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June 20, 2006 Digg | del.icio.us | Facebook | newsvine | Reddit
The Future of Music in a Digital Age
At the dawn of the online age, much was made of the egalitarian nature of the Internet, and in particular the idea that a small business could compete with a large corporation on equal footing. The hyperbole of these early statements may have lost their effect, but as time passes by, it is truly becoming easier for individuals and small organizations to successfully put their entrepreneurial skills to use. There is no better example of this than the ongoing changes taking place in the music industry.

Just this month, the website lala.com was launched. It is a forum for the peer-to-peer sale of CDs at bargain prices - often for as little as one dollar. It provides a great way for users to try something new by buying inexpensive used CDs from artists whose product might normally be too pricey to merit purchase on a whim. Lala even sends the artists a (small) portion of the money derived from the sale.

The recording industry doesn't like this business model one bit, but it will be hard pressed to force Lala to change, as many of the piracy issues that dogged napster have been addressed. The only truly outstanding issue is the sufficient compensation of artists.

As the technologies that support music consumption evolve, the music industry has had to evolve in step. But the advances in online music distribution that have been made over the past several years are sure to doom the big-business entities like Sony, Warner Music, etc., that have dominated the industry. These advances not only allow consumers to get choice music for less, but enable musicians to directly market themselves to their audience through the internet, thereby eliminating the need for support from a large corporation. Inexpensive digital tools that aid in the creation of sophisticated music only further diminishes any barriers that aspiring musicians confront.

Michael Nesmith, formerly of the 60s group The Monkees and now a multimedia seer who is credited for the seminal work that lead to the creation of MTV, sees a future where music will not be bounded by any format, and where musicians can use the social networking aspects of Web 2.0 to gain exposure. The only limiting factor is digital technology itself.

The collective effect of all these forces means that every day, our world is slowly moving closer to an era of widespread, mass entrepreneurship - an era in which only the most innovative corporations will be able to survive.