Brave New World
It’s easy to forget that it was only about a hundred and thirty years ago that Edison first recorded “Mary Had a Little Lamb” onto a tinfoil cylinder phonograph. As it turns out, this one technical achievement changed everything about the way music would be created and consumed from thenceforward. Once sound could be captured, it could be bottled up and sold which allowed music to morph from a service into a product. But now, technology is bringing things full circle and music is becoming a service again.
In the near future, I predict that there will be no restrictions to sharing music, no pay-per-song iTunes nonsense – we’ll just take what we want and listen to as much as we like. Small, barely noticeable fees will be surreptitiously tacked onto our internet bills and worked into the price of iPods and profit generating google-type sidebar ads will adorn the web pages where we go to find our otherwise free music. These websites will help us sort through the glut of content (the only real downside to the new model) by making personal recommendations based not just on “people who downloaded X, also downloaded Y” but based on analysis of the musical elements that run across genres like texture, meter, form, timbre and harmony - perhaps someday also incorporating studies of human perception which will explain exactly how and why people appreciate music on a neurological level.
I’m excited about the prospect of these developments on two personal levels. The first is as a consumer of hard-to-find small label original music. Since this genre doesn’t always work its way onto Soulseek or Limewire , the peer-to-peer sharing thing doesn’t help me out much. While everyone else gets their music for free, I’m still stuck paying $15 per CD and this, combined with wanting to both pay my rent and buy $6 beers on the weekends, holds me back from consuming large amounts of music.
The second level is as a musician. With minimal distribution and promotion costs, a self-released album can now reach millions of people and as music fees get bundled with internet service providers, total industry earnings will grow proportionally with the number of people online. More intriguing is that as consumers gain greater control of finding exactly what they want, it will become harder for a big corporation to tell them what to like, which is great news for musicians who care about creative integrity.
In the culinary world, we’ve seen that a wider availability of gourmet food products has spurred recent trends like local, organic, and hand-crafted and the same thing is happening in music. Despite falling record sales among major labels, small independent labels have grown to command a higher and higher share of the market. A growing cultural block of foodies now steer clear of fast food and chain restaurants and their musical counterparts share that same need to portray a more sophisticated, socially conscious palate. Mass-produced music is gradually becoming taboo. Anyone else craving a nice, grass-fed Indie band?
