In the City 2005: Tomorrow People

Move over William Gibson - a panel of experts mapped the next decade in digital music and media at this Interactive @ In The City session on 30 September 2005, reports Deirdre Molloy. Six months later, is their crystal ball gazing dated, confused, back-to-front, out of whack or just plain wrong..?

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Interactive @ In the City 2005: Tomorrow People Move over William Gibson – a panel of experts mapped the next decade in digital music and media at this Interactive @ In The City session - in association with NMK - in Manchester on 30 September 2005. Six months later, is their crystal ball gazing dated, confused, back-to-front, out of whack or just plain wrong? Report by Deirdre Molloy [<a href="/me/add/">Register</a> and post your own comments on this article below...] TRENDS TIMELINE: 2006-2015 Chair Toby Lewis of MusicAlly kicked off the session by asking the panel to start with their predictions for the coming year... Stardate 2006: William Higham, The Next Big Thing: The iPod phone is released; Kenwood launch the MP3 microsystem. Chad Wollen: Mash ups go mainstream. Jon Baines, Lateral: 5% of marketing spend moves into engagement marketing, for example Heineken own more than 80% of rock festivals globally. Stardate 2007: William Higham, The Next Big Thing: Amazon launch music download service. Chad Wollen: Digital content insurance is launched. Currently the average British person has 155 albums (8 gigabytes) online (but in the digital realm there’s currently no insurance back-up). There are now 53 varieties of DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems. Heineken A&R’s artists The Refreshers who headline at Glastonbury Festival. Stardate 2008: William Higham, The Next Big Thing: Apple make the iPod multiformat. CD sales start to fall away. Chad Wollen: Mobile music downloads hit 4 million (80% bought by 18-24 year olds). The “share of wallet issue” dominates – there’s only so much money, content and channels that can compete for that spend. Jon Baines, Lateral: Web 2.0 officially launches. All existing websites are rendered obsolete. Data is oriented around consumers instead of companies. With video on demand, a lot of web agencies go out of business because blogging is so big that no-one cares about design. The web becomes simplified. Brand-owned content is big. Stardate 2009: William Higham, The Next Big Thing: Walmart (in the UK that’s Asda) buys Universal but an attack on the morality of hip hop is resurrected and hits Universal hardest. The video iPod rules. Chad Wollen: Playlisting eclipses mixtapes due to the impact of RSS whereby groups of friends share mixtapes. A micro-economy of music is flourishing with people sharing stuff they know about, just under the mainstream radar – a cluster of technologies will help drive and enhance this scene. Jon Baines, Lateral: As ecommerce increases, the landscape starts to change on the high street – shops become showrooms. Starbucks takes over the world and coffee becomes the main purpose of going to the high street. The last media stores on the high street go out of business. Stardate 2010: William Higham, The Next Big Thing: Nokia release the snapper phone, a phone that actually works really well that is also a mobile music player ;-) It’s a standard phone that you can snap additional pieces onto. BSkyB launch the Library Channel (VOD may be a little sooner William admits). Chad Wollen: Last year (2004) there was 200m live performances and 100m live DJ sets – this will get bigger and more important. Music listening reaches an all time high. Jon Baines, Lateral: Oil prices soar. The price of an average gig is £200 as we can’t afford to travel. The world becomes smaller. Online gaming hits all all-time high. World Of Warcraft is recognized as a nation state. Brands now bankroll 50% of artists’ development costs. Stardate 2011: William Higham, The Next Big Thing: Amazon buys HMV, partly because people trust Amazon more. CD sales fall off massively and all are discounted. Two thirds of music stores are download booths. Ted Turner buys NTL (NTL having bought Telewest previously). Chad Wollen: Video games sales are larger than music sales (the music industry needs to think about the deep media and cultural shifts that are changing peoples consumer spending habits now in 2006, he noted, it's not all about illegal downloads!). Jon Baines, Lateral: Coffee is found to be carcinogenic – it is banned and a global recession ensues. Steve Jobs is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Stardate 2012: William Higham, The Next Big Thing: The Sony Smartbox internet TV set is released, [I noted this prediction is based solely on already passive models of consumers - not prosumers - and underestimates UGC (user generated content)]. People will associate the computer with work and won’t want it at home. IPTV won't replace broadcast TV, but it could replace TV that has already been shown, for instance there is already (in 2005) “Dave TV” in the US. Chad Wollen: 20% of all legal downloads are albums. There’s also a problem with the industry because of gender-skewing in the medium. Jon Baines, Lateral: MP3 dowlnloders and Linux users unite to assassinate Steve Jobs and he is anointed a Saint. No distinction between band and brand exists. Stardate 2013: William Higham, The Next Big Thing: NTL and Freeview launch IPTV services. The Korean “music virus” strikes. Sky launches its music creation channel. Chad Wollen: The number of music devices carried per person plateaus. Jon Baines, Lateral: The entire notion of singles charts is abolished; there’s just “the chart”. Lynx tops the charts. [The panel then skipped a year to compensate for the acceleration of time itself…] Stardate 2015: William Higham, The Next Big Thing: Home networking goes mainstream. The iCradle is launched – you can download anything from web or TV to your iPod. Downloading falls away. Chad Wollen: We have casual library browsing by Bluetooth, which replaces mates browsing through your vinyl/CD collection. Jon Baines, Lateral: Chinese is now mandatory in UK high schools. The entire notion of intellectual property just goes away. Multiculturalism runs rife. Stardate 2016: Chad Wollen: Amazon and MyCokeMusic close down. Walmart sells Universal to NTL. Freeview buys Warners-EMI. Each TV company now owns a records company. The notion of shuffle changes how we discover and consume music and spreads diversity. Chad added a grace note: people now automatically give you all their data when they rip your CD - therefore artists have increased ability to use the data they have collected. And consumer tagging rules. Jon Baines, Lateral: Selling direct-to-consumer is no longer viable. Artists make all their money through residuals. William Higham, The Next Big Thing: Loads of products will fail. People want stuff that’s easy, hence the focus on TV. Chad Wollen: People will be more creative and inventive with music, and more local. Toby Lewis (Chair): what about keyboards? Jon Baines, Lateral: Jon demurred on the persistence of keyboards, adding voice recognition will work in another few years (from now in 2005) and the iToy will be another of the many ways to engage that will be human-centric. William Higham, The Next Big Thing: Will added in closing that access to music trumps ownership. ---------------- See the original <a href="/event/2005/10/01/inthecity-mobile-music" target="blank">EVENT PAGE</a> About the Panelists: William Higham – Chairman, <a href="http://www.nbtresearch.com/" target="blank">Next Big Thing</a> / <a href="http://www.nbtresearch.blogspot.com/" target="blank">NBT blog</a> Jon Bains - Founder, <a href="http://www.lateral.net/" target="blank">Lateral</a> Chad Wollen - New Media Consultant (and former associate director at the Henley Centre and Head of Marketing and Strategy for Yahoo!) Chair: Toby Lewis - Digital music analyst, <a href="http://www.musically.com/" target="blank">Music Ally</a> Interactive @ In the City 2005 Panels: NMK ran the Interactive panels at In the City in Manchester on 30th September 2005. The other Interactive panel reports are here: <a href="/article/2006/04/17/inthecity-digital-high-street" target="blank">The Digital High Street</a> - 30th September 2005 <a href="/article/2006/04/17/inthecity-creativity-A&R" target="blank">Creativity & A&R In The Digital Age</a> - 30th September 2005 <a href="/article/2006/04/17/inthecity-mpod-ipod" target="blank">mPod The New iPod?</a> - 30th September 2005 For more information about In the City's annual music conference and convention, visit the <a href="http://www.inthecity2006.com/2006/" target="blank">In The City website</a>

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In the City 2005: Tomorrow People

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