Thursday, February 28, 2008

The End of The Music Industry

Forrester Research is now predicting that half of all music sold in the U.S. will be digital by 2011, with the tide turning against the CD in 2012. "This is the end of the music industry as we know it," stated James McQuivey, VP and principal analyst at Forrester... "experiments in ad-supported downloads will be silenced by the powerful combination of DRM-free music and on-demand music streaming on sites like imeem.com."  McQuivey says that ad-supported Web music services are not the future and that ad-supported music should be "on the radio where it belongs."
OK, maybe I'm missing something here, so what does he call all the banner ads we're forced to see to get to the free on-demand streams....?  Aren't the licenses for this music being subsidized by the advertising, in addition to equity being given to the labels??

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