The Future of the Music Industry?

With Apple announcing that it will stream the Red Hot Chilli Pepper's newest album, one has to question if this is indicative of the future of the music industry. Is the future of music playing cloud-based? Will people even own music in the future, or will they simply stream whatever they want? What will be the point of an ipod if all we need is an internet connection to an infinite library of tunes? Perhaps the future ipod will be little more than a wireless card and lcd.

For me, I love services such as Grooveshark and Spotify. I love the fact that I can access my music from any device or computer in the world. However, these services have not yet replaced the now traditional concept (!?) of owning mp3s because their bitrate continues to be low. Most of my music is 320kbps, which sounds far superior to much of the streamed music. Perhaps part of the revenue model behind these cloud-based music services will involve paying for a higher bitrate music.

What does this mean for the music artists themselves? It's no secret that albums haven't been profitable for artists in years, and that most of their revenue is from concert tours. Perhaps this presents artists with a new opportunity to make money. I presume that there won't be much artist resistance to the adaptation of cloud-based albums given the current state of the industry, but I can only guess what this will do for overall sales. Many artists have spoken about the benefits of music piracy. Many feel that it is best to get as many people listening to you regardless of whether they have paid for your product - that popularity leads to sales. Surely cloud-based music has the opportunity to increase airtime for artists. From that perspective, maybe a cloud-based music industry is a good thing. Hopefully for everyone.