Reference material is, I believe, some of the best types of content which can work in on-line or digitised forms. With in this I mean news, maps, opinion, diagrams, factual stuff. I’m not yet convinced that any digitised form is a good way of reading a book, studying a work of art or listening to music. The exception for this is a need we have for things to be more and more instantaneous, we want such and such a song and we want to be able to listen to it now! And we buy into the idea that such immediacy overrides concerns about quality and authenticity. (How much on-line journalism is out there which contains inaccuracies born from journalists with deadlines of a few minutes relying upon wikipedia?)

The music industry (and by this I guess I’m thinking mainly of the major labels) have done a lot wrong, not just in the last 15 years, but for decades. But, but but but, they must also have been doing things right as well.
There will be many new artists out there with great music who are also great at PR and business and marketing and accounting and IT and so on – hopefully these people will get to make great music and get paid.
There will be other great artists who haven’t got a clue about how to get there music out there, or who just don’t want to bother with learning about how to handle gig promoters and update myspace accounts every day. These people might have great music but no business drive.

Charlotte Hatherley (ex of the band Ash) had a few LPs worth of material after leaving the majors and going it alone and recently announced she was coming in from the cold, back to a label, who could actually do the non-music stuff for her.

A healthy music industry should be able to support good music not only when it is popular but when it isn’t as well. It’s all well and good that Radiohead can go it alone with a very web-friendly image, giving away music and being big enough not to need everyone to buy their music, but when they were on Parlaphone Records some of the profits of the sales went towards nurturing new talent. Nowadays if artists control everything then that doesn’t necessarily happen.

How this all ends I don’t know! But I would like to see mp3 prices slashed down to near the 10p/15$ mark for starters…

The distribution impact of the file sharing has shifted music industry from gate keeper to irrelevant as the artist and the fan are now linked direct.

This is good for music. The music industry was not good for music, it was good for lawyers and accountants and stock holders, but not many others.

I look forward to the new reality.

The comparison between Compton’s Encyclopedia and the Music Industry is a good one. Unfortunately, I’m old enough to remember that line of work being available I can remember going door to door selling greeting cards as a teenager – now we have e-cards!

Keep it coming!

I find it funny there is a music industry at all. A music INDUSTRY really only existed for 20 years: mid-50s to mid 70s and from the mid 70s the industry, was and remains, the equivalent of the walking dead. Combine payola and terrible product and outside of a few blips (Thriller or Nirvana) it has been dead.

Digitization of music saved the music industry and now they want to contain and control it. Digitization allowed the industry to repackage and resell the same product they released on LPs, cassettes, and 8-tracks, now on CDs – how many times do we replace our music catalog until we say, “enough”!

Since the birth of recorded music, the industry is revived each and every time by an artist or genre out of their control. This century .3% of new music accounts for >50% of annual sales, not too much artist development in that model. There is no music industry, it is a distribution industry made up of followers trying to create business model. The music only made them money when the industry acted as the gatekeepers and when they controlled distribution.

The greatest result of this shake up is that no longer will an artist have a gatekeeper to the fan. The web has destroyed distribution costs and the artist does not need to rely on a record deal pipe dream as the only way to get studio time, packaging, marketing (radio and press), and retail distribution.

The music industry has been on life support since lawyers and accountants started moving up the executive ranks their role is compliance, not business strategy.

Your analogy to the encyclopedia is an accurate evolution for that product and the publishing industry is trying to understand their model, just as the movie studios are.

Artists, go direct! Sorry Mr. Quirk, if you can’t understand your market, you should not be in business, it’s called competition.