kidmercury

Their lead singer may be a rich guy who dates supermodels while still managing to write the whiniest songs ever -- but he's also a new media revolutionary. Adam Duritz writes:

A lot of people think it's a tough time to be a band but we don't feel that way. The internet opens a world of limitless possibility, where the only boundaries are the boundaries of your own imagination. We want a chance to push those boundaries back as far as we can. Unfortunately, the directions we want to go and the opportunities we want to pursue are often things that our label is simply not allowed to do.

We have talked about the future of music before here on this blog. It is something I watch closely, because music tends to be a cultural leader and a trendsetter -- where the music trends go, other media trends go as well.

The future of music, from my perspective, is as follows:

• Free. The most important step. Everything else is beating around the bush until free music is embraced and encouraged.
• Peer-produced. Meaning get the fans involved in not just the consumption, but also the production.
• Niche. Oh sure, we'll still have mega rock stars. But the real revolution will be in enabling bands with just a few thousand fans to earn a viable living.
• If music is free, how does a band with a small fan base earn a living? By maximizing their influence. By selling products and services they like. By turning themselves into a brand. This creates a fundamentally different approach; instead of looking to sell a million CDs to get $1 from each fan, artists will need to try to get $1,000 from 1,000 fans. It's about greater share of wallet rather than greater breadth of market share.

This is an opportunity for textbook disruption. The existing record labels are designed to sell CDs and cannot survive in this new environment. Hence, new labels built around 360 deals are needed. As the Internet becomes the dominant means of music distribution, I would expect Internet media businesses to be well-positioned to address this. I plan on getting to it with my niche social networking business, but it will probably take a bit more time -- both for me to get stuff ready on my end, and for the music industry to continue collapsing, so that new opportunities can emerge.