Welcome to “Music 2.0”! This book is an edited collection of my best essays on the future of the music industry, and continues the work I presented in my first book, The Future of Music, co-written with Dave Kusek. It further describes what I think the next generation of music companies will actually look like – hence the term Music 2.0, a description derived from the now increasingly popular “Web 2.0.” I have been writing and blogging about digital music and the next generation of the music industry for almost four years now – in airplanes, taxis, trains, busses, hotel lobbies, conference halls, and at home. In Internet time (and it certainly feels that way to me), this is almost forever! In many ways my message and my opinions may have evolved a bit but the bottom lines and visions have not changed a whole lot.
I am also excited to see that some of my predictions have indeed come true, such as the major record labels drop- ping DRM – my crystal ball did okay on many occasions! Looking back at some 1,000 blog posts and over 20 essays it is evident that by far the most often covered subject is indeed what I (and many other people – I make no claim to having invented this moniker!) have come to call Music 2.0, the new principles that define the next iteration of the music business. All of this is also closely connected with a few other terms that I have co-coined and have come to be associated with: Music Like Water (MLW), the Flat Rate for Music, Feels Like Free (FLF), the Usator, Friction is Fiction, and the People Formerly Known As Consumers. In this book, I aim to just fine-tune the best of my writings from the past four years, while not altering the content too much, in order to preserve the timeliness and context of when it was actually written.
As the reader moves from 2003 to 2007, the evolution of my ideas and expressions can clearly be ob- served, and this should provide for a good and engaging read- ing experience, as well – even if jumping back and forth. The original content has therefore not been substantially altered; only grammar and spelling details have been cleaned up. All entries are presented chronologically (i.e., the oldest ones come first); the idea is just to make it a lot easier for my readers to dive into the Music 2.0 topics without having to click on and jump around hundreds of webpages and links. That, to me, is clearly one of the benefits of printed books – if it’s good, it can keep my attention all the way through, and does not give much room to distractions as much as the web does. Yet, I can skip around and still make sense of it when I am done. I hope that you enjoy this collection of essays, and would be delighted to get your feedback via my blog at www.mediafutur- ist.com or via email at [email protected] A final word on the Creative Commons license that I use for this book: My readers are free and certainly encouraged to re-use the content of this book, quote it, remix it, publish parts of it on blogs, etc., provided that it’s for non-commercial use, and that attribution is always given.
Music 2.0 – here we go! Gerd Leonhard Basel, Switzerland January 2008