The future of the music distribution

This is hardly an original subject to blog on, but it interests me nonetheless. I was at a new year’s party this year and discovered that I’d been to school with one of the guests. After chatting a while about jolly japes (slightly embarrassing as you’re aware it’s boring the crap out of the people around you…) we got round to asking what each other did. He told me he was as surprised as anyone to have become the MD of Sony Music Publishing UK. I felt like I’d just discovered Rudolf Hess hand landed in my allotment.

Oh my god. What, I asked, did he think about P2P, the recent legal shifts brought on by MPAA and RIAA lobbying in the US, and, and oh, that whole copyright thing and music and all? But either he wasn’t giving anything away, or he genuinely knew nothing. He certainly expressed no significant opinion about it. I was left spouting gibberish about tectonic shifts in copyright law, and he probably thinks I’m a nutter now. Oh well.

But I wonder if his lack of reaction is typical of people at that level of the music biz, because if it is then I think they’re going to get a wakeup call rather more jolting than I thought. There’s much pontificating about this stuff, and nobody really knows how it will pan out, but here’s an interestingly apocalyptic, if rather scattershot, set of predictions about music publishing (scroll down to the bottom) that I think might have a good chance of being true one day – although not as soon as he predicts.