I think often of what influence the Internet will inevitably have on the music industry. Obviously it's a process still in turbulent transition. I consider myself a very average "music consumer" -- white, male, mid-twenties, liberally inclined, etc. -- so I keep trying to figure it out through my meager experiences of trying to get tunes through PC. Usually, if I'm going to download a song, it will either be a brand new release or a semi-classic hit which doesn't receive much playtime. For example, earlier I was trying to hunt down Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," from So, which I have on cassette but not CD, to make a mix tape (well, I guess they're mix CDs now, but you know what I mean). I hate programs like KaZaa because they always come bundled with a wacky array of spyware and unsolicited applications and what I generally consider to be intrusive if not illegal.

I came across a site called Media Club, which seems based in the Ukraine. After setting up a minimum account balance of only ten bucks, you can download a song, and you essentially pay for your traffic -- about five megabytes per dollar, which comes to about a dollar per average song. Not so bad. This seems like the most logical design for the future of revenue-generating music publishing and broadcasting. So does this mean that when, at one time, a pop song was valued for its brevity (and thus replayability), it will soon become valued for its length? Will the average song grow to become eight or ten ... or thirty ... minutes long? It makes sense, since music has historically been lengthy. Only since the advent of radio has there ever really been a push to limit a song's track time. We shall see...

  posted by S. Parker @ 9:02 PM