Gee, Limewire being shut down… I was one of the first to question CDBaby signing on with Limewire originally and given the oh it’s not the same thing b.s. What a shock, not!

Sorry but you guys collectively are so out of touch, you make Joe Biden look in the know.

In Japan, CD rentals work because in Japan, Honor means something.

As for myspace, it sucks and always has. I check my myspace page monthly, no more than that because it is seen as a lame site by both venues and users for the past 3 years.

Fan Funding is dead already. Hello Morning’s failure to deliver on before Christmas to sponsors is proof of that.

As for Pomplamoose, maybe in Portland, nowhere else…

iPad, duh, I predicted that when it first shipped… You all said I was way off base.

Ticket prices? Duh… The economy is bad, people cannot afford to pay the prices for many
main stream acts these days. Heck, even 5 dollars is too much for many indie shows.

Google music, duh… what a shock, they cannot even produce a unified Android platform and
you honestly expect them to create a viable music platform?

Google music may come but, it will die a soon death just as Yahoo music, and so many other search engine based music businesses have.

Cloud computing is dead. Apple may offer such a feature but, the fact that the connection can fail renders
the cloud useless.

Video is moving away from Video. It’s all digital these days, The future will be more motion capture and less real people in videos.

Sound Exchange… I’m still waiting on the check… And I am owed money…

Your caller about the difference financially, is an idiot. If you made 1,000,000 last year and make
900,000 this year, you are operating at a loss. Music, like it or not, is a business.

As for creativeness vs profit, WRONG. People don’t buy creativeness, they buy what they see as a need.

All gonna get famous, dream on…

American Idol, Rock Band, please… Ratings are all that counts with television. AI is still amongst the
highest rated television shows in the US. Rock Band, already dead. The Beatles catalog coming on board
signed that death warrant.

Happy New Year

My money’s on streaming. Whether it’s through Spotify, Rdio or whatever Apple might have up its sleeve, streaming is going to play an even bigger role in music consumption.

Nobody cares about streaming audio quality. The quality for right now is good enough, and will get better. There’s a reason why YouTube is one of the top sites for music discovery, and it ain’t streaming quality. It’s availability.

And syncing from device to device is stupid. You’ll keep your favorites in a collection online. Maybe you’ll mirror it on your laptop or mobile device, but it’ll be mastered in the cloud.

You won’t actually “own” a copy of anything, but you won’t care, because anything you want to listen to will be available whenever you want it, wherever you want it.

It’s already happening with Netflix, Spotify, Grooveshark, etc. People will absolutely pay for anywhere/anytime access with an infinite selection of good-enough quality.

The biggest barrier to this is licensing, not technology.

Other thoughts:

I’ll be happily surprised if Google Music is a success, because they are absolutely terrible at social apps. Ditto with Apple and Ping. These companies are all about algorithms and engineering. Remember, Google *bought* YouTube while its own Google Video withered. And remember Orkut? Anyone?

Limewire: I’m not sure it will make a big impact. The people who love it will move on to less-detectable networks, everyone else will continue on unaware it even existed.

Japan CD renting: I was curious about this, so I googled this up:

A Lesson From Japan’s CD Rental Industry
http://lsolum.typepad.com/copyfutures/2004/10/a_lesson_from_j.html

tl,dr: most of the rental copies are illicitly ripped by the customers, but it’s generally overlooked because the rental shops pay compulsory licensing fees.

Fan funding: it works when it works.

@Robert Lee King – Good to have you on board for another year! It wouldn’t be the same without you.

@scottandrew – I agree this year will see the rise of streaming. I’m still not convinced that the current model we are seeing is what will last long term. I’ve know several people that have been burned by a streaming company going out of business, or changing their terms of service. I’m nit sure I want my entire music catalog locked up and subject to the whims of a money hungry music industry.

Kevin, glad to still be around:)…

ScottAndrew,

Really? what happens when you have no electricity? Happens all the
time all over the world. No library then. What happens when the servers are down for maintenance? No library then. What happens when bandwidth runs low as it already is. No library then.

There are already too many devices eating up the available bandwidth in any given country. This is one of the reasons we are switching from
IPV4 to IPV6 all over the world. There just aren’t enough available addresses to support the ever growing amount of connected devices.

More and more, Internet providers are limiting total monthly bandwidth usage. As streaming continues to grow, more will come up against that limit.

Most email providers limit the maximum size of a single email to 10 megabytes or less.

Apple limits the size of applications for the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch to 20 megabytes due to the cost of transmission and bandwidth used over
3G networks, this won’t change anytime soon even with 4G because the bandwidth is actually lower on the higher speed 4G than it is on 3G.

This too will happen with streaming, it has to because the bandwidth does not exist to support the ever increasing demands being placed on the internet as a whole.

Ever used twitter? I have not seen a single day when twitter’s servers weren’t down, at least for a brief period due to too much bandwidth usage. The same will happen with cloud based music and video services.

Are you truly prepared to go without your music collection simply because you were too lazy to synch a device to another? I’m not!

Hey Kevin!

This is an unrelated comment…but I saw this video about Portland and thought of y’all

Ashley

http://www.hulu.com/watch/205428/portlandia-i-dream-of-the-90s

Thanks Ashley,

That new show is all the buzz in Portland these days. I love that video!

The Bolt