The people at Morph blog asked me to post there for the next month or so. It’s a great site, the other contributors come from pretty wild backgrounds - the guys who made EPIC for example - so it’s a chance to stir up some discussion. This is cross-posted at Morph.

If you’re involved - labels, music-making, blogger, podcaster, DJ, technology, writer, whatever - I’m interested in your opinions on where technology is affecting music business.

I listened my way through many happy hours and stacks of records while I was at university. Every week, probably far more than I should have. Carefully avoiding the glare of shop assistants, who rumour had it held the best records from any imported vinyl shipment for their friends. If you didn’t dig out the music, you didn’t hear it.
Technology has democratised the process of finding music. Digital downloads, blogs, podcasts, netlabels, MP3 blogs, file-sharing, online communities, radio streams, message boards, messaging, ezines, moblogging, wireless. Probably many more, that neither my dictionary nor I have heard of yet. They make a space for people to give and receive comments on new, old, obscure and mainstream music, they even let you download it.
But that democracy has resulted in reserves of music, many times bigger than the huge record libraries at HMV or Tower Records here in Tokyo. Where 20 or 30 years ago, you could be abreast of popular music, it’s near impossible to keep track of it all these days. Not only that, but popular culture itself is changing as a result of technology.
The whole music business is slanted towards the old model of Participation via Purchase. That’s purchase of music, but the vestiges of the previous order, when sheet music ruled the industry, are still apparent in the huge power of music publishers. But the explosion of bloggers (text, multimedia), podcasts and streams, zines, indie labels and DJs (that’s right, not just limited to the tech domain), all seem to suggest that popular culture is moving towards participation by, well, Participation.
The choice of where to go next is a difficult problem, complicated and intertwined. It gets even more twisted when you get into the inertia-bound interests of major labels, so I’m going to stick to the coalface of independent labels and artists.
Should the music industry consider a new business model? It may seem crazy, but the Digital Rights Management battle being waged by the majors seems like patching up pressure-leaks on a boat that’s sinking because it’s overloaded. Not only that, it’s alienating their core customers, record buyers.
A new cottage industry? Independent acts, who rarely do more than break even on record sales, are offering free/cheap downloads, which ideally result in exposure and income from touring and merchandise sales. International networks of like-minded labels and artists could easily spring out of the indie network to give this kind of movement real clout.
As now, the biggest issue is how to filter the mass of music.
Change could be as simple as online jukeboxes, since broadband’s market penetration makes this kind of database quite feasible. Especially since GRID programming lets websites, servers and databases weave into one another. New music formats, like Weed, which allows free download and a number of free plays before the user is prompted to purchase the piece of music, also offer a way to structure music sharing online.
The explosion of podcasting in the past few months, since iTunes 4.9 simplified the process of downloading them, coupled with the iTunes shop and the iPod’s phemonenal success, Apple seems set to be a major player in the music business, but this kind of monopoly won’t be positive! Can smaller players work together to form serious competition, like British label Warp’s Bleep initiative?
MusicMusic Industry