My vision of the Future of the Music Industry

Downloading will definitely take over the music industry. However not in the way it is developing now. I think the whole pay per track and DRM is going to die. I have some experience with DRM and I simply hate it. I think it’s good that musicians get there share but not this way. The future of downloading will be something like Itunes but you won’t need to download the music, you just pay for a subcription to stream the music. You'll only get access the music and you won't need to download it to your harddrive. This will be around 15 euro per month. This maybe seem a low price, cause you get so access to so many kinds of music. But imagine if 3 million people in The Netherlands will use this. That will be 3.000.000 * 15= 45.000.000 million a month! And if the musicians get there share of that 45 million a month. I don’t think you are going to hear them complain. If the user wants to use the music on his/her Ipod or maybe on an other mp3 player. The user needs a gold or premium membership this will cost 20 euro a month. The DRM system won’t be applied to this product. This way, a whole family can take advantage of the music supplied from this system.

I also think in the future the cdshops will be replaced by mp3 shops. Like the ones at Schiphol (airport in Amsterdam). If a new track is published by DJ Tiesto and you are wandering around in Amsterdam you just walk in the shop and buy the track (just like singles), and upload it to your MP3 player. This is my vision of the Music industry in 5-15 years. I think if people can easily download tracks (No difficulties with creditcards or bankaccounts) they eventually will pay for music. I don’t think the P2P programs will die, simply because it is free. But if you give people the opportunity to support their favourite musicians and if you can provide them to get access to (all) the music in the world they will pay for it. And if you don’t bother them with crap like DRM they eventually step over to legal downloads