You know how they say that there will be no charging for news? Well, now the idea spreads to music.
From the country that gave you DVD Jon, here is influential and super cool jazz musician Bugge Wesseltoft to tell you that the economy of popular music is heading for the free (and I mean free!) market.
Wesseltoft told Dagbladet (quoted in Norwegian language Web site ITAvisen): "I think the most super commercial music will be free of charge in a couple of years. People just won't understand why they should pay to listen to what they can hear 24/7 on some radio station or TV channel. ... I just have to look at my son. You don't get him and his friends to pay for that. And that makes me optimistic on behalf of music."
I guess Mr. Wesseltoft sees himself as the kind of premium content that people will want to pay for. And maybe his comment isn't more than an anecdoteal observation, but I think a lot of us have heard the same comments by mp3-fueled kids with iPods for pacemakers. They just don't think of music as something to be collected, saved and reorganized every other week. They consider music a mere commodity, and they will delete a song that reeks of 2005. Not to mention that they can get a long way by just using Pandora (I wrote about it last week) so that they never even need to download, borrow or steal music.
Last summer I asked a 19-year-old what his favourite band was. He was clearly interested in music, and had lots of tunes on his player. But he could not tell me what his favourite band was, because he didn't have one. They were in and out of his player before anyone could say "
Gorky's Zygotic Mynci." He would never travel to London just to find a Cure remix and a Smiths T-shirt, like certain people. And he will probably never subscribe to a newspaper. See the connection?
