Thread by @davekarpf

Next up in our guided tour of throughlines in the #twitterarchive: The future of music.

ICYMI, previous throughlines on bitcoin

https://twitter.com/davekarpf/status/1017440598528323584

Futurism

https://twitter.com/davekarpf/status/1017493623166984195

and Journalism

https://twitter.com/davekarpf/status/1017873649121087490

The February 2003 @WIRED cover story was Charles Mann's "The Year the Music Died." wired.com/2003/02/dirge/

Napster was gone at that point, but a dozen Napster-like filesharing systems had risen in its place. (2/x)

Timothy White, the editor of Billboard, had asked Mann "How much you want to bet that the entire music industry collapses? And I mean soon - like five, ten years. Kaboom!"

Mann's article argued that it could be even sooner. 2003 could spell the end of the music business. (3/x)

One interesting thing here is that, unlike the future-of-journalism throughline, the future-of-music conversation has ALWAYS been about music as a business.

We *eventually* came to realize that the news crisis was an industrial-production-of-journalism crisis. It took awhile.

But future-of-music convo has always been more concentrated on (1) what happens to the record labels, and (2) what replaces them if/when they die.

the ? of how musicians will make a living has always been a distant third. Probably because of built-in starving-artist assumptions.

Mann's solution for the music industry's woes? (1) Find a way to make $ on a per-track basis, (2) allow in-store CD burning, (3) slash recording costs, (4) change artists' contracts to reflect the new economic reality.

...Only one of those four sounds ridiculous today. (6/x)

By late 2004, iTunes Music was looking like a potential revenue stream. And that was one of the developments that led to @chr1sa's argument in "The Long Tail." wired.com/2004/10/tail/

Anderson is showing how the economics of digital music could turn out GREAT. (7/x)

All these years later, what stands out about The Long Tail is that Anderson is clearly *right* about the increasing potential for niche entertainment markets to flourish. (we see this in television, too.) And he's also right about the importance of recommendation systems. But...

The thing that now seems obvious with the benefit of hindsight is that *you can't make a living in the long tail!*

The Long Tail is great for Amazon and iTunes. It's great for fans. It's so-so for labels. (8/x)

But it's a mixed-bag for artists, because of what we might call the "rent-money" threshold. (As in, are you making enough money to pay rent?)

Again, we tend not to think about this with the future-of-music, because "starving artists." But with journalism it is front-of-mind. 9/x

That rent-money threshold/enough-to-live-off-of threshold has become one of the main stories of the past few years. I'll write more about it when I get to the sharing economy-->gig economy throughline. It also helps explain what happened to the once-vibrant blogosphere. (10/x)

But the key point is that, by late 2004, iTunes and Rhapsody were starting to develop workable payment models for digital music. And that brought some sunshine into the future-of-music conversation.

Maybe there will be more of it, and maybe it will be better! (11/x)

A year later, Jeff Howe writes "The Hit Factory." The future of music turns out to be... MySpace! wired.com/2005/11/myspac…

(12/x)

(From Howe): "For this generation of musicians, the mass market and the hit-making apparatus it supports are relics of a bygone age. The new reality is that their audience isn't listening to radio or vegging out in front of MTV. The audience is online."

(13/x)

Howe's comment rings true today, even if MySpace has become a bit of a punchline.

We still have hit-makers, we still have mass marketing. (Hell, Taylor Swift's last album was advertised on UPS trucks!) Throughout the 00's, the record labels lost some of their market power. 14/x

And the pathways for artists trying to getting noticed got a bit more chaotic. Instead of playing the right gig at the venue, musicians started developing a following online.

there are a thousand stories like this over the 00s (remember Soulja Boy?). The landscape was changing.

If you want to read something really prescient, check out "David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists -- and Megastars" from 2007 wired.com/2007/12/ff-byr…
(16/x)

The thing I really like about this piece is that it lays out six different models for the future of the recording industry, but concludes "No single model will work for everyone."

Rather than saying "Radiohead's In Rainbows is the future!" Byrne says "that's ONE future." (17/x)

Byrne also implicitly picks up on the predictions that Mann made back in 2003. Payment-per-track is now a reality. Napster/Kazaa/bittorrent didn't eat the world. The RIAA is still moaning about lost sales, but there's a ton of good music and the labels aren't on deaths door. 18/x

In-store CD burning... okay, no, that never became a thing. But recording costs have plummeted thanks to new technology. So Byrne focuses on the new contract options for artists.

It's really cool, reading Mann and Byrne side-by-side. (19/x)

And that takes us to 2014. @questlove writes for @WIRED "on how to find music you'll fall in love with." wired.com/2007/12/ff-byr…

He's got this great passage where he lays out just how dramatically the music scene has changed... (20/x)

"...Then digital music arrived(...) The iPod happened. Playlists happened. Pandora happened. YouTube happened. Spotify happened. (...) I couldn't believe them when I heard them. But they are here, and they are changing everything about our relationship with music." (21/x)

There's a joy in @questlove's piece which is emblematic of the time. "We did it one way in the past; now we have to figure out how to do it in the present, which, in so many ways, is the future."

(22/x)

The recording industry didn't die. the calcified music industry was shaken, and it still hasn't exactly found its footing.

Struggling artists today are still struggling. But, unlike so many other "disrupted" industries, that was already the norm. (23/x)

Final note: if you enjoyed this thread, you should also read @aram's The Piracy Crusade amazon.com/Piracy-Crusade…

And @nancybaym's Playing to the Crowd amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_no…

(fin)

(I mislabeled this thread #twitterarchive instead of #wiredarchive. Whoops.)