Canary In A Coalmine: How Music Guides Other Industries

George Howard reflects on how the music business has, for good or for ill, often been one of the first industries to experience innovation, and how this will likely be the case for technologies such as the Blockchain, VR, and the Internet of Things.

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Guest Post by George Howard on Forbes

As a rule, I wish futurists would just go to the future and stop annoying those of us here in the present. Thus, I tend to avoid prognostication. Increasingly, however, my vocations require me to – paraphrasing my wise friend, Venture Capitalist, Andy Weissman – envision and bet on a future I’d like to see come to fruition in the next three to five years.

Still, it seems hollow to use this space to just “predict” what 2016 holds for the music business. Instead, I’d like to mostly invert the normative predictive New Year’s Eve trope, and return to a theme I often espouse: The Music Business is a Canary in the Coalmine for other industries. As goes the music industry, so goes other industries.

Participants in non-music industries, therefore, would be wise to view the music business as a cautionary tale.

I first put forth this Canary in a Coalmine idea back in the summer of 2010 on my personal blog, 9GiantSteps.com:

I truly believe that the music business is a canary in a coalmine, and therefore, it’s wise to view the travails and successes of the music business, and see what you might be able to avoid/apply in whatever work you do.

My dominant theme at the time of this initial writing was that innovation often occurs in the music space prior to other industries . In large part, this is because of music’s relatively small file sizes and its appeal to college students; who have a combination of more time than money and access to high speed internet.

Streaming

My thesis at the time has been borne out. I stated that streaming would become a prominent part of people’s lives – both for music and video – in a much more rapid fashion than most expected.

Similarly, I predicted that cloud based applications – the “cloud”, of course, being just another version of streaming, but semantically better applied to data/”work” than entertainment – would also become quickly prominent.

These positions were put forth in two different, but similarly titled, posts:

The Stream that Snuck up on You (2010)

The Cloud That Snuck up on You (2012)

Sharing Economy

While envisioning music as a leading edge for streaming/cloud-based computing is a fairly straightforward analogy, music’s most important predictive of the past few years is less readily apparent.

The innovations in the music business that led to both P2P file sharing and DAWs (like ProTools), and resulted in the dawn of the age of disintermediation – removing any middlemen that stand between content creators and content consumers – is truly only now picking up speed across industries.

The ability for a musician to easily and cheaply create their works and then present them to consumers without myriad institutions – labels, promoters, distributors, retailers – standing between, is similar both in spirit and mechanics not only to the relatively parallel analogies of people creating movies, documentaries, instructional videos, podcasts, books, blogs, etc. and disseminating directly to consumers with few or no middlemen, but also to more orthogonal industries.

For instance, Uber, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Etsy, and other ventures that are generally lumped under the heading of “sharing economy,” all trade in the same disintermediated approach that was first prominently visible in the music industry. Uber, et al. facilitate the unlocking of assets – either surplus personal goods (cars/spare bedrooms for Uber and Airbnb) or time/homemade goods (Taskrabbit, Etsy) – that heretofore required layers of institutional involvement to do so.

And, just as the road to disintermediated music business nirvana has been paved with recalcitrant incumbents clinging mightily to their at-risk business models; bad actors taking advantage of unforeseeable flaws in the systems; unintended (both “bad” and “good”) consequences; naysayers/Pollyannas; confused/enlightened legislators/bureaucrats; and pundits, pundits, pundits, so too has the disintermediated sharing economy of other industries.

Of course, there’s no going back either for music or for these other industries. Whether Uber, Lyft or some new entrant claims dominance, we’ll never go back to the old Taxi system any more than musicians will go back to a system that required them to trade the copyright in their sound recording (in perpetuity) in exchange for a label’s funding of the recording, nor will customers go back to paying for downloads of albums when they can stream any song they like.

Internet of Things

So, where is the Music Canary fluttering next? One fairly obvious use case of music leading the way to wide-spread adoption will be the aggressively sputtering Internet of Things movement.

I say, “aggressively sputtering” not because I believe that IoT is in any way flailing, but because it currently lacks a “killer app” to pull it out of the early adopter/early majority channel in which it appears stuck.

I believe that the IoT killer app could be Amazon’s Echo because of music.

I stated back in April that I thought the Echo was “one of Amazon’s potentially more innovative products.” If demand is any indicator (it is), the backordered status over Christmas of this device shows that others agree.

Having lived with the Echo since June, I can definitively state that it’s the first IoT device that really integrates in a manner that goes beyond gimmicky, and that is easily utilized by people other than just nerds like me who spend an inordinate amount of time hacking together IFTTT recipes.

Dominantly, this is because of music.

While you can utilize the Echo to get weather forecasts, and the time, and – again, if you’re a nerd, use it to voice control your lights, etc. – its current magic lies in the fact that you can walk into the room, and say, “Alexa, play Paul Desmond,” and instantly the room fills with God’s gift to the alto sax.

There’s no unlocking of an iPhone, and opening apps, and swiping and waiting. To use an Apple phrase, “it just works.”

I am a deeply passionate, fervent Sonos fan, and by no means does the sound of the Echo compare to that of the Sonos system, but you know who doesn’t care? My wife, my kids, and their friends, and also about 99% of the population who have neither the desire nor time to figure out how to open the Sonos app (wait for it to load – even a few seconds is too long), pick a music source, and pick a Sonos device to stream to when they can just walk into a room and say, “Alexa, play ‘Good to Be Alive.’”

If IoT is to really integrate in a meaningful way – and I believe it will – it will be led by the approach that Echo has taken with music. That is, a dead-simple application that while only hinting at the underlying potential of the device, delights the user enough to engage them in a manner that initiates usage and spurs further exploration.

My wife, for instance, now uses the Echo to not only call up music, but also to turn on and off the lights. Music was the leading edge. But for her being pulled into the Echo IoT world by music, she never would have engaged.

The music business is a “Canary in a Coalmine,” suggests George Howard, and other industries would be wise to harvest its predictive power (Photo credit: YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images)

Virtual Reality

No one doubts that VR is upon us, and that 2016 is likely to be the year when it becomes vastly more widespread. As my friend and colleague, Benji Rogers and I discussed in a conversation in two parts, we both believe that it will be music that largely drives the VR adoption.

Rather than repeat that conversation here, I urge you to read what Benji has to say:

Benji Rogers’ .bc Codec: A Fair Trade Approach To Music And Virtual Reality Using The Blockchain

Benji Rogers Gets Specific About The .bc Codec: A Fair Trade Music And VR Solution Using Blockchain

Blockchain

I’ve spilled a ton of words on Blockchain technology in this space this year, and I’ve created a short primer and collection of articles on this topic here:

An End Of Year Blockchain Summary And Primer

Through artists like Imogen Heap we’re already seeing music push Blockchain technology into a larger public consciousness , and – as is often the case – other industries – from VR (see above) to fine art to finance – are watching/following/engaging.

So, predicting that Blockchain tech will be more prominent in 2016 isn’t a very bold statement, but – again – the point of this post is more to show that we should be watching the music space for clues as to where other industries will land, and right now music is pushing Blockchain, and vice versa.

Empathy

I’ll end this column – my last of 2015 – with my own personal hope for 2016.

In a handful of columns this year, I’ve written the following:

Now more than ever – with so much talk about building walls that not only (in theory) keep others out, but also ensnare those within – empathy is crucial. Empathy allows us to overcome our fear of the “other”; to expand the circles — whether they are of our own makings or created by political forces — to be more inclusive in nature.

Art generally, and music, specifically, has long been a force for this type of empathic expansion. When we are emotionally moved by a piece of music, the arbitrary “otherness” — whether based on differences of skin color or religious/sexual orientation — begins to fall away, and understanding of commonality ensues. In short: More Art Equals Less War.

I truly hope and believe that it will be music and art that will cut through the divisive rhetoric and fear, and lead to understanding and empathy. This is truly the purpose of music, and it’s what keeps us coming back to it – irrespective of the business elements surrounding it.

At its core, music isn’t so much a canary in a coalmine, but rather a homing pigeon that somehow, someway knows how to help us find our way home.