Record Exec Says Music’s Future Is In The Clouds
In a speech to college musicians, CEO of Vancouver-based Nettwork Music Group Terry McBride said smart-phone apps “will radically change the business.”
“Upcoming smart phones from companies like Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, are likely to create new business models, he said. He was speaking in Boston in a lecture series on music management at Berklee College of Music, a 4,000-student college. McBride predicted the smart phone will replace the PC as the control center for media.
Mr. McBride is CEO of Vancouver-based Nettwerk Music Group, which manages Avril Lavigne, Barenaked Ladies and Sarah MacLachlan, among other artists. He said he anticipates that many music lovers will start to access smart-phone apps like Slacker’s subscription-radio service.
If they can create their own playlist, he says, they are likely to stop buying downloads, since they know they will always be able to retrieve music they want to hear from the cloud, the computer industry term for content and applications stored remotely and accessed over the Internet. “There’s no need to own product,” he said.
Ofcourse, cloud-based services are dependant on the user being connected to a network. Perhaps when GSM is the standard across all Canadian operators and underground coverage is improved, I can forego local music for my iDrive in the cloud.