Ooh, ah, visionary…
In the Business & Media section of this Sunday’s
You can read the whole thing by clicking on the newspaper article above, but here’s the first and last paragraphs from the piece to give those that don’t like to read too much the gist of the piece…
————————————————————————————————————-
Rock star David Bowie wrote a thoughtful piece in the New York Times in June 2002 about the future of music. ‘The absolute transformation of everything we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years,’ he wrote, ‘and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music, itself, is going to become like running water or electricity…’
As broadband internet access becomes ubiquitous – and wireless – this model suddenly becomes feasible for music. At the moment, the only way we can have the stuff we crave is to buy or steal the product. But if we could access whatever we wanted, at any time, on payment of a levy, our need to own the packages would diminish. We could just turn on the tap, as it were, and get Beethoven or So Solid Crew on demand. Not to mention the collected works of David Bowie. And then we could give him a Brit Award for being so far ahead of the game.
————————————————————————————————————-
As clearly true as the statement “our need to own the packages would diminish” is…the thought is still no less distressing for an older fan such as myself. Lord knows the transition from 12″ vinyl to piddley little CDs was traumatic enough. God forbid a library of faceless MP3s…obviously I have such a thing for convenience…but, like most of us who have been buying music for the past four decades or so, I have the vinyl and the CDs too…not to mention cassettes, 8 track cartridges, mini discs, etc.
Perhaps it’s time to simplify by finally accepting the inevitability of David’s predictions and just filling up from the digital pipe from now on… Anybody wanna buy a forty year collection of beautiful vinyl, etc.? Yeah, right!
BowieNetter’s can