Music industry professionals interviewed about their thoughts on own future

An interesting post on the Music Network blog interviews music biz officials about what they think the music industry and consumer landscape will look like in five years. Of course, five years isn’t all that long, so the interviewees do not expect any major landslides. However, they do see their business changing.

All still see a significant part played by the traditional labels. Artists, is the general opinion, will still need the recording, marketing and distribution expertise that labels have to offer. Some, however, predict a shift in the nature of the relationship between artists and labels, predicting that deals will be made more on the basis of partnership rather than control. This mirrors predictions made by label owner Tom Silverman that we wrote about earlier. At the same time, either cooperative or not, the labels will likely extend their reach over artists with more elaborate 360 deals that not only manage physical and digital distribution, but also help artists market their brand and plan gigs. Music promoter Ariel Hyatt: “Record labels will become more and more involved in every facet of an artist’s career - taking a piece of all profitable areas as record sales fall more by the wayside in the order of importance for earning money from music.”

The way that music is consumed will further develop along the trends of preferring

access to ownership, spurring further growth of subscription-based services. Mobile devices with an internet connection will be the devices of choice for listening. Radio will still have an impact, although diminishing, as people do not always want to choose their own music.

Universal Music’s Max Hole suspects that at a point in the future “there will be a movement back towards music as art, rather than music as commodity”, which would indeed be an interesting reversal of almost a century of music history.