Something Important Is On The Horizon In The Music Business

I'm really getting tired of all these pundits who have a magic crystal ball.

Services can stay irrationally bad for a very long time. He's making ridiculous speculations about the spread of broadband over the entirety of the United States without even considering why the USA doesn't already have the kind of bandwidth Europe and Japan have.

Just because there's a potential for something to occur doesn't mean it will happen. Do you remember microformats? People like Jakob Nielsen had chubbies for that crap for years. It never materialized even though it kind of seems like a good idea.

Just because you throw money at people for a living doesn't mean you know what the fuck you're doing.

A grad student I know said he might work at his friends' very secret startup this summer. All he said is that it'll revolutionize the music business, it has the full support of several record companies, they got half a million from vc's just for the idea, and apparently radiohead is tangentially involved. I don't know if it's good or bad to have so many cooks in the kitchen before they've written a single line of code... but anyway, maybe it's something like fred's talking about.

"Everyone of my generation has had their favorite radio stations. Everyone of my kid’s generation will have their favorite web music services. There will be hundreds of them."

Why would there be hundreds of them? Unlike radio stations, web streaming services aren't limited to one song at a time. With network effects it seems a few services would dominate.

(Otherwise a good article. I'm typing this while listening to thefeelgood.com)

What's to stop Apple from adopting this business model? They already have the music database, and the streaming capability (for song previews).

I'm not commenting on the value of this business model, just that the article seems to imply that Apple will be left in the dust when the music industry goes this way.

"These services are coming to mobile phones, probably in the next year we’ll all be listening to pandora or last.fm in the gym on our phone instead of our limited library on our iPod."

This is already here. You can get XM Radio, MobiRadio on ATT and Sprint phones, and Pandora (on Sprint only so far), and there are many services (verizon has it's own streaming music).

The article amounts to saying one thing, streaming is getting popular.

But so what? People will still buy a house even if they can also rent it. Renting and owning will always coexist.

Also, if streaming gets popular, then a million people will be doing it. So, instead of putting up a mp3 for download, now people will use some streaming service to stream it. What do the label companies get? They have the same piracy and control issue like before.