3 Trends Driving The Music Industry In 2009

Predictions are easy. Being good at them is much harder. As I’ve been working on my predictions for the music industry for 2009, however, three recurring themes seem to be dominating the industry conversation as we begin the new year.

DEMOCRATIZATION -  Giving entrepreneurs, artists and even fans the tools to compete with the major labels and mass media.

DATA -  Gathering and crunching actionable date. As you explore all of these new avenues for music discovery, what is working?  How do you break a band in 2009?

MONETIZATION – If you can’t make money at it, you probably can’t keep doing it. But how do you monetize music in a down economy?

I explore these trends a bit further and name trendsetting companies to keep an eye on the MidemNet blog with a post 3 Trends, 12 Companies & 1 Wild Card To Watch in 2009.

Future Trends in Business Comm

I don’t know about you but I have been observing a significant shift in how people communicate, professionally as well as socially and privately.  While only 7-10 years ago, most of the work was done on the phone (I recall living in) .com boom-town numero uno, San Francisco, and using up all my 2000 AT&T minutes every single month!), eMail soon became big with everyone, and now eMail is still pretty much the prime vehicle of business communications – thus the rise of blackberry mania. Use of the phone declined heavily as a result.

Now, it seems that… well, eMail is for old people.  About 18 months ago, the use of ’social’ business platforms such as LinkedIn became more prevalent, and all of a sudden people started to have ‘professional’ conversations on LinkedIn, Ryze (remember??), Xing, and then, soon, Facebook, Myspace, and now… Twitter, Skype and GTalk.  Now, for me, it has already become the No. 1 method of how people reach out to me: rather than calling (ouch) or even emailing (ehem), people ping me via my various networks – and I think this will increase drastically because it provides a build-in filter as you have to be in my network to ping me via the Network.

This, below, is how I see this developing – and this will have vast consequences for business communications, going forward. Needless to say… I do have some ideas, here. Talk back!