this makes me feel better about the fact that whilst i love making music (and currently have a couple of albums worth of material), I only seem to spend a very small amount of time doing it.

But on the other hand, I do need for it to be one of the income streams that between them just about supports me at the moment and may one day provide some financial security.

Rich
Xx

However, what I would really like to add to this discussion, is the issue of what motivates and enables music makers and the people who do things around music – from photography and artwork to software, from instrument makers to marketers. i.e. the producing side of the market place. I think the major wild card is, that the producing side of the house isn’t only motivated by money. The argument could be made, that most of the better one’s aren’t fundamentally motivated by money at all, but by the need to be heard or seen.

That reality alone guarantees that there will always be new relationships between producers and consumers especially as technology changes and therefore (as a fallout) culture and legal frameworks change.

While Orlowski may bash the creative commons for his own commercial reasons, there is a reasons it’s becoming so widely used. Creators of art (including musicians, photographers, writers and even software developers) are flocking to new intellectual property models, because being heard/seen/noticed is more important than making money.

Sure, some people will make some money using various business models. But more and more decent art will be free.

A big reason is that it takes less time and money to produce, market and distribute decent quality. That’s due to the amazing technology evolution. High end tools are becoming affordable (inexpensive or free) like never before. For making music, pictures, software and marketing campaigns. The supply side is growing quickly (good stuff as well as crap) and economics 101 suggests what that will do to prices.

This would/should already have occurred sooner, if it wasn’t for the cartel like behavior of the music industry, which have been successful in artificially throttling the supply side for years. With that throttling disappearing, prices have only one place to go: down. There will be fewer musician millionaires in the future. Heck, there were few – if any – before the 1970s.

Arguably the last 30-40 years will prove to be a short blip in history – the one special time when musicians could become rich just by making music.

But ultimately, we all seem to be in agreement on the main thread here: and that’s the fact that audience relationship with music consumption is complicated, and it’s unlikely to get simpler any time soon.

Mandating a universal subscription method as a one-size-fits all solution (even with the sideline in ‘bottled water’) is a utopian ideal — and, as with all such utopian ideals, it’s misguided and kind of broken — and you need to lose far more than you’ll gain in order to make it stick.

The new generations growing up with p2p, Ipods and most important of all, playlists, just don’t care to own the music the way you and I do. They still use music to tell themselves and everyone else aboout their identity though. They just do it by going to concerts and listing hundreds of favorite bands on their social networking profiles – do they even own a bookshelve?

I believe supscription services will happen but I agree that it won’t be the nly solution. A basic service and a more expensive one. And as long as our generatio is around, cd’s and lp’s which preserves the physical art. But the future is committed to digital art. And don’t forget for the the younger generations music already feels free – like water.

I just wanted to clarify what I think is implicit in this post: that people consume music in different ways and there are varying levels of importance placed on music depending on who you talk to.

The music-like-water talk doesn’t irk me because it’s a “prediction of the future”, but because it’s presented as “the only way”. Given that people experience music in different ways, there’s no reason to think there’s not room in the “future” ;-) for a la carte, subscription, ad-supported AND music like water models.

I happen to fully agree with you that once a song is released, it belongs to the listener: There’s no way Elvis Presley could’ve known the effect that “Heartbreak Hotel” would have on the millions of people who now use that as a “bookmark” to some momentous (or mundane) emotional moment in their lives.

But the fact is, some people don’t connect to music this way. And to them, they’ll probably prefer tap water.

The book analogy, though flawed, was just to illustrate that people don’t just turn music on and off. They do all sorts of different things including dancing, collecting, studying and sharing. It’s cultural, social and personal.

Like literature, music is not essential for survival, but nor is it simply a consumer item. It defines and reflects culture, contributes greatly to the wellbeing and welfare of a society and has educational, social and psychological effects.

Like all media, it has the capacity to aspire to great art, and the ability to exist for purely commercial reasons. It can be like water. It can be like air. It can be like petrol and it can be like pretty much anything else you care to name if you put your mind to it.

I’m afraid this comes back to my antagonism towards totalising theories: saying that the future of the music business is in selling ‘music-like-water’ is about as helpful as saying that in the future, all meals will be dispensed from a vending machine.

As a rule of thumb, you’ll always know when a commentator has either grossly oversimplified things or is just plain wrong: they’ll have used the word ‘future’ in a sentence.

But people don’t consume music the way they consume cable television, as Kusek suggests. The relationship is more akin to the relationship that they have with books.

By saying this I assume you’re implying that everyone in the whole world enjoys music in the same way. Well, I think this is short-sighted. You can be right about wealthy North-american and European listeners but I’m afraid you’re wrong about the way music is appreciated in other parts of the world, for instance in Brazil and other Latin-American nations. For these societies, music is something that while it is deeply ingrained in daily life it is, at the same time, a disposable product in relation to other material goods that are essential for staying alive: clothes, water, food, a shelter, etc.

So, yeah, claiming that music is like water doesn’t mean that it always has to be unexpensive. Just think about Evian and Perrier. While water is a universal good that everyone can have access to by paying a monthly small fee, some people are willing to pay an extra just because of the brand or some other immaterial aspect.

In a case a flatfee is implemented, there will still be a small group of music fans willing to pay more for an exclusive release, just like the disbox package that Radiohead are going to launch.