16 years ago – 16 years ago! – I wrote a Ping about the future of digital music. My idea of having some sort of wireless network here was referring to a home wifi network and not LTE/3G/etc.
A wireless network between my portable music player, my car, and my computer would be nice. Sure, the network wouldn’t have much of a reach, but it wouldn’t need it. After an initial download, I could just drive or go wherever I want to, with the music I want, without bulky CDs.
And really, that’s about what I do today. I download the music I want to keep with me from Spotify, and stream the rest on demand. (Same goes for podcasts, but there’s no way I could have imagined podcasts in 2000.) (Probably.) While I’m happy to give myself a pat on the back for this almost-perfect prediction, I thought I’d instead take a little look at where digital music (and streaming, really) is today… and perhaps throw out a prediction for 16 years from now, in the year 2032 (oh my god).
What’s Awesome
Being able to access a large body of music for a flat monthly fee is, basically, amazing. It’s pretty much how the computer worked on the Enterprise: name a piece of music, and it plays. And there have been some excellent discovery methods along the way: Pandora, The Sentence (on the late Beats Music), Mog, Lala, Discover Weekly on Spotify. There’s the possibility that I can discover really great music from years ago – and really, have almost no sense of when the music was created! – and fall in love with it.
It’s also noteworthy that this all happens with little effort on multiple devices. At this moment I’m in a hotel room streaming music from my Mac to a Bluetooth speaker. Back when I wrote that Ping, the same thing would have required wires and CDs and the like. It’s way more convenient. It matches the way I’d like to think about music, ultimately: it’s simply available when I’d like it.
What is Not Awesome
So much.
First: the media collections of Spotify, Apple Music, et al are very large but they’re not comprehensive nor historical in any way; they’re driven by record labels. Yuck. There’s probably less direct business value in making more of a digital artifact (ie, the computer on the Enterprise), but I can’t even imagine the undertaking that would be required to digitize and make available as much recorded music as possible. But if we did have that resource at our fingertips, whoo man. “Play me the latest Taylor Swift song” is the Siri command today, but what if it was, “Can you play me the very first song that was recorded at this recording studio I’m standing in now?” or something equally educational.
Second: the business model sucks. Artists get paid terribly for streaming music. Pennies, basically. And while one can still buy MP3s (or CDs! or vinyl!), I don’t see that exclusively living on over time. Streaming for access is the right model for people, but it’s totally not the right model for artists. So, we start to see streaming services get exclusives: Tidal gets Prince, unless you want to buy his stuff, which you can at Amazon or iTunes or Google Play. I honestly don’t know how this gets easily fixed, although I hypothesized that streaming services could just up and become music labels. So really, streaming as we know it isn’t sustainable.
What about the future?
I’ll be in my mid-50s in the year 2032. 16 years is a long way away. So here is my wild-ass guess as to what happens.
From an experience perspective, there won’t be a significant conceptual change. While the tech will change (Bluetooth), the concept will not (just play music in this space/in my ears/on this device). The interface will definitely change: voice command, other inputs for sure. I can imagine sitting down at a table, and requesting a song into thin air – or having some sort of interface connected to me (!) that will assemble music based on my mood, what I’m doing, et al. It will be entirely seamless and just work.
(As an aside: I could also see some sort of automatically- and algorithmically- generated music being created on demand, maybe even as a way to avoid licensing fees and other crap. If today’s algorithms can determine what music I like, it’s not a far cry to imagine a computer making original music just for me. This is both fascinating and creepy.)
From a business perspective, I think we’ll see a similar mess, but with different players. It will be at a plumbing level, not at a service level, because the service will be transparent. So if Comcast is still providing internet to a majority of America, for instance, we’ll just pay them. I would imagine some music could be listened to for “free” (as a part of a subscription) and the rest on an on-demand basis. It’s my sincere hope that artists get a lion’s share of the money.
Now, if you set aside the business crap… that all sounds pretty amazing. We’ve come a long way in 16 years. I hope we come a long way in 16 more.
Posted in Technology
