Music is more than just art, it is business
Many people, including myself, have always wondered why The Beatles are considered the best band of all times.
Clearly, they disrupted the music industry by creating a new way of producing rock music. By producing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, they created an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology, and created innovative techniques that would be useful not only for rock but also for other styles of music in the future, such as dance and electronic music.
The music industry is always innovating — never stagnant, never complacent. Rick Hall and his FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals’ Sound Studio together hosted artists such as the Rolling Stones, which produced albums that would go on to influence music and culture for generations. Artists like Madonna and Michael Jackson, the queen and king of pop, respectively, created a style that is probably one of the single biggest factors shaping the music scene today.
Connecting these trends and influences with the way that music is reproduced is what has taken music to the next step in recent years. When music was first recorded it was done so via phonograph record; then came the vinyl disc; then the compact cassettes came into play; and then finally the compact discs made their mark.
Napster thought ahead and created the technology that would be the next way to reproduce music: digital audio files encoded in the MP3 format. But the company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement.
Apple went one step further and formed agreements with big record label companies that had the rights to reproduce music. This gave way to the iPod: a device that reproduced music and also allowed people to buy songs individually instead of the full album. The Apple iPod, and later the iPhone, still influences music greatly. These innovations influence not only music but also other industries where creativity and consumer experience matter.
Currently, there are startups that are disrupting the music industry with streaming technologies that deliver music online — a shift that has also influenced TV channels and video reproduction.
Spotify and Apple Music are the leaders in the music streaming industry, and Tencent Music is greatly influencing the industry in Asia. Both Spotify and Tencent are startups that grew to a scale that warranted an IPO.
As part of my Cornell MBA, I had an opportunity to meet two startups whose technologies will entertain customers, musicians and sound professionals in the upcoming years.
Specdrums, started by two Cornell University Engineers, uses smart rings devices that combine colors into sound to produce music. Soundskrit is changing the way sound is measured and is producing a microphone that can capture sound from closer or farther distances without having too much interference of surrounding noises.
This application can be useful even for smartphones in the future or for studios that want to record a cleaner sound.
Music is more than art. Music is more than entertainment. Music is business, and I believe we should all invest in this industry for the innovations that are currently in the market and for the ones that definitely will be created in the future.
