The Future of Music..

What is the future of the music industry? A big question these days as the CD is dead, iTunes is flourishing, yet free music is still widely available all over the web. Charging .99 cents for a song is a great concept but will only last so long. Any type of digital recording posted on the internet will eventually have to be free because of the fact that it is so easily transferable. Bandwidth is only going to get more capable in the future to allow anyone to send whatever size file through the system whether it be by email, SMS, or other means. Once a song is posted online, its out there for the taking. Can the industry be regulated to prevent this? Highly unlikely but they still are trying!
So what does this mean for the musicians? Are they destined to receive no reward for their work? Definitely not. If you look at the music industry you will find that most money for musicians is made from live performances. Musicians play a show at a bar / club / or venue of some sort and take a cut of the house tab for bringing in the crowd. The better the musician, the bigger the crowd and the more money both parties make. When the musicians get big enough, they can tour and eventually sell out the big venues and make the big bucks.
So how does a musician get ‘big’? Well thats where the internet comes back in. If the music is good enough, and there is a lot of incredible music out there just waiting to be heard, then the internet is just the ticket for musicians to promote themselves. Thats basically what labels are these days anyway, large promotional firms trying to get the word out. Most musicians have already realized this fact and post their songs and videos online in places like MySpace and YouTube. You may not know this but many labels have established their own MySpace teams to search through the massive amount of content to find the best!
There in lies the problem though…there is so much out there that its difficult to filter through it all. You would need a huge amount of people filtering through all the new music and showing other users what they happen to like. Eventually, the good stuff would always surface at the top! Does a solution like this exist? Not yet but it could.
There is another form of data on the web that is unlimited, readily available, and needed to be filtered. Its written work - articles, news stories, blogs, etc. There is an overwhelmingly amount of written documents on the web these days and there is no way to filter through them all yourself. Thats why websites like Digg and Delicio.us have become so popular. Lets take Digg for example. If you see an article on the web that you like, you may see a small icon below it allowing you to “Digg” that article. Once selected, assuming you have a Digg account, the article is recorded as being ‘dugg’ and placed in your Digg account. Once enough people have ‘dugg’ an article then a link to it can be placed on Digg’s homepage where it will immediately generate a large amount of traffic to the original site.
So why can’t we do the same thing for new music? The problem would be to get the small “I like this song” icon below any song you come across on the internet but it wouldn’t be impossible. A few companies are already positioned to do this fairly easily including MySpace, Digg, or Yahoo Buzz. Musicians could place this icon below their free uploaded songs wherever they are posted online, be it MySpace, StartMySong, or their own personal website. Then when a listener comes across the new song they can select the icon to show they like it. The song is placed in their Music list and the most selected songs eventually filter to the top.
Whatever the final medium is it would be nice if it would easily sync with your iTunes. So now you have one medium where anyone can go to find the world-filtered best new music out there. All the music is free to hear and download with links back to the artists MySpace or personnal website they’ve set up. Once artists have built a large enough promotional base through the internet and local venues, the next step is to start the tour.