music revolution

One of my fav talks of the weekend at Northern Voice was Music 2.0 by Colin Brumelle from Bryght. It is crazy how the music industry has changed so drastically over the past couple years. For me personally before I got my iPod I was stuck in a music rut. I was listening to the same cds I had been listening to for years and the only new stuff I heard was the same cheese ball top 40 that was played in the clubs. My ipod gave me a music makeover (plus Mike and Bre’s suggestions and collections) and I now have about 70GB of musica and am loving it.

Colin did a great job of summing up the main contributing factors to the current music revolution. The first thing is that the cost of producing music has majorly go down. With cheap software and hardware anyone (with musical talent) can produce and mix music on their laptop with GarageBand and programs like that.

The second thing is that the cost of distributing music has also decreased rapidly. An artist no longer needs to rely on a big money production house and expensive distribution costs since music can easily be sold in digital form via iTunes and other similar services. The internet provides the best distribution model, it reaches the entire world pretty much for free! He mentioned something else that struck a cord –due to this new distribution model we will start seeing tons more “middle class musicians” – so instead of having just a handful of artists at the top who are zillionares (and tons of starving ones at the bottom waiting to be heard) we will see more artists who will be able to reach their niche market and making a just healthy living (the long tail economic model). This is a great thing for music as I don’t really like listening to many of the mainstream artists that much anyways.

The last factor is the tons of new ways to find out about music that you like, instead of having to rely on the junk muchmusic and mtv repeatedly play (and mainstream radios). A great way is to check out music and MP3 blogs. The main one for me is my sister Breeze. Paul Lamere is also another great music blogger. Most MP3/music blogs even provides links to a song so you can download for free to see if you like it in addition to reading the review. Colin suggested some great ones that I can’t wait to check out: fluxblog, tofuhut, soul sides, and music for robots. Another way is checking out some review sites like PitchForkMedia and MetaCritic. Another is the amazing site Pandora. It rocks! For those who don’t know what Pandora is check it out immediately. It is a music suggestion service and operates similar to a radio only you tell it what music you like and then it suggests and plays songs (streams) that are musically similar. Experts spend tons of time breaking down and marking up tons of music into hundreds of categories based on harmony, rhythm etc. And so when you tell it that you like “Death Cab For Cutie” it suggests other songs that are similar to their songs. It is an amazing way to here about new artists that line up with your musical taste. For more information on Pandora listen to the “Inside the Net” podcast that features an interview with the founder.

Colin also made his prediction on the future of the record company. He feels that it will be less about selling discs and more about a creating a brand around an artist. So the focus will shift to artist management and touring (at this point most record companies don’t directly make money off touring). There will also be the emergence of small niche record labels. These labels will act as a brand and a filter in themselves (much like review sites and suggestion blogs). This is just like the label Arts and Crafts – I trust their taste in artists and like pretty much every artist on their label. He also had a great quote from David Bowie in a New York Times article. Either way the future of music looks bright and beautiful. (but maybe not so for the future of the ‘recording industry’ monopolies).