Stocks That Will Rock Your World [Fool.com: Commentary] July 5, 2005 Rick Aristotle Munarriz writes over at the Motley Fool about the future of music in the digital age.
“I believe that, years from now, the major labels won’t be the same batch of old-school vinyl pushers you see today. As ludicrous as it may seem, I think that the real power brokers in the music industry will be Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT).
Oh, they don’t even know it yet. It may be years before they even come around to connecting the dots, but they will connect those dots. That’s because those three companies are the ones leading the way in localized search.”
Munarriz argues that it will be the long tail of local music that will drive music going forward which does make some sense. Although the vast majority of bands out there today don’t ever make it, and lets be honest oftentime suck, having a local based music filter certainly would make for interesting recomendative technology. If you found a local band that was as good as The Counting Crows and happened to play in your town a couple of times a month you would probably be more biased towards seeing a small band in a local venue.
“Yes, the local music scene will be the place to be in the future. Instead of hundreds of musical artists selling millions of CDs, you will have millions of bands selling hundreds of CDs. Record labels in their present form won’t serve much of a purpose in a “bunt single” scenario like that. Google? Yahoo!? Microsoft? They will be the ones wielding the promotional weaponry.”
Personally I rarely go see large bands play anymore. Why? I can’t bring my camera. I love taking photographs of bands and it kills me when artists come to town and maintain a no photography policy. Although I do like the White Stripes, I will not be seeing them when they play at the Greek in Berkeley because of their no camera policy. I will on the other hand be seeing Minipop when they play later this month in Oakland. I got an email back from the band saying to feel free and bring my camera and photograph them. Personally I think their music is every bit as good as the White Stripes. The question is how do I find more local bands like this. If Munarriz is right, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft will be providing the digital music of tomorrow to my future digital ears.
By the way, that’s my photo on the current Minipop Myspace internet site. Very fun.
Thanks, Unofficial Google Weblog.