The future of the Music Industry

As we are probably well aware, the record industry is declining in the number of sales. With the ease and convenience of online downloading, sales are dropping quite quickly. So what does this mean for the future of music?"The labels fully understand that recorded music, streamed or downloaded, is going to be free in the future (we’ve argued this relentlessly). CD sales continue to decline by 20% per year, and the only thing that’ll stop that trend is when those sales reach zero. Nothing will replace those revenues."
"By 2013 (maybe as early as 2011) it’ll make sense for the labels to finally reorganize their business models around the reality created by the Internet and person to person file sharing services. No longer will the labels be tied to revenue limited to sales of master recordings - by then most or all artists will be under 360 music contracts that give the labels a cut of virtually every revenue stream artists can tap into - fan sites, concerts, merchandise, endorsement deals, and everything else."
"What this means for us music consumers - don’t expect much to change for the next few years. But sometime in the next decade we’ll see a real renaissance in how music is distributed and consumed. And who knows, a decade after that we may have all forgiven the music labels."

Radiohead releasing In Rainbows

Radiohead released it’s seventh album brilliantly on October 10, 2007. Music listeners could digitally download the CD from their website making whatever payment they wanted. Beneath the payment option it read only ‘it’s up to you.’ By the end of the day 1.2 million copies of the CD were downloaded.
“On the deliriously satisfying In Rainbows, Radiohead returns to a more straight-ahead (though subdued) rock sound. Much hubbub has been made about this record's innovative release. Radiohead allowed fans to pay what they wished to download fairly low-resolution tracks from the band's own website. Like so many innovations, it already seems funny both that it was such big news and that someone else of similar stature hadn't done it sooner. Some pundits were appalled that it took awhile to download the tracks if you tried to do it at the same time as thousands of other people, while others decried that the group was trying to kill the music industry (or save it). -Mike McGonigal

Changing Musicians Role

The musician’s role will change drastically with increasing music technology, they will need to adapt to be successful rather than relying or huge record labels. I remember reading (unaware of the exact source) the uncontrollable music piracy in Japan. Musicians must find new avenues of income like advertising for products or appearing on television shows along with continued live performances. Now with the limitless availability of digitally acquired and insurmountable music in people’s hands, consumers and music fans are not going to like getting their music any other way. Music artists who fail to utilize and embrace the Internet’s wide distribution are naive. The Internet’s publicity for music is grand, any musician unaccepting of that is not truly making music for the sake of being heard. I also think that big record companies will become less necessary, if musicians can acquire the technology and knowledge themselves I think they will take the opportunity and be more self sufficient. This will in turn shape the recording industry.

Gerd Leonhard on "ABUNDANCE - The Future of Music"

Music 2.0?

MusicGiants SoundVault

Listening to ipod earbuds is one thing, but “good living-room speakers, wall-rattling home theaters and stereos, or slick car audio systems” are indefinitely another. MusicGiants is planning to sell the SoundVault, a digital music player that would completely bypass connection to a PC by loading songs directly.” They aim to convince music consumers still cooing over their iPods,” that there is something better. Experts predict “master” song copies will be sold and later compressed to fit any smaller version of music player. Digital music if it hasn’t already will be networked extensively throughout homes.

Burrows, Peter. “Is this Digital Music’s Future?” Business Week. 2 August 2005. 11 June 2009. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2005/tc2005062_3663_PG2_tc024.htm

Craving Quality

Currently we are content with music in its small compressed MP3’s, but eventually people will begin craving better quality and higher fidelity. Most MP3’s that people are currently listening to are so highly compressed, ”stripped of millions of digital bits that leave them with about one-tenth of the data found on a CD track.” A small inventive company called MusicGiants is soon to begin selling downloadable CD quality songs off of the internet. They will be more expensive and require more storage space but when listening devices become bigger than ipods and their small speaker hook ups, people will demand listening to better quality.

Burrows, Peter. “Is this Digital Music’s Future?” Business Week. 2 August 2005. 11 June 2009. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2005/tc2005062_3663_PG2_tc024.htm

Cordless Music Experience

I predict that music will eventually become entirely cordless. Instruments, speakers and microphones will soon just have all sounds transmitted void of cords. Headphones for portable music players will soon become closer to Bluetooth devices. Ipods and portable music players could someday completely be compacted to the size of a Bluetooth.

Music's Inevitable future

David Bowie said that “music itself is going to become like running water or electricity….it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what is going to happen.” After doing the last project on Climate Change, running water and electricity may not be so inevitable, so I have re-arranged the quote. Music itself is like change, it is indefinitely what is going to happen with new technology. I find it nearly impossible to predict the future of music in 10 years, 20 and 30 years. It is assumed society will continue to be increasingly reliant on technology, craving certain advances and eventually wanting to revert back to certain quality.

CMX Music Downloads: It's Flaws and Future

It was a bigger deal a few years ago: stick a popular music CD in your computer and you'd be greeted by a Flash application containing some music videos and maybe some desktop wallpapers. To some, it was a bonus to having a CD.
Mostly though, the applications were a giant pain in the seating equipment, forcing music fans everywhere to learn what the hell "disable auto-run" meant. Now, imagine that, only with all your songs contained in the same application as well. From what we understand, this is the crux of a new proposal from the think-tanks at the world's largest four record labels.
Known internally as CMX, it will be a music-distribution format--essentially a single download containing all album tracks, the artwork, liner notes, some music videos and whatever else they've got lying around the office--that the labels hope will rekindle the love of buying entire albums, rather than picking the four good songs from whatever A-lister's latest release.
The perks of established artistsAs a standalone product, CMX could suffer a tragic fate reserved solely for products launched on the back of these very A-listers. In fact, the Times even outs U2 as a possible beneficiary of the new medium, whose next album could spearhead a CMX "soft launch."
Good job, because it'll need the money U2 has behind them to enlist the developer, designer, coder, and distributor elite to produce and peddle the unusual, paid-for downloads fans are going to be encouraged to want. But that's only one part of the potential problem.
The perks of the value-adding techniqueAnother clot in the CMX bloodstream could be agonizing: "Where are my MP3s?" and related concerns. It'll be the top item on any sales site's FAQ list, right after "What is CMX?" and "Why don't you just release a DVD?"
So let's put it in black and white right now: if you don't get standalone, DRM-free MP3s as part of your CMX download, it is absolutely, entirely and completely doomed.
Offer a CMX download for free if a customer buys all the album tracks, and then perhaps you're onto something. But woe betide you if you charge extra--your customer already paid extra by buying the whole album, and in your collective position chaps, that's really something.
The perks of knowing your audience"Think about the importance of the gift market for albums," a spokesperson for the Entertainment Retailers Association told the Times. "Online it's stripped down to the bare music, and there's a lot more to an album than that."
There's a word missing in his or her statement. Can you guess what it is?
It's "physical," and it should've come right before "album." "There's a lot more to a physical album than that." But online, there are different advantages: instant (and satisfying) ownership of an album, and quality embedded artwork to look at on your MP3 player or iPhone. It may seem superficial, but it's what matters to the people who are paying for downloads. Other paying customers do buy a physical CD.
What might happenClaims that the record labels are "dinosaurs" that "just don't get it" and "deserve to fail" are daft in some respects. They're an old business trying to stay afloat. The problem--and the reason we love to hate them--is that they've been going about it backward for years. And it's finally coming back to cripple them, like a man suddenly finding himself undergoing heart surgery after decades of enjoying nothing but gravy-soaked pies and champagne.
This is what will probably happen: CMX will launch with a few massive acts behind it, and the downloads will look stunning, but choice will be limited to your most A-list of A-listers. You'll pay more, and they won't work on an iPod. Apple will do its own proprietary version that will, and that's a story for another day (or now, if your're impatient).
The whole thing will fall flat on its face, because only hard-core fans will pay. Everyone else will ignore this thing that doesn't work on their iPod, won't play on their Walkman, and can't be burned to a CD for listening in the car.
What should happenCMX will be an open format with its own standards, and any label or band can produce a CMX version of an album. They'll be offered by sites such as Amazon MP3, 7digital, and Play.com when, and only when, you buy a full album download. That way, the labels get their album sales, the fans get their MP3s and music-video-ringtone-package-thing as a bonus.
But really, this is only a bandage over a still-bleeding ax wound: the biggest flaw with full album downloads is that, by and large, they cost the same as a physical CD, so why bother? Just lowering the cost will do far more for sales than bundling these bonuses for the hard-core fans.
Anyway, your thoughts are extremely welcome and will find a cozy home in the comments section below. CMX--or whatever it launches as--will quietly arrive later this year, almost certainly costing more than a CD album from Amazon.

Works Cited: Lanxon, Nate. "CMX downloads:its flaws and future."news.cnet.com. 11 Aug. 2009. 13 Aug. 2009<http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10307467-1.html>.

Music Taxes Will Kill Music Innovation

Forcing people to buy music whether they want to or not is not a solution to this problem. The incentives created by such a system are perverse - guaranteed revenue and guaranteed profits will remove any incentive to innovate and serve niche markets. It will be the death of music.
Music industry revenues will be a set size, regardless of the quality or type of music they release. Incentives to innovate will evaporate. There will only be competition for market share, with no attempt to build the size of market or serve less-popular niches. Forget labels building new brands and encouraging early artists to succeed - they’ll bleed existing big names for all they are worth and work hard to keep anything new - labels, artists, and songwriters - out of the market. New entrants just means more competition for a static amount of money. Collusion by existing players will run rampant. Soon labels will complain that revenues aren’t high enough to sustain their businesses, and demand a higher tax. It will go up, but it will never go down.Asking the government to prop up a dying industry is always (always) a bad idea. In this case, it is a monumentally stupid, dangerous, and bad idea.

Works Cited: Arrington, Michael. "The Music Industry's Last Stand Will Be A Music Tax." www. techcrunch.com. 10 Jan. 2008. 12 Aug. 2009<http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/10/the-music-industrys-last-stand-will-be-a-music-tax/>

Where is File Sharing leading the Music Industry?

It is becoming more and more difficult for the music industry to ignore the basic economics of their industry: unenforceable property rights (you can’t sue everyone) and zero marginal production costs (file sharing is ridiculously easy). All the big labels have now given up on DRM. They haven’t yet given up on trying to charge for their music, but it’s becoming more and more clear that as long as there is a free alternative (file sharing), the price of music will have to fall towards free. You can disagree as to whether it’s “fair” that the price of recorded music will be zero or near zero, but you can’t disagree that it might happen.

Works Cited:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/10/the-music-industrys-last-stand-will-be-a-music-tax/

iPod future

As we are all aware, the iPod is the music phenomenon of our decade if not our century. But will it continue to dominate the world of portable music? Recent studies "suggests that people are making the jump from older iPods to newer models, a trend backed up by our recent iPod survey. The iPod Classic (defined as any generation of video-playing iPod) is the day-to-day music player for 31 percent of respondents. Fifty-two percent of all respondents have owned one or two iPods, and 34 percent bought their first model in 2003 or 2004.

As chips continue to get smaller, more powerful, and cheaper, it stands to reason that Apple could beef up the other versions of the iPod, the Shuffle and the Nano, with additional capabilities and features. Certainly, it will be able to keep increasing the amount of storage available on each device, the single largest request of MP3 player shoppers who responded to our poll. Wi-Fi capability was the second-most desired trait in a future iPod."

"Also, basic mobile phones are growing more and more capable of handling simple music playback, said Ross Rubin, an analyst with The NPD Group. And at some point, the ability of manufacturers to add more and more capacity will outpace the growth of the average individual's personal music library, he said.

The iPhone and the iPod Touch are the kind of innovative high-margin products that Apple likes to have. In a crowded marketplace, you need to find some way to differentiate yourself, and Apple has traditionally focused on making high-end products with great design that are easy to use."

So the future of Apple and the iPod is uncertain as is the future of anything, but as of now, these products are still on the top of everyone's list and looks as though they can keep up with the competition.

Other Music Technologies

We think of music as instruments and singing put together to make a song. But there are other types of music technologies that are advancing. We are seeing surround sound systems more frequently, and this is a relatively new advancement but one that is becoming quite popular and desirable. This is a video about predictions of this new phenomenon in the world of sound. It is rather long but even the first few minutes have you hooked. Also, it does contain some explicit language so viewers watch with discretion. Click on FSOL-Stereosucks

http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=ZhM&q=future%20music%20technology&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv#

what does the future of music have in store?

"What is the future of music? Has it become a business of lamentations and lawsuits against electronic sharing, foretelling the end of recorded media as we know it? Or is there something much more interesting happening here that offers exciting new opportunities?"

This is a question that I am sure many have thought about. It is hard to make predictions about the evolution of music technology now into 10, 30, or 50 years from now. Many of the predictions that were made in the past about technology today sounded far fetched but have come true.

"But isn't piracy destroying the industry? "There are two forms that are currently labeled piracy," says Kusek. "You have the wholesale replication of CDs and DVDs. To me, that's counterfeit products and is obviously not to be tolerated. It is certainly evil and criminal, and bad for business."

"But the other kind of behavior that is labeled as piracy -- downloading files and trading files with your friends -- I'm not sure that I would put that in the same camp. Often there is no profit margin, there's no distribution network, other than yourself and a handful of people that you know. Generally, you are not selling files to your friends."

"I don't think that file sharing and downloading of music is going to stop," says Kusek, "until there is something easier, and better, and cheaper, and more appealing. So as I argue in the book, why not embrace that behavior, license and tax it, and somehow derive money from it? Make it easier to find music, improve the quality of the files, and make it easier to record, instead of trying to fight it. It seems a completely losing battle; People are never going to stop doing it as long as the price of CDs is too high. So why not go with the flow and embrace it?"

'So the future of music may be bright after all. "I would really encourage the manufacturers to try to develop new formats," says Kusek. "I think that is the only way they are going to be able to survive. DVDs will sell for quite a while, but they are going to run into the same issues. New formats are the key, and trying to really understand people's behavior shifts. This Internet, digital networks, cell phone, wireless thing is not going to stop. It's just going to grow and get more pervasive. I don't think that it has to be an either/or choice, if the formats are right, and they are in the middle, and are married to that network. In one form or another, I think there is lots of potential."'

Possible Future Scenario

<-(Music Stations in a Starbucks in Seattle)

You're sitting at Starbucks and a friend who just swiped his credit card into the store's music kiosk to download a brand-new mixtape onto his MP3 player tells you about a rare My Chemical Romance track he heard last night, which you proceed to download with a few clicks on your cell phone.



Or maybe you discover a hot new underground MC and pay $20 to join his fan club, which allows you to rhyme alongside his "Second Life" avatar whenever you want, suggest songs for him to play at an upcoming show in your town, or maybe even contribute some ideas to the lyrics he can add to a song he's writing with a group of fellow fan-club members.



Such scenarios are right around the corner. In this rapidly evolving technological world, the music industry is seemingly willing to try anything to find new ways to stop the fiscal hemorrhage caused by downloading.



And we mean anything. We talked with label executives, managers, booking agents, artists and future forecasters about what the next big revolutions in music might be (not all of them are quoted in this story). And the one thing almost everyone agreed upon is that you will be able to consume music just about anywhere and any way you want.



They talked about everything from "personal subscriptions" to your favorite artists that will give you unprecedented access to them, to custom MP3 player mixes you'll be able to buy with a quick credit card swipe at the local coffee shop. Some envision virtual concerts in "Second Life," complete with virtual merch, as well as a long-hyped celestial jukebox that could beam virtually any song ever recorded directly to your MP3 player.



A few of the changes they predicted are already on the way, like Apple's recent deal with EMI Music to sell digital-rights-management-free songs at a premium (see "iTunes, Unrestricted: Apple, EMI Agree To Drop Digital Rights Management"), which some think could lead to other major labels jumping aboard that wagon. Add that to the buzz that's been building since Apple's legal settlement earlier this year with the Beatles' Apple Corps that could pave the way for cheap, pre-loaded iPods containing an artist's entire catalog or song selections, to be sold at airports, bus depots or even at a concert.



Whether our experts think that cell phones are the new iPods or concerts can be attended without leaving your home, music will only become more portable, customizable and bite-sized in the next few years.



Works Cited: Kaufman, Gil. “The Future of Music.” www.mtv.com. 16 May 2007. 4 Aug. 2009.

What Will Become of the Radio?

“Radio is a powerful medium. It's not dead but ... it has lost its soul. Radio is a companion. It's a very personal medium, and they've taken the personal aspect out of it."
"The media today does not seek truth, it seeks success," say Harrison of Talkers. "It seeks victory. Nobody is hired to do a talk show because they are going to save the world or educate people or benefit humanity. Radio historically has been a street medium - a mass medium of popular culture. That's what radio is. Radio is not dead. It just doesn't have much of a future, because of monumental changes that are unfolding as we speak. Radio in the future will be very street, it will just be less magical."
"What I call mono-media," he says, "that is to say, radio, television, newspapers, film - all of these different institutions of the 20th century - will no longer exist on separate venues. Looking at McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' - the venue of radio being an appliance that has AM and FM, the venue of TV that is an appliance, the venue of film that you watch on a disk or you go to a movie theater, the venue of a book that you put on a shelf and hold in your hand, a magazine on the stand - these venues will no longer exist as entities separate from each other. Thus, the culture of creating programming for them will become different because culture is so impacted by the venue, meaning, the medium is the message. When the medium changes, so will the message. So will the culture. And the medium now is a medium that combines all of those hitherto separate concepts. The idea of a radio station coming in on an appliance that is specific to radio, that is an audio-only medium, the theater of the mind, if you will, is, in fact, going to be obsolete. This is happening right before our eyes, and it is accelerating so quickly. Will there still be radio stations on AM and FM in five years? Yes. But they will seem weaker and far less important than they do today.
"Your typical radio station will become a production company as opposed to a broadcast facility. Everybody will be a production company."
Harrison's prophecy is borne out in a conversation I have with Charles Kireker, the new owner of Air America.
"It's definitely a new frontier situation, a listener, a viewer, a reader, they are all doubling back on each other with all the new technologies ... PDA, the cell phone, Internet and so forth."
I asked an old-fashioned question, using my limited vocabulary. "What made you decide to buy a radio network?"
"We're a media company," he says. "We're not a radio company."
Whether it is called a media company or radio company, will the radio still be around in say 40 years?

Works Cited: “The Future of Radio.” www.hear2.com. 29 Sept. 2008. 4 Aug. 2009 <>.

Blue-Ray Discs Replacing CD's?

Neil Young’s ‘Archives’ Shows the potential of new formats. New formats have driven the music industry forever. That and new music. While Blu-ray may not be the “next big thing”, it shows what can be done with more storage and bandwidth. The evolution of music formats will determine the path for the future. MP3 was the last major music format and the industry missed monetizing it entirely.
“Anything is possible in the Blu-ray disc edition of “Neil Young: Archives, Vol. 1 (1963-1972),” the most technologically advanced mega-boxed set in rock ‘n’ roll history, arriving with a hefty thump on store shelves Tuesday.Young, a militant guardian of the analog waveform (notably, the vinyl LP) who dismissed the CD era as sonic sludge, has found purist’s heaven in a new digital format, Blu-ray, that’s still trying to push the consumer acceptance needle past indifference.
How big is the climb? Young has used “ice picks” to describe the sound of early CD. Where a vinyl LP is a continuous analog waveform, a CD is a digital approximation. The CD takes 44,100 numerical samples each second, each sample in 16-bit chunks. At 22 kilohertz, the theoretical high-frequency limit of human hearing, that 44.1-kilohertz sampling rate produces as few as two samples. It’s what makes the higher frequencies fatiguing, even grating, to some ears.
In recent years, DVD-Audio pushed recorded digital music to 24 bits and 96,000 samples per second. Now, Blu-ray goes even further with music, like “Archives,” at 24/192,000 or, as it’s more widely known, 24/192. With more digital information comes a more lifelike representation of the original source. An elaborate timeline, a horizontal scroll, lays out Young’s career amid world events and includes access to supplemental music, vintage concert video and future BD-Live downloads.
The music is also cataloged in a virtual file cabinet that stores each song in a folder with album art, recording date, credits and handwritten lyrics. As the music plays, a vintage Dual cassette deck, Ampex reel-to-reel player or KLH turntable might be the video backdrop, a lit cigarette in an ashtray next to a coffee cup the ambience.”
So will Blu-ray discs not only be for movies but music as well? What will be next?

Works Cited: “The Potential of New Music Formats.” www.futureofmusicbook.com. 2 June 2009. 4 Aug. 2009 <>.

Future Music

The music industry of today looks nothing like it did 20 years ago. There are tons of reasons, most of them having to do with digital technology. From phonographs to records to iPods; not only is music changing but so it how it is distributed. It’s hard to imagine what music will be like twenty years from now. Will we be listening to music through a chip that is placed behind the ear? Or will the new digital technology completely crash and society will have to use the methods of music distribution from the past.