End times, baby. As we’ve been pondering and predicting and hoping for years, the paradigm shift in the music “industry” seems to be finally upon us. In an effort to topple pathetically desperate Big Music, who have taken to suing fans and consumers that they overcharged for years, it seems a flurry of your favorite kewl bands like the Radioheads, are dumping their labels and shunning the evil recording industry once and for all, opting for more direct online sales type openness. Hands together, world, you can doooo it (with the interwebs of course.) Keep Radiohead rich without their square suited benefactors! The music industry never suited music in the first place. This is a natural break.

Irony aside, the real shocker isn’t that Radiohead, or Nine Inch Nails, has gone utterly idealistic, but fucking Madonna? Although she is really just shifting from Warner to some other huge-ass promotional company, it is still a huge departure.

The only real question now is how fast will the music industry model come tumbling down. When Radiohead led the way in offering their music directly to fans many predicted that the move was the beginning of the end; Madonna may well be the tipping point from where we will now see a flood of recording artists dumping record labels and where todays model will shortly become a footnote in Wikipedia.

Let the apocalypse begin. I predict that in 5 years every band will be selling songs off their website directly to hungry consumers. Or maybe just giving them away for free in hopes that some really good music blog or mag gives you glowing reviews so that people will come to your shows and buy a t-shirt and your limited number of vinyl pressings.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 3:11 am and is filed under music, musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.