Gerard Leonhard has seen the future of music business - and it's incredibly dull. In this book The Future of Music for the Digital Revolution, co-authored by Dave Kusek, he predicts that music will be consumed exactly like water or any other household utility.
For a monthly subscription fee of, say, $5, anyone will be able to tap into the 'celestial jukebox', a continuously updated collection that spans the history of recorded music. And given the increasing ubiquity if the Internet, the music will flow easily ti listeners, via computer, TV sets, mobile phones and other devices not yet invented. Artists, in turn, will be paid using a subscription pool based on 'pro rata, second' usage. Free from the constraints of having to manufacture and distribute plastic discs, any musician with laptop can release whatever, whenever. This will drive musicians to engage listeners - in terms of both price and quality - as never before. In the process, music will become more of a service and less of a product.
There are signs that the brave new world of subscription music is not that far off. A recent survey found interest in subscription services highest among consumers in the all-important 18-24 age group and those aficionados who spend large sums of money on music each year.
Musician themselves are also adapting to a service model. The key is to build online communities of fans who feel engaged in the creative process, giving 'users' an unprecedented degree of participation in music they listen to. Some famous artists, such as Metallica, Prince and David Bowie, maintain online collections of live concert downloads, exclusive digital-only track, videos, online journals and interactive forums where like-minded fans can meet.
Young listeners, it seems, are increasingly unimpressed with the album format - however cleverly the songs are arranged and attractively designed the cover art is. The album is 'traditional not inevitable' according to William Higham of the Nexi Big Thing, a London-based youth trend consultancy. The next generation of music fans ids growing up in a 'compilation culture', he says, pointing out that the single-track purchases make up a much larger percentage of digital music sales than singles do for 'offline' music purchases.
