/music

From vertical to horizontal

We want access to any bit of music whenever we feel like it, wherever we might be. Regardless of whether we are on our iPhones, in our cars, playing our games, or on our laptops. Using headphones or speakers. At work or at home. Sometimes we know exactly what we want to hear, other times we want to be surprised. The rise of smart phones and connected hardware means that we are always a swipe away from turning on a sound track. For ourselves. Or for others around us. We want the control of being able to choose one song from 20 million tracks, and yet we also want the ease of having music run in the background, like a friendly ambient daemon. The ubiquity of its presence, and the variety of its uses, has turned music from an entertainment “vertical” into a horizontal layer of data that operates across every online application.

A new kind of dial tone

It is becoming harder to distinguish between iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, Google Play, Beats, Songza, SoundCloud and others. Some of these will merge to complement eachother’s offerings (as Apple has just done with Beats). Soon, we will end up with the music industry equivalent of our wireless or cable oligopolies. We judge our wireless carriers based on their coverage, and we judge our cable companies based on their speed. We will evaluate our music carriers based on their ability to provide fast access to any song we want, whether we are looking for it (on-demand) or not (radio). This is how music becomes a commodity, like bandwidth, and which we pay for on a monthly basis just like we pay for our cel phone or cable service.

Beware the tax authorities

The rights to most of the catalog of recorded music are controlled by 3 major labels (UMG, WMG and Sony) and a handful of publishers; distribution is dominated by an equally small number of online services: iTunes, Pandora, Youtube and Spotify. And then there is the added spectre of litigation, which has threatened online music ever since since the RIAA went after Napster more than ten years ago. Nothing ruins the appetite of a venture capitalist more than the idea of investing in a business that has to pay a perpetual tax on its revenues. And without the healthy interest of investors, it is hard to develop a product that isn’t compromised by the premature need to monetize. And so the concentration of rights and distribution, combined with the chill of speculative capital, perpetuates the power of the oligopoly. The oligarchs still reward upstarts, but they tend to be more influenced by the stature of the founders (Jimmy and Daniel) than by the genius of their products.

From screen to controller

With the emergence of technologies such as Internet-enabled TVs, cheap projectors, Apple’s Airplay, Sonos, Spotify Connect, and legions of great bluetooth speakers, our smart phones will function increasingly as remote control devices for projecting music experiences onto the walls around us (rather than just as small screens to jack our headphones into). Our mobile entertainment apps will interact with our physical environments to create new stages for live performance everywhere we go. And as we meet up with others, using the same apps in the same location, we will see how mobile technology can deepen live experience rather than distract us from it.