Not said that this is Utopia, but its a step towards it. And with this huge competition going on, I'm sure that the available offers will continue to improve for the consumers.

Not said that this is Utopia, but its a step towards it. And with this huge competition going on, I'm sure that the available offers will continue to improve for the consumers.

Not said that this is Utopia, but its a step towards it. And with this huge competition going on, I'm sure that the available offers will continue to improve for the consumers.

The model I'm thinking about is not a streaming, pay-your-bill-or-lose-it model. I'm thinking of a model that is more like a cable video-on-demand system writ large, with everybody having a TiVo.

Let's say there's an iTunes-like website that offers the entire vast universe of music content. Maybe you could pay $10 a month to stream that content, or maybe to download files that must be renewed every month when you pay your bill. OR you could pay $20 a month, and purchase the ability to download permanent files of anything and everything you want, DRM-free. After that, it's yours to keep. If you have the time, bandwidth and wherewithal to download every single recording known to man, then have at it. But if you want more stuff next month, you'll have to pay your bill–or perhaps you can still purchase songs individually, but under my fantasyland subscription model there won't be much incentive to do that for anyone who's got $20 a month.

What I envision is a business model in which many millions of people commit to spending relatively small amounts of money, on a sliding scale, for access to temporary or permanent copies of…everything. It seems to me that such a model could fund a thriving recording industry, though it would probably be one very much unlike what we have now.

How to get there, I don't know. How artists will get their content onto the database and how they'll get paid, I don't know. (Maybe artists will get paid by the sale–a song that's downloaded a million times will be worth much more than your brother Ed's upload that sells five copies to your mom.) Who (if anyone) will serve as a gatekeeper for such a system, I don't know.

It's music-collecting Utopia, my friends! (maybe…)

Read music history and you'll notice the drop in record sales in the 70's coincided with the effort to kill the single – roughly the same time when new bands stoppped being signed to “initial single” contracts – think of all the 70's rock bands like Queen, Blur Oyster Cult, Steely Dan, etc. whose first major label release is a single-only track.

I don't think the major-label album is dead, but you will be seeing contracts structured such that albums won't be green-lighted if the single tanks.

Similarly the CD will – slowly – be replaced by digital format, particularly now bandwidth and storage are so much cheaper, in the same way that the vinyl record and then the tape cassette both faded away over a period of time. Most of the 20-somethings I work with don't buy CDs now – they go straight to iTunes or – more pertinently – less legal sources.

I'm with you on subscriptions – I'd be surprised if that model becomes popular – for the very reason you gave that people like to own what they buy.

The subscription idea doesn't appeal to me at all, unless the cost is quite low. I already have enough music to keep me entertained for the rest of my life. It doesn't stop me from buying new albums, but that's just the point. People like to own, not rent. (Even if they stole it, haha.)

The artificial construct that is The Album is all-but-dead commercially. The sooner the record companies realise this, the sooner we may be able to enter a new golden age of pop music. Bring on a period of musical Darwinism!

JonCummings' subscription-based model also seems likely to be given a run-out before too much longer, though I fear that model may flounder if it the music is tied to a particular device. While someone might gladly pay $20 a month to access a library of music, would they be quite so prepared to pay three times that amount just to have that library access across their computer, their MP3 player AND their mobile phone?

Because that's the way music execs seem to think: “We've been able to re-sell the same catalogues over and over again for decades so why won't it work now?” Sometimes I wonder whether the suits actually understand digitisation at all.

This has the potential to be a hugely exciting few years in pop music, yet nobody in the industry seems to recognise the need to try new things NOW before the entire industry collapses under the weight of all those 1s and 0s flying back and forth across the web.

I believe that while individual-track or -album sales will continue on some level, subscription-based services are going to become more popular. This will alleviate some of the labels' risk, because if they can develop an industry-wide model based on x-number of consumers paying, say, $10-$25 a month for access to huge volumes of downloadable music, the labels will be able to base their A&R and release decisions on a stable revenue stream.

Additionally, such a model will enable at least some well-established acts to exert their creative muscles on an album-length level, even if new artists are signed based on an assumption that every track released under an initial contract should be single-quality. I honestly can't imagine a world in which U2 or Springsteen or Radiohead or Dylan or Leonard Cohen (you get the idea) couldn't pursue their muses across a dozen tracks released simultaneously; however, that doesn't mean that even Mariah or Madonna need to be putting out full-length efforts if they (or Timbaland) don't have the material to justify it.

This is a fascinating subject that should be/hopefully is under intense discussion in boardrooms around Manhattan and Hollywood. We should kick it around amongst ourselves for awhile, too…