FUTURE OF MUSIC

NAPSTER AND SPOTIFY, it turns out, were just tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. Today, thanks to the frenetic pace of tech advancement and the insatiability of young, internet-grown audiences, the global music business moves at breakneck speed. It evolves, expands, and upends itself on the daily; it is an innovator’s playground and paradise.

Alongside record labels and publishers, the industry’s big bosses now include data analysts, financial entrepreneurs, algorithm creators, engineers, economists, and also artists and songwriters, who — freshly empowered by the cheap musicmaking tools and easy social media platforms available to them — are wresting real control of their own empires for the first time. (“Hail to the artists, because . . . they’re winning,” veteran music mogul Jimmy Iovine mused in 2019. “The artists now have something they’ve never had before, which is a massive, direct communication with their audience — from their house, their bed, their car, whatever. And because of that, everybody wants them.”)

But it’s not just artists who’ve found themselves with bold new advantages in the game. Under the peculiar shadow of the pandemic year, the music business — reeling from a worldwide concert shutdown and the sudden loss of billions of dollars — has also been forced to forge brandnew revenue streams, play around in a digital Wild West, redesign artist-fan relationships, and tear down even more of its legacy hierarchy to make room for upstart outsiders.

In short: The DNA of the global business is forever altered.

So what will albums’ creation, release, and consumption look like in the wake of all this sea change?

What are the most exciting innovations to come — and the dangerous pitfalls to avoid — in the next five, 10, 50 years of music?

From AI artists and bedroom audio production to cryptocurrency ticketing and virtualreality concerts, here are the next great disruptions poised to overtake the strange, twisty business of hitmaking.

Welcome to the future of music.