We'd like to share something about the future of music.
Technology and music are strange bedfellows. Since the beginning of professionally performed music, technology advances have provided new instruments, performance methods, and recording mediums. At the same time, technology has worked to dilute the value of the musician's creativity. With the advent of every new recording and playback method, the music industry has gone through the textbook Kubler-Ross "Five Stages of Grief," and finally moved on, to wait for the Next Big Thing.
In the late 1800s, the pianola (player piano) spelled the certain death of performing musicians. Ditto for the gramophone in the early 20th century. Fast forward to the battles the New York Musician's Union has had with Broadway over using synthesizers in lieu of pit musicians, starting in the late 70s and continuing to the present day. Home Taping Was Killing Music in the 80s, when the record industry successfully lobbied the United States Congress to attach a mandated tax to all digital audio recording mediums (due to their ability to capture "perfect" reproductions.)
In 1990, Karlheinz Brandenburg, working at Bell Labs, gave us the MP3, and by the late 90s the hard drive had essentially replaced the cassette tape as a storage medium. In 1999 Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker sprung Napster on us, and at the peak of its short life, people using the peer-to-peer service accounted for roughly 60% of all bandwidth used by universities in the United States.
In 2001, Steve Jobs introduced the world to the iPod and iTunes, and the purely digital distribution of music became the standard.
What do all of these events have in common? Not a single one of them has had the slightest effect on the desire of a human being, sitting in his or her bedroom late at night, to write a piece of music to express how he or she feels. The medium is not the message, and the tool is not the art. Someone will always have something to say, and will want to say it through music. We'd like to help them.
