MUSIC INDUSTRY: Present Shock: When Musica(TM)S Future Arrives in the Here and Now [kyle Bylin]

Has the conversation about streaming music serviceschanged in recent years? Hasmusic's future entered the absolute present? If so, how did music execs and indie artists react. Kyle Bylin, a tech writer and user researcher, explores all of these interesting questions in his latest essay.

1. Music Futurism

Ive spent several years of my life writing about the future of music listening. I love to look at the world through the lens of a music startup that has an ambition to change current listener habits and speculate on what the shift could mean if it actually happens. The greatest challenge of this pursuit is that behavioral change often takes a very long time to occur, and by the time a predicted shift begins to fully emerge, both the world and I have likely forgotten that I ever planted that flag in the ground.

I have woken up several times in the past couple of years to a news story about a music startup launch or new feature release that sounded very familiar. I look back in my blog post archive, and, sure enough, a few years earlier I predicted that this very thing might happen. So I email the writer with a hyperlink to an old blog post of mine, and then he or she updates his or her news story with an acknowledgment that I had said it first.

And then, life goes on.

There is nothing awarded for correctly predicting that some thing might happen at some point. Furthermore, it often takes several more years to learn whether a music startup or new feature will cause a behavioral shift among music listeners. There have been many cases where I hypothesized about how a specific feature would look and feel, and why it would matter, only to see that some company came to realize the potential for a similar feature and incorporated it into a part of its music website or mobile app.

Months or years later, I grab a coffee with the startup founder and ask him or her about this feature, only to find out that no one uses it. Did the company get the feature right? Could the feature have been a commercial success if it had been introduced in a different context or incorporated into another product? It's hard to know. I have heard that it can take many different implementations for a feature to catch on. Oftentimes, the company doesnt have enough time to test every possible angle. Some ideas come too early and others too late, but sometimes they arrive right on time. Timing is what every music startup must attempt to nail or defy.

Today, many versions of the future of music exist. Interestingly, I think this has decreased speculation about what this future might entail and increased concern from industry executives and indie artists about how the present will play out.

At the start of 2011, the online trade conversation about streaming music services was mainly based on anticipation and speculation: What will happen when company X does X? What will happen when Spotify finally launches in the U.S. and a free version is offered without a trial period? Will this freemium model lead to wider use of subscription music? What will happen when Apple releases a Pandora or Spotify killer? Apple has sold over 800 million iOS devices and over 800 million credit cards on file with iTunes. How about Google, Facebook, Samsung, Twitter, or Amazon? What will happen when these major tech giants decide to enter the streaming music space? Will there be a streaming music war? Who will win? As each of these hotly anticipated and highly speculated things happened, the music industrys focus shifted from the next horizon to the present moment.

A strong indicator of this shift arrived in 2012, when several indie artists published their royalty statements online and stirred up a heated debate about streaming payout figures. In sum, their blog posts and social statuses said, Look at what Pandora and Spotify pay me right now. My royalty payments are too small. We must discuss this issue right now. For months, indie artists argued with industry executives about whether they understood how to read royalty statements and if streaming payouts could ever support their careers. Most artists didnt seem to care whether they would receive more money from Pandora and Spotify as their business operations and revenue streams grew in the coming years. All they focused on was how their streaming payouts compared to their music income and whether Pandora and Spotify royalties could supplant declining physical and digital sales. Suddenly, the conversation about whether Pandora and Spotify were the future of music grew into direct criticism about whether either companys business model was sustainable.