Music 2.0 By Gerd Leonhard (Free PDF)

It’s been quite a revolution in the scene of music consumption (!) in the last few years. By emerge of indie artists to the surface, music industries have slowly faded away. This is of course nothing but good news to all those real talents that have been buried underground. Nowadays, if you put all those bulk of garbage that MTV offers as “music” aside, a listening ear has been matured up to an upper-intermediate degree. The customer doesn’t feel the urge to choose from a limited range of choices. Back in 1999 as I recall, if you wanted to buy something fun, there was Smash Mouth, there was Sugar Ray and Barenaked Ladies and that was almost all. All those bands signed with all those giant record labels like BMI, Geffen, Columbia or Warner Bros had almost full certainty about how much their new junk will sell, simply because alternatives were seldom heard or observed by the public. Of course there always have been huge bands with genuine talents although they were signed to big labels but that's not the point here. But the major issue was how to get it all to the industry. The result of this "betraya"l to music to its real value, was the uprising of such virtueless acts of shame i.e. the boy bands. If New Kids On the Block started it all, it was nothing until shameful clowns like Backstreet Boys, Take That and others came up. Their public acceptance was the direct result of a frightening beast called the music industry. And then there was the alternative music era which was a weak although affecting element to subside this disaster even to a small degree back then. The latter was itself a new born child of the underground arena.

Fortunately, that period passed when insignificant independent record labels showed up (to the public ear) and we shouldn’t ignore the massive mainstream attention that internet caused: The new age of MP3s and music-in-the-form-of-files phenomenon. Music had become so much more accessible and therefore a typical music listener’s ear capacity was highly integrated. Now the listener has become the main player as he becomes more and more strict by time. The indie music in return, has become all about discovery, signature sounds, experimentation and modernity and how overwhelming that sounds.
Music 2.0 is a collection of essays by Gerd Leonhard about the future of music industries. According to him: “It further describes what I think the next generation of music companies will actually look like – hence the term Music 2.0, a description derived from the now increasingly popular Web 2.0. ” Well, not all music lovers will find this e-book interesting but in fact it is among the rare books that have given elaborate explanations about music industries, how they were and how they will become in the near future. 228 pages is probably too much for a non-regular reader but anyway it’s downloadable for free and here it is.

PDF: Music 2.0 By Gerd Leonhard (7.73 MB)
Gerd Leonhard’s Official Blog (MediaFuturist.com)
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