On the social networking panel were some heavy hitters: for example, the founder of Baby Grande records, CEO of iLike, and founder of Lala. Listening to Bill from Lala talk was a breath of fresh air. He’s extremely blunt, which is a character trait that is drowning in a sea of political correctness.
During the Q&A, a rock journalist stood up basically saying that his problem with blogging was that if everyone has a voice on the Internet, it takes away attention from him and he loses out on contracts to write. Bill just shot him down saying that if he was any good at writing and had a voice in the music scene, he’d still have a job, which is the truth.
However, I have to disagree with Bill’s love of MGMT. If they put out a 4 song EP of Time to Pretend, The Youth, Electric Feel, and Kids, it’d be flawless, but they have the other 6 songs, which lack originality, listenability, and overall just annoy me.
Getting back on topic, Bill’s vision for music helped me realize certain things. Collectability of music is dying in the world of Wi-Fi. After all, the city of Philadelphia offers free Wi-FI throughout (most of) the city. You don’t need a record, CD, or a digital file when you can go to a site like Lala and stream whatever song you want forever for 10 cents a song. You just don’t need to “own” music, in the traditional sense of the word, anymore.
Internet is on phones, mp3 players, and will eventually be in cars, so CD’s are just space on a shelf. In addition, I went to The Orchard, one of the world’s leading digital music distributors (including Ropeadope), where I met a guy whose job was to convert vinyl not previously on CD to digital. With the final cards in place, the Internet will have the full deck of music and it will be ready for infinite streaming.
However, the internet is almost full. Does the internet have a hardrive? Where does the information go? Maybe I’m ignorant, but it all seems like too much to wrap my head around.