waning Lyrical

The music industry has been suffering from an upset stomach since it sunk in that strapping on the blinkers and lumbering ahead with the decaying carcass of physical media in tow was, to put it delicately, a crap strategy.

Now your Grandma has an Ipod, and she downloads Alan Titchmarsh ebooks from Piratebay.

Old news. Everyone knows that labels are consolidating to strengthen and that the pop-machine is in overdrive, pumping out identikit racially ambiguous middle-of-the-dual-carraigeway starlets from the reality TV picking and packing plant.

So as a band musician (tesseractband.co.uk), I’m left wondering ‘Where do I and all my fellow grass-root musicians looking to earn go from here?’

The promise of social networking to cut out the middleman has proven hollow. The major sites are a new but just as strictly regulated advertising platform with the same puppeteers tweaking the strings, and now the barrier for entry is so low the clamour is cacophonous.

The labels massage and capitalise upon the brief successes of flash-in-the-pan MyBands, fully knowing that they’re essentially interchangeable in the current 15 clicks of fame online musical universe. Why should labels support and develop musicians when consumer appetite is quickly and temporarily sated and another band is just around the corner with product ready to go and zero cost attached?

I think we’re going to see a revolution in the way music is monetized. In the next few years, conventional recording, marketing and distribution contracts will become extinct as

a) the barriers to high quality recording fall to the rush of open source, high powered recording software and hardware (yes, open source hardware is just around the corner), making the majority of popular music produceable to releasable quality in the toilet, let alone the bedroom;

b) everyone’s efforts are visible from here to fucking mars due to the inevitable ubiquity of social networks in the home and workplace, and

c) we hear the final death rattle of physical media.

Labels will use site traffic reports and posting trends to make remuneration granular in the way that online ad revenue has become. No one will buy music any more, it will simply be used to advertise other services and merchandise that is not so easily pirated, and musicians will be paid solely on referrals. We’ll all be writing audio viagra spam jingles.

Doom, i tell you. Doooooooooom.