Thinkcorps

Cory at BoingBoing posts about how restrictive the music industry has been in limiting the evolution of legal music services, denying features like searching by artist. As the RIAA and its cohorts continue to stand their ground: kicking, punching and wrapping everything in sight with new flavors of DRM —like some bizarro-land Christmas presents you can’t actually open unless first stripping down to your skivvies, getting down on all fours in a dim, empty and windowless room, and peering through the one loosened corner with only your right eye—I wonder what impact this will have on the music culture at large, the listeners not the labels.

I suppose you can fall back on hubris and assume that no matter what happens, there will always be music consumers to sell to, but I don’t know. This is the digital world, and there’s always something new and disruptive coming down the pipe. Adaptation is the name of the game. Remember Netscape? Lycos? A thousand dot-coms? They were huge and now they’re not.

Just because you guys own music today, doesn’t mean you’ll own it tomorrow. Worse, I’m not sure you realize that your product is changing.

The kids are online, and they’re chatting, creating, sharing with each other, building their own digital personalities, ecologies. They are building homepages with their favorite bands integrated into a player on the page. They are blogging and posting cool mp3s to share. They are remixing and podcasting. They are downloading, ripping, and burning.

The consumer is evolving the market and you aren’t there.

First, I think it’s clear that this is a market. It’s just not one defined by profit motives; it is instead about individual obsessions and passions. The only real difference between markets and communities is that communities aren’t limited to trading in dollars. And that makes communities much more powerful, doesn’t it?

If I were a music executive today (or a shareholder), I’d be very worried whether the music market was even going to exist in 10 years. Will the music consumer still want what you’re trying to sell? Ownership and possession are very late-century American concepts in my opinion. Ubiquitous connectivity and cheap technology are slowly breaking down those ideas with consumers, even if they don’t completely realize it.

For example, combine two current trends, participatory remix culture and the celestial jukebox (i.e., the Net), and you’ve got a very powerful combination that doesn’t rely on the record industry we know today.

Be afraid.