denied by the music companies in the late 90’s and early 00’s. That arrogance has and will cost a whole generation of leadership in the business their careers. But almost ten years later we are still in limbo and things are falling apart precipitously at this late hour.
The current state of things is killing the business. I’m afraid that like slowly dripping morphine into an IV, we’ve trained a whole generation of kids to demand free entertainment. Of at least feels-like-free entertainment. The notion of transaction has gone has gone the way of making long-distance calls through your post office or picking up bottles of milk from the stoop. It’s becoming counter-intuitive to shell out in order to listen to music. Music has become an add-on feature for our computers (and soon our set-top boxes and cell phones).
The next step is going to give us all a pain deep in the belly – we either need to sue the network providers to recover the stolen licensing fees retroactively, or craft some sort of blanket arrangement ubiquitously applied to all high-speed internet access. Whether or not that license is compulsory to all subscribers or has an opt-out clause remains to be seen, but THIS is the future of music as I see it.
A blanket arrangement for all high-speed internet access will cause an uproar. There are many people that work hard at keeping their computers clean of illegally downloaded music and other media. The most obvious is people who use their computer for a home business – they don’t want to be busted for illegal mp3’s when their computer is their source of income. There are also people that don’t steal music because they don’t like mainstream artists – they listen to Creative Commons licensed music. The future of music as I see it will include freely available music, with merchandise and paraphernalia becoming the real moneymakers.
In my mind, the future is that digital music will get better and freer. The best music, however, will be local artists playing in concerts and gigs.
I wish we can stop piracy in the future. Poor quality pirated copies does not give justice to the music they are copying.
Have you came across the Young Entrepreneur Society from the http://www.YoungEntrepreneurSociety.com? Great site for entrepreneurs.