The Band Of The Future

20 posted on April 20, 2010

At the recent Chirp event (Twitter’s first-ever conference for developers), noted hip-hop artist and beat master Will.i.am (@iamwill) talked about the importance of social media in music and how the best bands in the future will find ways to embrace technology and become what he called “self-contained content-providers.”

The band of the future is not going to be a singer, a guitarist and a bass player. It will be a singer, a guitarist, a bass player and a code writer – the guy who does apps, computer animation. That is a group. It is going to be about self-contained content-providers.

It’s not music that is dead. It’s the people that house it that are dead. The industry I came from ain’t there any more, but it’s pretending to be.

Turns out computer geeks like me might finally get to be in the band after all. Time to put on those cool sunglasses and rockstar jeans. Wait a minute, is the world ready for *gasp* cool computer geeks??

What effect do you think social media has had on the music industry?
Do you think the music industry as we know it is dying?
Will it be replaced by “self-contained content-providers” instead?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 9:17 am and is filed under Blog Posts, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Comments

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April 20, 2010

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1 Jay said:

Uhh…where is the mention of the drummers?

We are the time-keepers you know.
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April 20, 2010

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2 Brad Ruggles said:

Ahhh, you know those Hip-Hoppers…who needs a drummer when you have a turntable and some dope beats?
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April 20, 2010

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3 Vince said:

Sounds like he is describing the Gorillaz
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April 20, 2010

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4 Zack (@zacharyb) said:

That sounds totally reasonable to me.

He’s right about the “people who house the music”. But I think also at work is our American (or maybe 21st century) addiction to whatever is new. It doesn’t matter how good that band was last week… what are they offering this week.
Artists who want to cater to that kind of appetite will need to work hand-in-glove with geeks like you and me to keep cranking out the new.

I think the whole Passion/268 movement is a great example of this. They have their own musical artists, graphic artists, record label… and though they seem to hire outside web developers, I’ll bet it won’t be long before they have full-time code gurus too.
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5 Josh said:

I have no doubt that this man speaks the truth here…

I’ma be tellin’ you that right now.
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April 20, 2010

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6 bondChristian said:

Yes, I think the old music industry, the one that produced Millennium by the Backstreet Boys in 1999, is dead. That’s the last CD that will sell anything close to those numbers (in comparison of course… maybe the population will go up so high that selling over 100 million copies won’t be a big deal).

I think social media will make personal interaction a requirement.

Something I’ve thought about lately: autographs are going to die too (if they haven’t already). Sure, Abraham Lincoln’s will still be worth something since he’s not around to Tweet. The rest of us, though, aren’t going to want a signature anyone. We’ll expect an entire conversation.

-Marshall Jones Jr.