The Fate of Online Music at Internet World. Are music subscription services giving digital music lovers what they want, or was Napster onto something long ago that is still evading the business strategies of the Big Five? [internetnews.com: Top News]
As I mentioned in an earlier post, in the future consumers will "own" far more music than they do today. I think I might own roughly 100 CDs. That is not a lot of music by the standards of the future. Consumers will want far more music because old music gets stale quickly. Consumers will get more music because the costs of production and distribution will fall. This, of course, means that the relatively few music superstars will not be making as much money from recordings. (They will, however, makes lots of money in other ways: fame has its rewards.) The record labels can make money, too. But they will have to produce more music, and produce and distribute it more efficiently.
Posted by Doug Sauder at April 25, 2002 11:13 PM