Future of the Music Industry Summit, 2014

Here’s an article that came out last week that gives an overview of some of the information that was shared at the annual “Future of Music Summit” in Washington, DC. The Future of Music Summit is an annual meeting organized by the Future of Music Coalition, an organization founded my artists in 2000 to respond to changes in the music industry that resulted from the post-digital collapse. Here is an overview of this year’s meeting, that two place over two days.

The author discusses some of the changes in the structure of the industry and some of the responses that seem to be taking shape. At the centre of this is the displacement of traditional gatekeepers – music labels, radio, etc. – with a new set of players that play similar (but not identical roles.) Here’s a video from an upcoming documentary called Unsound, that documents the “dramatic collapse of the music industry.” It will be familiar to any of you who have studied Dallas Smythe’s ideas about the audience commodity.

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