Online Music Industry Forecast

    Many say that forecasting is an ignoble occupation, I absolutely disagree with this. And so I’ll try to make a fairly accurate forecast of the further development of the music industry on the Internet. Moreover, below I will describe in detail how I imagine the technical implementation of my forecast.

    Basic postulates:
    • music will be free (legally);
    • musicians and distributors will earn on advertising and paid services;
    • large players involved in the distribution of music can be counted on the fingers, perhaps there will be 1 giant (as now YouTube, Google Search, Windows in their fields).
    Implementation: We

    will arbitrarily call our main distributor of music “MuzArhive”. This organization will conclude agreements with musicians (music labels, publishers) and post their recordings on its servers. Each download of the file will be paid. (Already, DepositFiles.com pays its partners $ 0.005 for each download of any file, so I think MuzArhive will be able to pay up to $ 0.05 for each download, and maybe even more). Musicians on their sites will post links for downloading songs from the MuzArhive website. Each file will have its own permanent address, where it will be stored "forever."

    Of course, “MuzArhive” will attach a social network, all kinds of ratings and paid services (increase in download speed, etc.) to its file storage. Musicians will replenish this storehouse, receiving in return a little (or a lot) of money and, most importantly, popularity. And popularity includes thousands of concerts and good advertising contracts. And everyone will be happy!

    There is no need to distribute music in P2P networks, send by mail, burn and transfer on CDs and flash drives. If you want to share a song with a friend, just give a link to it on the MuzArhive website.

    Problems that may arise:
    • it may be difficult to convince the musicians to moderate their appetites and agree to receive a few cents for each download, instead of the usual few bucks for the disc sold. But after all, they will download hundreds of times more often than buying disks, and the problem will be solved by itself;
    • there may be problems finding advertisers, although this is unlikely;
    • filling the base is not an easy task, especially at first. It is advisable to immediately get at your disposal millions of songs. The experience of qtrax.com shows that this is possible ( UPD: it turns out Qtrax deceived everyone a little , at the time of publication I did not know about it. And yet, apparently, they managed to agree with one of the 4 largest labels) ;
    • competition can have a negative impact, although this is unlikely. If there are several large legal archives, a search engine will appear that searches for them.

    To summarize all this, I want to say that only one of the current Internet giants will be able to implement such a system. As far as I know, Yahoo is already working in this direction. Wait and see ….

    PS: many things may have seemed obvious to you, moreover, some of the things described have already been implemented, but not quite in the way I imagine it. Do not judge strictly, this is my first habratopik :)

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