Is the industry going to ruin?
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Among audiophiles, for example, streaming over the Internet is regularly discussed. Sure, it’s convenient and listeners have a huge assortment of music to choose from. But because of bandwidth, the audio is often compressed. And besides the technical aspects, there is the commercial set-up of the streaming market that makes it difficult for musicians to make a living. All things that need to be talked about.
Can it be done better technically and can a different arrangement of the commercial part of this system be found or enforced? But is the industry going to die?
The alleged bad influence of “big money” is also discussed quite critically. The financier-driven companies that introduce a ‘new’ model every year or companies that exploit their monopoly position, these are practices that we should certainly denounce. But is the industry going to disappear? I don’t think so.
We will continue to listen to music
We can safely assume that music will always go from musicians to listeners. Making and listening to music is a very human thing. That’s not going to change. But the path along which is certainly going to change. The cultural ecosystem and the audio within it will really continue to exist, but all sorts of things are constantly happening in those systems. Those changes are threatening all kinds of people and businesses. After all, we were just getting along so nicely.
In short, is the industry going to die? For part of the audio ecosystem, it is indeed so, that is going to change at the very least and sometimes even to disappear.
But the ecosystem itself remains. And, is it bad? For people and things in it, sometimes it is indeed bad, they just have to adapt. But if you look at the whole, there is no reason for fatalism. It’s supposed to change for the better and sometimes for the worse. As I said, we really do continue to make music and listen to it.