The future of music

With the popularizing of social media, the music industry also will develop with this trend. On May fifth, 2008, Trent Reznor announced on the official Nine Inch Nails website that he gave his new album free of charge under a creative commons license. This shows that in the future the the record labels might go to the end. Since in the traditional recording industry, for a CD from the record label who publishing the album, the manufacturers, distributors, to retailers, there's too many participates to get profit. But with the internet most of these costs are zero, therefore artists can offer the audiances at a much lower price or even free without the record labels to publish their music. A decade ago, six labels held 77 percent of recorded music sales worldwide. Today, those six are down to four Universal (31%), Sony-BMG (25%), Warner (15%) and EMI (9.5%) and none has got to grips with the internet revolution. And we know that besides selling albums artists also make their money fromsome other way such as touring and performing, songwriting or selling t-shirts, hats. However under the control of the record labels, the business is unfair to vast majority of musicians, since most artists never recouped their royalty advances. In the future the power base will be shifted from the record labels to the artists and mangers, and the music fans. Through social network artists and their managers can make things happen on their own. With it, the structure of this industry will changed. the creative people like the artists and songwriters along with their business managers.will be at the center of the future of Music.

Launching singles and letting the audiences to select songs they like to make a album by themselves. As in the past, buyers were forced to buy albums to get the one or two songs they loved. But now the people can buy the song they want one at a time, maybe even free. Artist managements can use Facebook and MySpace as routes for launching new talent and songs free to likely fans.

And in the future the The music industry may abandon certain restrictive digital rights management tools, and might finally .abandon DRM. Music will come free with advertisements attached. This means trying out ad-supported models, for instance delivering fixed commercials such as sell concert tickets or merchandise in support of the artist, social networks, and whatever else people develop with free music tracks.

by Wang, Yiqing