The future of recorded music

Inspiration has struck, and so once more I will endeavor to speculate about better business models that are probably either already being done by someone else, or in actual fact, not an improvement at all. What are blogs for, after all?

In any case, today I'm looking at music.

I think that the entire model needs to be flipped. Allow me to explain: studios bitch and moan because they feel like they're losing money to the internet. My sense of it is, more and more unknown bands are going to want to allow free and easy access to their music through the web, because that gives them the potential for much larger-scope exposure and it is relatively cheap to proliferate. Not to mention the fact that putting your stuff online doesn't require you to tether yourself to some record label that'll be constantly looking over your shoulder.

So even putting the illegal filesharing aside, the legitimate face of internet music-trading is probably not going to be favorable to the old approach.

I think that there is real money to be made by selling to artists, rather than focusing on the listeners. Most of our country's musicians aren't coming from poverty-striken households; if you could set up some kind of "McStudio", a small, unimposing little place where people could record their music for relatively cheap prices depending on the quality recording they're looking to get...well, I think that it's an avenue that deserves more exploration.

My instinct is that people are going to end up being able to get most of their music for free and through legal means. The era of the album is coming to an end--a statement which I think at this point isn't too controversial.

What comes next I believe will be a combination of the McStudio I mentioned, and companies that dedicate themselves to financing live concerts. Musicians themselves will make money not from selling their music, but from playing live, and being paid to write soundtracks or talk on television shows or any number of profitable avenues. After all, a musician doesn't have to be famous for a movie producer/director to have heard them and desire to utilize their talent.

Your chances of making it with a band of any color are already pretty slim. So it isn't as though this arrangement would be horrible for musicians--it would just increase their opportunities to be heard. Which, in turn, increases name recognition and improves their chances of being noticed by someone who can offer them the opportunity to make music for a living.

This arrangement would also make it possible for people who love music but don't particularly want to pursue it as a career to be heard--and for those of us who love listening to music to hear people we might never have been able to, under the previous model.

All the big boys of media, the Record Labels, the Movie Studios, the Newsrooms--they're all tied to a gatekeeper system that just can't keep up with the times. It's always entertaining to take a moment and wonder what the landscape might look like, once they are gone.