C7.3

The Future Of The Music Industry:

I think that the music industry is likely to change rapidly in multiple ways in the future - many of which could be considered bad or good depending on how you view them. I'm going to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of: physical copies of music, streaming, AI, working remotely and social media. 

Physical Music:

Recently, an increase in the ownership of physical copies of music has occurred and this has been known as the vinyl revival and is most notably seen in the year 2020 when there was 20-25 million sales of vinyl in the US. This is likely due to the Covid pandemic causing people to be stuck inside and therefore streaming music more frequently - treating it as a radio. 

I think that the future is likely to hold a further increase in the demand and release of vinyl and CDs for multiple reasons. A vinyl can come with collectible items as, a record tending to be quite large, it is able to also encase things such as clothing, posters etc. This reinforces the relationship between the artists and their audience which makes the listeners more loyal and therefore the artist's lifestyle more sustainable. Another advantage seen from listening to vinyl is that it has a 'better sound'. What I mean by this is that, despite having the same file format as a CD or on a streaming service, what vinyl uniquely has is imperfections and small sounds that are different depending on the conditions of the record and where you're playing it. These small imperfections are what gives a vinyl a more 'raw' feel and makes it feel more natural or humans which means we are automatically more drawn to listening to it. Another aspect of this is that vinyls haven't been out of fashion for more than 35 - 40 years which means a lot of people who are 40+ now will have a big sense of nostalgia when listening to music with those imperfections as appose to music that is strictly clean of them. A further advantage of selling vinyl is that it makes the artists' life more sustainble through the money that you can sell a vinyl for as, nowadays, they tend to be £20 - £30. However, this could also been seen as a disadvantage as, with streaming, royalties are ongoing every time people listen to your music whereas the payment for a

vinyl or CD is a one off payment. Another show of a disadvantage from the worth of vinyl is that it is very expensive in comparison to streaming services (a lot of which are free for all music but with adverts) and so this could either mean that it doesn't become much more popular due to people not being able to pay that much, especially as the cost of living rises; or it could mean that they continue to become popular due to the people who are able continue to buy them but then this results in the music industry becoming really expensive which puts people off of it. Another disadvantage of selling vinyl

or CDs is that it's not as convenient as streaming as not everyone has a record player or CD player and it's harder to listen to on a portable device compared to a phone which can play pretty much any music as long as you have WiFi. Due to these reasons, I think it is likely that artists may continue to push physical copies of music to make their careers more sustainable and people who are interested in music and supporting their favourite artists will buy the products but it's unlikely to become the main way of listening to music.

Advantages of Streaming:

I think that the main way of listening to music in the future will reflect the current situation of streaming. This is because streaming has many obvious advantages and the disadvantages are more hidden and not widely spoken about. The advantages include how convenient and accessible it is for anyone with some kind of device and WiFI connection to be able to play probably any type of music they want. These are usually free but with some limitations and adverts but you can play any music with no ads for not a very high fee considering what you're getting as it only costs £11.99/month for a Spotify subscription, £10.99/month for Amazon Music and £10.99/month for Apple Music. Paying this

little and getting pretty much unlimited access to all music is what draws people away from CDs and vinyl and towards streaming with the added bonuses of being able to make your own playlists out of any music you want from whichever artists you want whereas with vinyl, you have to listen to the album in order without being able to easily skip tracks and CDs can play in specific orders but even they can't switch albums. Another huge advantage of streaming services is their easy exposure for artists as it costs very little to pay a music distributor to put your music onto different streaming platforms. For example, it only costs £19.99/year for unlimited releases on Ditto Music, £18.41/year for unlimited releases on Distrokid and £8.00 per release on

CDbaby (single or album). However, with these further advances of accessibility for exposure and releasing your music also means that your competition is now times ten harder than it was and I predict that this will only become worse as times goes on. It takes more effort now to gain an independent following before you can even think about making your music into your career compared to twenty years ago where you needed a record label if you wanted to get anywhere and then they'd provide the promotion and help you get the following for your music. Another disadvantage is that of listening to streamed music does not provide you with being able to get collectible items along with your music like with vinyl which means that people are less likely to connect with the artist and be invested in their musical journey. I think that it is possible that the future will circle back round to putting record labels back onto a pedestal due to the wealth changing into being a marketable, popular brand and so the only people who build a proper career off of music are those who record labels invest in and everyone else falls into the same place that most artists were twenty years ago as presence on streaming services will even out to mean next to nothing without promotion. Building on this, streaming services encourage passive listening which isn't necessarily a bad thing as it's nice to have background noise however, it will mean that, in the future, more and more people will listen to music as though it's white noise and not appreciate or really care about nuances or anything in the music that they like which also discourages their investment in specific artists. 

Disadvantages of Streaming:

Another disadvantage which, in my opinion, is probably one of the biggest problems and yet most hidden is how bad streaming is for the environment. You may not think it as it isn't at all obvious, nor widely known but due to streaming services (like most of Internet websites and apps) use servers to play everything we listen to and these servers heat up a lot (much like how your laptop heats up when you use it or your phone heats up when you charge it) and this massively contributes to global warming and climate change. A stark example of the impact streaming specifically has on the environment is that five hours of streaming is the carbon equivalent of one plastic CD case (17 hours = one vinyl record). Originally, this may seem on the side of streaming with CDs only being able to play just over an hour of music but you can use this CD hundreds of times with the carbon emission staying the same whereas the carbon emissions increase the more you listen to streamed music. In our current culture, it's unrealistic to expect everybody to be able to completely switch over to listening to only CDs and vinyl but something that would improve your carbon footprint would be to limit streaming music down to five hours or less every day. Hopefully, in doing this, it will contribute to less carbon emissions in the future which could be a reason that the future holds more physical copies of music than we currently do. Onto a slightly less drastic disadvantage but still a big one that's hidden is the low pay out to artists from these streaming services. One of the higher paying is Apple Music which pays £0.0058 per stream

and the lower end has Youtube Music at £0.0026 which is rather minimal, especially for smaller artists. To demonstrate how low the pay is here, I used the current UK minimum wage (£11.44/hour) and the average hours someone works a week (37 hours) and worked out the average monthly wage for a full time worker would be £1693.12. In order to achieve this number off of streaming, you'd need at least 291,918 streams a month using Apple Music but that varies depending on the streaming service. In comparison, you'd need to sell 57 (£30) or 85 (£20) vinyl to achieve that. I think that the future of the music industry could do with less of a focus on streaming services as they have too low of a pay as well as not being able to pick up the royalties from everywhere your song is played - TikTok being a prime example with many artists having their music removed from the platform recently in protest to the low pay (roughly £0.000037037 per stream). 

AI:

In regards to the use of AI in music, I think that AI isn't going to go away anytime soon and that can be either a very good thing or a very bad thing - likely a bit of both. We can already see how AI is taking over real people now in the art community with companies having less of a need to employ real artists for jobs when it is much cheaper, quicker and easier to just type a prompt into a bit of AI software. This is likely to become a bigger problem in the future of music as some traces are already being seen in music by entire songs being written by AI or arranged by AI. This will cause a lot of lost work for

artists as record labels could decide to just use AI as it will do everything they tell it to and not require any kind of pay cut - the same goes for any company making an advert or radio stations. Also due to the increasing cases of passive listening, many people are likely not to notice or mind due to barely knowing what they're listening to anyway. But, I think one of the downfalls of AI will be the legal side of it. There's already doubts about copyright regarding things that are made by AI as there's the person who codes the AI, the person who writes in the prompt and then the many, many pieces of work from a variety of artists that the AI takes the bits from to create something 'new'. In this case, it might cause AI to be payed with the same amount that was put into it by the company - more or less nothing. If it can't be copyrighted, then it technically doesn't belong to anyone in which case, anyone and everyone has the right to play it wherever they want. On the flipside of this, AI drummers are very helpful for artists for inspiration as well as to help keep them in time in a more comfortable way than using a metronome when they're absent of a drummer. Also, having a temporary AI corrupted music industry could turn out to be a good thing as it may encourage more active listening from audiences as people will become more appreciative of real human-made music as, AI has far to go with being relatable to the human experience and sounding natural. I don't think people will ever stop listening to music because it's so deeply embedded into most cultures. A common and early example of this is the typical way we talk to babies which can be described as a 'sing-song' voice - this shows that music helps us express ourselves to the point of it being the first way of communication we have with the first people in our lives. This shows that music is too deeply important and embedded into us that people will never stop making music, simply adapt to the technology and environment at the time. 

Remote Recording:

In the future, I think that music is going to be predominantly made remotely and it will be more rare for people to make music together whilst actually in the same room - especially for recordings. This is already becoming more prominent in the recent few years as well as a rise of people making music purely by themselves with the ability to separately record many tracks on a DAW. People working together remotely is shown hugely in the making of Folklore by Taylor Swift which was made entirely remotely as it was during 2020 (it was also done in Evermore by Swift, made in the same year). This was an adaption to their surroundings as Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner operated from Long Pond

Studios in New York whilst Swift made a small recording studio at her home with a sound engineer (Laura Sisk) to help. These albums are amazing examples of remote writing and recording especially as they both give a sense of an intimate sound between the artist and the audience as though all of the music is specifically for them. It doesn't have a disjointed sound - quite the opposite within a contemporary folk genre, it amazingly sounds as though they all were in the same studio together. This shows how music will become more remote in the future due to it being more convenient and likely cheaper as things will be done quicker and therefore less time needs to be spent in the studio. Taylor Swift has

proceeded to further demonstrate her use of remotely recording for her albums as she is currently on a world tour yet still had her album Midnights come out alongside her rerecordings of Fearless, Red,
Speak Now and 1989 and also a brand new album (The Tortured Poets Department). Considering how little time she'd have to be able to record any of these albums, the method of recording remotely proves that it saves time as it doesn't hold any of the distractions that a studio might hold as well as being able to do it in most places (e.g., a hotel room). I think that this will definitely become a very important part of making music in the future due to its convenience as well as lack of expense and ability to feel coherent. 

Social Media:

Social media is already a very important part of our current society with most people's moods or opinions being dictated by it. Due to the rise of social media, the idea of an artist being judged by their branding and image became further perpetuated and it's at the point where it is now more important than ever for an artist to have the right image and personality in order for anyone to listen to their music. I think that in the future, all promotion and marketing will be transferred over to social medias

and the artists' websites with little to no in person promotion (e.g., posters). One of the first people to recognise and utilise social media in the way of marketing and promotion was Taylor Swift and this is shown through her large social media presence and you can see how she was quickly followed by many other artists. I think that the future will make more of a big deal out of these aspects of an artist which means that they will have to be the right image, say the right things and act in the way that they're expected for who they're known to be. This is because those who are in the public eye get criticised hugely constantly which is why they have to be careful what they say in fear of it being misconstrued in some way by people either

misunderstanding or people actively looking for a reason to hate them for some reason. I think that social media is good in its way of accessibility and easy exposure for artists (or anyone who uses it) but I also think that it will become more difficult to be in the public eye as time goes on due to the use of social media and people having the power to say what they want hidden behind the guise of a screen. As a result, people in the future (and a lot now) will have more competition and pressure to stand out for fear of blending in with the crowd of people who are trying to get noticed. On top of trying to be unique, future artists will also have to be able to deal with increasingly more hate as their career improves. Building upon a previous point, I think that this again shows the possibility of record labels becoming more necessary in the future despite their current state looking rather bleak at present. I think this because artists will need the advanced promotion and manging in order to stand out from the crowd and be able to make a career from their music. 

Conclusion:

In conclusion, I think that the future poses a lot more challenges such as trying to stand out, competing with AI as well as being able to earn enough money to be able to stick with music as a career but the future also holds a lot of exciting opportunities that we would have never thought possible twenty years ago such as a more personal relationship between artist and audience as well as more accessibility to music and artists than ever before for cheap prices. I think, going into the future, we need to consider some of the hidden problems such as payment and the environment but also explore and experiment with new technologies and ways of making music that are coming with time. 

Future of Music Conference: