John Naughton, writing in today's Observer, recalls a 2002 NYT article about David Bowie in which the musician speculated on 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...'
If you want to read the NYT piece, you can go here and pay $3.95 for the pleasure. And it's worth reading. Alternatively, you can go here and read it for free. Or here. I find it … amusing that the NYT carries an article prophesying the end of copyright as we know it, then tries to charge you for the same article — only to find itself defeated by the power of the net.
And that's the point. As Naughton's Observer article explains, what has happened so far (mp3/compression technology, Napster/etc, iPods/etc) to change the music-as-packaged-product model for the broadcasting and entertainment industries is but
… half a revolution, because it's still [my emphasis] based on the music-as-product model. For the record industry, it has been an unqualified disaster, because millions of people aren't paying for their packages. Legal download services like Apple iTunes are beginning to mitigate the disaster, but it's not clear that even iTunes can compete with illicit file-sharing.
So what's to be done? Here's where the water analogy comes in. It's as if we lived in a world where water was only made available in Perrier bottles, so that if you want the stuff you have to buy (or steal) bottles. But in fact water is also available as a public service, piped through mains and available by turning a tap. We pay for this either via a flat tax or a charge based on how much we use, and everyone is (reasonably) happy. We have access to water whenever we need it; and the companies that provide the stuff earn reasonable revenues from providing it.
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.
Bowie's vision of the future (2012!) is wilder/more radical than Naughton's, of course.
