New musical solutions to social humans

I’ve been reading a bit about the discussions happening at the MIDEM event taking place in Cannes at the moment, which is a big business 2 business event for the music industry.

Highlights include the fact that the bags for the event have been sponsored by Napster (as captured by Mr Herdmeister, Mark Earls).

The other highlight I’ve enjoyed is the presentation by Gerd Leonard, who is moderating the panel at which the Herdmeister is speaking.

And in the meantime, I’ve also been having my stab at the future of music, thanks to the People’s Music Store (Found via Springwise).

I’ve always been a closet librarian when it comes to collecting music in physical form, and always had a soft spot for the idea of owning my own record shop (Even before I read High Fidelity!)

It’s not completely revolutionary – basically you can set up your store, share recommendations and reviews, and anything sold through your store earns you 10% as reward points to spend on new music via the store.

Interestingly, I’ve just spotted Amazon has released an MP3 widget for affiliates, which helps you to earn a 10% fee for anyone buying someone from the store.

But the next step is also to include user-generated audio for sale.

It will be interesting to see if the People’s Music Store can emulate the feel of ‘your favourite local independent record store’ enough to differentiate itself and offer more than an affiliate mechanism.  In the meantime, I spent five minutes on the site and came up with the start of my own music store.

And there are plenty of other interesting music services out there for buying or even investing in music:

• Amie Street
• Sellaband
• SliceThePie

I’m not sure I can conclude with more than starting to wonder about the filter and recommendation mechanisms, and how mainstream media might better fit the future. But the evolution of media and entertainment seems to becoming more like Moore’s Law every week, and not just in terms of technology.