“It wasn’t the internet that killed the music industry. In fact, everything is still looking rosy for many musicians and labels. Taylor Swift has had a good year, and her latest album is likely to be making her very wealthy indeed. And that won’t change in all likelihood, not for Swift, and not for those who come after her,” Ian Morris writes for Forbes. “There is always going to be public demand for music, as there has been for hundreds or even thousands of years. The human brain is wired to enjoy the patterns of music, so a musical beat is something we will always seek out.”
“So how will technology kill the music industry then? Well, it will simply destroy the record label,” Morris writes. “The reason is simple. Record labels are a man in the middle that simply doesn’t need to exist anymore. The same way we buy our flights direct, and get our shopping online and have things delivered from Amazon instead of going to a local shop. We have always been keen to enjoy cost reductions at the expense of the middleman, and the record labels are the ultimate in middle men.”
“Record labels also used to have an important role in producing the music. But again, for musicians that’s becoming something that can achieve on their own, through software like Apple’s GarageBand, or any of the other amazing music development apps that exist to nurture new talent,” Morris writes. “These aren’t even that expensive these days, and the hardware – thanks to digital technology – is cheaper than ever. Every Mac is a recording studio and countless artists are making their own way, without any help from the labels.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back in October 2005:
We hope that someday Steve Jobs is the one who eliminates the [middleman] and allows the artists to go directly to their fans via iTunes; no more outdated ideas like making an album a year (you write a song, record it and release it via iTunes whenever the creative urge hits) and no more greedy, waste-of-space [middleman] types always getting in the way with their stupid money-hungry ideas and disproportionately outsized takes.