The search for the "Music Business v2.0" business model

Let me spoil this for you: You're on a quest for the holy grail, dudes. There is no new business model.

The time when music was a simple business is over. As long as recorded music has existed, the industry around it has been based on an ancient paradigm of creating a product, pressing it into physical form and exchanging said physical product into cash money.

No more.

The problem here is not that people in the industry don't get this. I can assure each and everyone out there that they get it very very thoroughly. The issue is that it seems everyone is chasing that one simple cover-all new model that'll save music business from this crisis.

It's becoming clearer by the day, that the whole field of business known as music will in the future be a highly fragmented and diverse market where people will generate revenue in wildly different ways, instead of everyone just following the same old pattern. Just the simple solutions (sell music digitally, sell music to films and ads or use recorded music only as a promotional tool and make money off some peripheral thing) are already quite different from one another, but I'd strongly predict that in the (not-too-distant) future there will be almost as many business models as there will be players on the field.

And that's nothing but a good thing.

I'm really looking forwards to seeing what people will come up with.

(I'll probably be writing a bit more on this specific subject in the future, but my trust in digital sales in the long run are pretty much slim-to-none. There's just no way people will want to pay in the larger scale for immaterial music recordings.)