Scott McGibbon
Scott McGibbon is Project Specialist at the Norman Lear Center.
Despite the cultural popularity of American Idol and continuing sky-high touring profits for artists like Madonna and U2, the recording industry continues to stare into an abyss of vanishing record sales, pirated content and a once-solid business model in tatters. Record company staffs have been eviscerated, and anything like a profitable future looks like smoke in the wind.
The Lear Center's Popular Music Project, which studies popular music in every way you can think of, wrapped up this year with an endeavor that might offer music producers as well as music lovers a few rays of hope. PMP Artist-in-Residence Courtney Holt, president of MySpace Music, asked an undergraduate working group of students from
several USC schools to develop via no-holds-barred brainstorming sessions what they believed would be the perfect online music delivery platform of the future. The students met throughout the quarter under the guidance of PMP director Josh Kun. This was to be something for the entire industry to think about, not just MySpace Music.
The students hashed out their ideas and then organized their vision into a presentation for Holt, which you can view above in its entirety, including an honest Q&A session that followed. But a couple of Holt's sobering remarks are noteworthy:
• The smartphone app business, which is a little more than 2 years old, will eclipse the music business this year in sales.
• The idea that all music is or should be "free" is now about 10 years old.
• On YouTube -- with its mashups and covers and remixes of music -- only 5% of users contribute content. The other 95% of users are just consumers. (The user-generated paradise may be a little farther off)
• One great review on a music site like Pitchfork can sell more "records" (downloads and CDs) than 2 weeks of heavy rotation play on KROQ.
Yet of particular interest to me (and I hope other music lovers) were two elements that the students insisted be a part of their musical future. Their comprehensive platform included several features that are already available from current online services, like Pandora and iTunes and MySpace Music and Netflix -- levels of membership, rewards, social networking -- and some things not quite available yet, like platform-neutral files and very high-quality audio files. But the two elements that hit me like a gong? Accurate song lyrics and sheet music available for every song on this future service. Wow. Even in this fiercely digital age, it all comes back to what's on the page.
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