The Music Industry’s future was pre-determined 300 years ago.

 

Louis XIV and his ultimate beheading resulting from the Revolution has curious parallels to today’s file sharing activity and the P2Pvolution.

 

The peasants rose in revolt against the high taxes and lack of bread.

(And maybe because the early Ipods were self powered, but not very portable.)

The phonautograph was the earliest known invention of a sound transcription device. (20 years before Edison) It was invented by Frenchman Édouard-Léon
Scott de Martinville and patented on March 25, 1857.

The French Revolution peasant uprising is to me reminiscent of the milleniumites activities today.

I can hear the chant as they walk past my home from school: "Down with the Music Industry, long live Kazaa……"

 

We all know what happened to the French revolution. It failed. But the peasants learnt from their failure and their Russian cousins were successful just a couple of hundred years later by declaring a “free” (United Soviet Socialist Republic) proletariat nation.

 

EDonkey arose out of the ashes of the guillotined Kazaa and sprouted several offspring processes.

Whether the bourgeois Music Industry likes it or not, we have built a proletariat world with music to sooth the savage beast.

And we all know, with savage beasts, occasionally one gets taken and torn to shreds.

It reminds me of the quote from the Life of Brian “Oooooo did you see that ? Another one of those Christians just got eaten by that Lion (MGM).”

 

Keep the faith, boys and girls – the second coming is nigh……

And the Antichrist (RIAA) will be cleansed from the earth with a flood of angels (Iphones, Imoko) and a few others. But before you rejoice, I need to tell you that the peasants' revolt ultimately failed because when they stormed the bastions of the French aristocracy, they found that the cupboards were quickly emptied and with no-one to replenish them (all the peasants were busy having a revolution) hunger, despondency and plague devastated the nation.

 

We need to buy some music or there will be no reason for anyone  to keep writing it.

At least I'm doing my patriotic duty. I have a secret weapon that will continue to ensure my supply of music for many years to come: Aunty Carol. And I know I can depend on Aunty Carol to buy those CD’s for everyone in the family every Christmas for many years to come.

 

I hope that she doesn’t go insane when the CD’s are pulled of the shelves because digital music sales have taken over.

What’s that? You will never pay for music, and nobody you know will either ?

I think the die hards are wrong. We will very soon see charging models based on free music and network costs only to pay for the content on your phone.

 

Source: ARIA, RIAA, Tony Blair's Stats, BEA.

 

Please note the gradual rise between vinyl and casettes followed by the meteoric rise of the CD’s and the almost vertical rise of the digital media. Probably because of Ipod and MP3 player sales.

 

 

Worldwide Ipod Sales

 

(Excluding Ipods)

 

According to Forrester Researches Report last year entitled ‘End of Music Industry as We Know It’

 

“Digital music sales will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23% over the next five years, reaching $4.8 billion in revenue by 2012, but will fail to make up for the continuing steady decline in CD sales, Forrester said. In 2012, CD sales will be reduced to just $3.8 billion, according to its forecast.”

 

I have bad news for Forrester – We’re there already. Its all in the way you do the numbers.

Wholesale or retail ? Corrections for distribution allowance  or no corrections.

 

What is a distribution allowance?

Basically the cost of shipping an $ 0.87 cent CD to the retail store (About $3.20) including warehousing, logistics management, shipping, freight forwarding, demurrage, customs, more freight, more warehousing, couriers and retailer handling costs.

 

In other words, the music industry and Itunes might try to convince you that a music track is worth $4.99. But you don’t need to go to university for seven years to calculate that obviously its not. That was the price of a single (one track) CD in 2002.

My guess is that we will pay for music on the basis of minutes.

And it is you the consumer that will set the price.

 

That “Send” button, if judiciously used, will force the different resellers to offer tiered pricing depending on the popularity of the calalogue item. Exactly the same way that the Movie Industry bundles two old movies with a new one on a single DVD for five bucks.

 

The more popular tracks will initially be $ 0.90 cents reducing over time as they age in the catalogue.

 

It’s still free, you just pay a different way. Instead of paying for DSL bandwidth, you pay AT&T/Vodaphone/Optus GPRS/WAP or minutes for downloading your chosen music.

 

And why will people do it? Because it works. Because it’s the EASY choice.

Just like today, File sharing is the easy choice.

So for the Music Industry – built on the premise that “But we have to ship SOMETHING…..!” there will be some changes; some accountants will move in over the next couple of years and whole lotta guys ‘n gals will be leaving their distribution offices.

 

But for the geeks and the code writers, I see a bright future in the Music Business.

You see there will need to be a music differentiator. HUH ?

 

Well, the Music Industry will finally realize that digital is profitable.

So they will have to cut different quality recordings – 56 Kb 128 Kb, 192 Kb, 256 Kb and the really Rolls Royce stuff at 320 Kb. (In case you missed it – the higher quality files take longer to download so cost more minutes…..)

 

Is that it? Is that all they will do?

 

No… they will probably start to clean up the P2P file base after all there’s real  money in them thar shared files..

 

After all – the shareholders of the music companies will eventually work out that digital music sales are providing them with enormous returns on their investments and it was all made possible by Napster popularity suggesting a portable hardware device that Apple stole (err, borrowed) the Ipod)

 

Now they will need some router jockeys to move their listings up the search engines – and not necessarily Google – think: hum that tune - Gracenote. The technical job description is SEO but – here’s the real twist. For the artificially intelligent search engine optimization programs of the future that will run on your phone making sure that only songs that you are likely to like will be offered to you….. – they will need access to your computer music library. You know, the one that goes :       /program files/Kazaa/my shared folder/

 

Extras.

Attached is an Excel spreadsheet with a table comparing the features of 3 top selling phones in 2008 and a tab of links for further analysis.

Iphonecompare.xls

 References: http://www.gracenote.com/business_solutions/mobileMusic/