MidemNet Blog: Serve The Music

The following appears courtesy of MIDEMNet’s Blogs. See all of Ted Cohen’s blogs for MIDEMNet at MIDEM.com.

by Ted Cohen

I just got done listening to about two hours of music via my Sonos system. I bounced from Pandora to Rhapsody to iHeart Radio and back to home base, my 100,000 track library. It was a good balance of lean-forward and lean-back experiences. Technology has enabled music to literally be at your fingertips, it is something that we dreamed of ten years ago, today the dream is fully realized.

The marketplace has grown exponentially in the past eighteen months, Spotify, MOG, Grooveshark, Play.me, Guvera, MP3Tunes and Slacker have all launched feature-rich on-demand and/or user-influenced services, the offerings are bountiful. Rumors abound concerning planned services from Apple and Google, the primetime era of the cloud-based service is debuting imminently: don’t miss the revolution.The economics are still to be proved, but we have made some significant progress.

At this point, it is critical that we remember that technology is there to serve the music, and not the other way around. Music should be enjoyed by as many fans as possible, but the artists and songwriters who create it need to be fairly compensated. The rush to drive the cost of music to near zero will eventually deliver unintended consequences, the disappearance of the full-time musician.

The promise of the net was to offer unimaginable opportunities and rewards to artists freed from the major label system. The reality is that, for the majority of these artists, sustainable careers are not emerging.

We need to make sure that there’s enough money left on the table to give deserving artists and songwriters careers that don’t include a shift at Starbucks. It can be done, but it will take vision and cooperation.

It’s the right outcome.

Posted by Ted • Monday, July 12, 2010 .

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