The future of music?

Interesting perspective on the future of the recording industry from a musician who's also a software engineer:

It’s my belief that music CDs will soon be given away free. The CD will become promotional material to advertise a band’s live shows and merchandise for sale. Space inside the CD cover could even be sold for advertising.

This will have several results: First, bands will reduce the cost of producing a CD by making use of the incredible capabilities of your average digital recording system to avoid the ridiculous hourly prices that professional recording studios charge. (Next week my band is doing this very thing.) Self-production will become the norm.

Second, CDs will become shorter, more focused and released more frequently. (‘See us on tour next month at these locations! Hear these four songs performed live!’)

Third, bands will perform live far more often and venues for live music will see a resurgence in popularity.

Interesting pipe dream of an end-run around the recording industry. I buy the fact that it is now technologically feasible to self-record and that this is even an economical alternative. But what about promotion and distribution - isn't that where the labels comes in? The vision that's being articulated is probably a feasible strategy for a small band to build grassroots support and popularity and even to fund itself on a modest scale, but to scale up from there and reach a mass audience you need the intermediation of a label of some sort. Tim Oren's had some thoughts around a music business model targeted at genre acts (acts that fall below the 100-200,000 unit sales line) that's worth reading in this regard.

Umair had an incisive analysis recently (see here and here) on why file-sharing is so pervasive and how the music industry needs to adapt. To quote:

For many people, digital music's more about risk than it is about music itself. Not legal risk - but transactional risk, the kind of risk you take when you buy a used car...consumers download music, as much to derive extra value from getting something for free, as they do because they want insurance against buying something they didn't want in the first place.

He proposes solutions for reforming the recording industry that insure the consumer against this risk. I find this musician's idea above intriguing partly because it addresses the risk issue in a fundamentally new way - view the CD as a way to mitigate/reduce risk on the part of the consumer and derive revenue through other means (live shows, merchandise).