An extremely interesting post on Techcrunch about the death of music (See http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/19/ian-rogers-on-the-death-of-the-music-cd-business-i-dont-care/)
Ian Rogers predicts no the death of music but the death of CD business. He predicts that the ecosystem will change. Distributors will earn less and artists may get rid of the distributors to directly sell to the public. Once more, we see the holy grail of disintermediation. Sell directly, earn more.
To prove his forecasts, he presented two artists Brian Eno and David Byrne who made money with direct sales. The problem with this holy grail is that we underestimate the value of the promotion done by distributors. Ian Rogers used as example already established artists. The same is true for Radio Head. But how many non established artists have made enough money to survive and are now widely known?
One thing is sure: the equilibrium point between artists, distributors and consumers will change. And probably a new breed of “distributors” such as Topspin (the company of Ian Rogers) will raise.