Fred Wilson on the New Streaming

Something Important Is On The Horizon In The Music Business

In an always-on connected world, nobody will need downloads. I'll reorganize what I think is Fred's most important message to content owners and distributors, and service providers.

For content owners and distributors:

We need someone to create an easy to search streamable library of all the recorded music in the world. We need to be able to grab a track and embed it on our blog. We need to be able to see how many people played it... This all has to be licensed and legal and it has to result in money flowing to the artists.

For service providers (this goes to my thesis that it's the services who will enable the crowd to determine what acts get discovered and what music becomes popular, rather than relying on big promotion):

We need others to be able to crawl these user pages with the embedded music and create algorithms based on who posted it, how often it was played, and how often it was reblogged and linked to. The services that do all of that need to be able to play the music that flows out of these social algorithms in the same way.