Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders
Music’s Next Evolution
Podcast Audio | Posted by Phil Leigh on May 20, 2010
David Pakman
Today’s audio podcast is an interview with David Pakman who has been a venture capital Partner with Venrock since 2008. Earlier he was the CEO of eMusic where he led the online retailer to sell more music download tracks than any competitor except Apple’s iTunes. Before joining eMusic he Co-Founded MyPlay which pioneered online music lockers. MyPlay was sold to Bertelsmann shortly after the turn-of-the-century. Earlier David was a digital music innovator with N2K and Apple.
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David believes that the recorded music business has reached yet another mutation point. Over the past decade worldwide revenues dropped from $40 billion to about $17 billion. Furthermore, unless the industry begins to proceed along a new evolutionary path he predicts the declines will continue for another five years before bottoming-out at perhaps $7 billion.
In order prosper henceforth, David believes the industry must permit recorded music to become “part of the very fabric of the web, not merely an overlay on top of it”. That’s because users increasingly visualize the entire Internet as a readily available computing resource. While the concept is described with new terms such as “Cloud Computing”, in reality it is an amplified echo of a slogan popularized by Sun Microsystems 20 years ago when LANs first came into use, to wit, “The Network is the Computer.” The only difference is today’s network encompasses the entire Internet.
As a consequence we are beginning to live in our computers as much as we live in a physical world. That’s why online social networks such as Facebook and FourSquare are becoming popular. When something is important to us we seek to share it with friends and family in both the terrestrial and cyber worlds. David contends that music is typically one such part of our lives that we are often anxious to share.
When music is within the fabric of the Web, users might embed it like a Twitter Feed, or share tracks at Facebook with a single mouse-click as lala.com once permitted. Developers could create “more engaging and relevant online music experiences” that might become the foundations for new businesses and consequent incremental revenues for the music industry.
As noted in earlier posts, broadcast radio is losing influence. Domestic radio’s advertising revenues dropped from $21.7 billion in 2006 to $16.0 billion last year. To a large extent, broadcast radio depends upon record labels for content. If music listening migrates to the Internet, then there should be a good opportunity for advertising to follow it and for labels to pick-up a major share.
Precisely how this will happen is unclear, but as always the ones best able to predict the future are those who invent it. In this context, there has been much speculation that Apple’s decision to close lala.com is a precursor to the introduction of a Cloud-based music service by iTunes. Apple acquired lala.com only about six months ago. It seems unlikely that they would shut it down without resurrecting it in related form more integral to the Apple business model. Apple’s developer conference scheduled for early next month might be an opportune time for the company to reveal its plans.
Categories: Podcast Audio
Tags: Add new tag, Apple, David-Pakman, digital-music, eMusic, Facebook, future-of-advertising, Future-of-Music, record-labels
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[...] * Venrock’s David Pakman on the future of digital music [...]
As a avid music listener, I do listen to a of of music, just not music that one thinks of as “New Music”.
I don’t do any country anymore, last good country was Waylon, Johnny, Willie, and Kris. Collectively known as the “Highway Men”
As for current music of any other type, the only stuff that interest me is smooth Jazz, particularly guitar instrumental.
Most of my listening is as I said in earlier comments off the satellite, The music I mostly stream is what would probably be called elevator music. as you know, theres no new music like that anymore.
So for me, all of this talk about discovering new music is irrelevant. What is relevant is sharing my passion for the music I do love. My favorite thing is to corner someone and play music they’ve never hard before and they like it and tell them, its older then they are,, and generally open their ears to whole new worlds of music they never knew existed before. The same for classic movies, particularity movies of the ’40’s and ’50’s.
The freedom to share whatever music or moves moves you is essential. The industry is trying to hard to hold on to every aspect of their content and limiting what one can do with what they have legally bought, soon it will not be “bought” but “rented” for a limited use on very limited devices, with no ability to move from one device to another, or share it in any way.
Then whats the point of buying it?
Ken Lawson
[...] Pakman in an audio interview discussing music’s next evolution made the point that music must become “part of the very fabric of the web, not merely an overlay [...]
[...] http://insidedigitalmedia.com/musics-next-evolution/ By Earl McCluskie, on June 17, 2010 at 9:33 pm, under Analysis. . No Comments Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. « Data plans could discourage smartphone usage [...]