I originally wrote this article back in August of 2010 for The Mark News as part of their series on obsolescence. I’ve decided to repost, but wanted to add 2011′s biggest buzword: Cloud!

This week Apple announced their latest cloud product iCloud that brings much of what I talk about here to a more tangible reality. I figured with the new appetite for all things cloud, this article may be interesting as a current affairs article than as a futurist piece. Feel free to substitute Apple for Facebook. Cloud, cloud, cloudy cloud.

I am Jack’s Facebook Profile

In the near future, the notion of a single company holding your online identity, photos, and videos will seem quite strange and unnecessary. This, of course, is the monumental goal of Facebook. And they’ve had some success. Not long ago, it was unthinkable to use our real names on the internet, but Facebook has made this commonplace. Soon though, neither Facebook nor any other sole entity will be the exclusive host of our digital identities, our photos and videos, or information about our personal relationships. They won’t let it go without a fight however…

Identity

Your digital identity is made up of several parts: authentication, identification, and associated information (your stuff). Authentication is your login. You enter a user name and password, and you’re granted access to manage your identification and associated information.

Authentication is one of the more irritating aspects of online life. Creating new accounts and remembering user names and passwords at dozens of sites is a pain. To solve this problem, Facebook has created a portable authentication mechanism called Facebook Login that is now used on thousands of web sites. It allows you to register for and log in to any website that has adopted Facebook Login, simply by using your Facebook credentials.

The key benefit to Facebook of the broad adoption of this technology is that they get to know everywhere you go on the internet. Further, by hosting your identification (your real name, residence, family members, favourite movies, and even vacation plans) they have quite a powerful marketing platform.

In the future, however, a technology similar to OpenID will be standard, ubiquitous, and deeply integrated into everything we do. The devices we use to access the internet will simply require a biometric pass-code such as a thumb print or voice command. We will be instantly logged into all of our favourite websites and online services. Our personal information will be stored ”in the cloud,” on no particular server owned by any particular corporation. Our profile will be linked to our government files, Air Miles, and medical records.

Decentralized Data

Most people’s photo and video workflow goes something like this: we take a picture, upload it to our computer, and then, if we want to share it, upload it somewhere else. Sharing can still be done by email but it’s much more practical to upload to Facebook. Many of our fancy phones let us upload directly to Facebook, which is often also our camera. The problem is that now there are multiple copies of that photo, and more importantly, one of the copies is sitting on a closed system owned by a corporation.

Accessing your content is also a challenge. On our mobile devices, we can use the Facebook app to see and post some of our pictures, and we can buy music from the iTunes store and download it to the phone, but not play it elsewhere. What about all the music and movies on my computer at home? In the near future, connectivity will be fast enough that when I take a picture or video with my phone, it is added to my online photo library instantly. That repository will be linked with my identity, via my authentication. Technologies such as OAuth and OData are already being developed to service this need. The end result is that all my devices – my phone, my television, my tablet, my laptop – can access all my stuff, all the time, automatically, from anywhere.

Decentralized Relationships

Not only does Facebook have all your personal details, your browsing habits, and your media, it also stores (and uses) your personal relationships. Once we have open communications technologies such as StatusNet and OStatus in place, we start to see a completely decentralized, open social network for connecting and sharing with the people we trust. Again, no single entity needs to store your personal information. One group that is attempting to put it all together is Diaspora, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

Why not now?

It would seem that everything we need to create this digital utopia has been developed, so what’s the hold-up? The low-level technology will simply enable new products to be created for the general public. The biggest challenge with standards and new products is adoption. All the providers of these services need to buy into all the standards before they can interoperate. Even if that happens, there must be a critical mass of consumers using the services to draw them away from their 500 million friends on Facebook. Nobody’s doing it, because nobody’s doing it. The future isn’t so far-fetched though. I mean, how hard could it be to digitize medical records, right?

Kid, I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff, but I’ve never seen anything to make me believe that there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything. ‘Cause no mystical energy field controls my destiny. It’s all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.

With the addition of a call-to-action in the widget, you can now extend your brand and drive traffic back to the mothership. Did we mention we record all stats including views, geo and sources? Nice!

Click on the share button and install on your profile!

“The Future of Music Business, Law and Technology: A Critical Analysis of
Related Articles on the Topic of Digital Music.”

Quite a mouthful.

The related articles mentioned in the title were all written within a short time frame (2000, 2004 and 2005), yet also within three significantly different climates. The first was written before the explosion of Napster, the second at the height of Napster Mania, and the third just as the iTunes Music Store was gaining momentum.

I have decided to revisit the topics discussed in these papers and to reflect on the last several years. I wrote the first version of this paper before many had heard of Facebook, MySpace or YouTube, and well before they sold for billions (Facebook pending…). New bits are in bold.

So here we go:

It is a popular notion that the future of the music business structure is unclear. Traditional copyright law does not allow for a frictionless model of information diffusion and companies that have, in the past, been based upon geographic boundaries are being forced to adopt new business models.

In order to create a practical vision of the future, several issues need to be examined. The history and evolution of current copyright law, its intended purpose and the effect of globalization on that institution is discussed in “How Will the Music Industry Weather the Globalization Storm?” by Wilfred Dolfsma (2000). Digital technology’s role in changing the way consumers experience music and the resulting shift in relative value within the music market structure is analysed in “The end of the CD as we know it… Shifting consumer behaviour and changing business models in the music industry” by Dr. Piet Bakker (2004). The article “The Move to Artist-Led Online Music Distribution: Explaining Structural Changes in the Digital Music Market”(2005), by The Carlson School of Management proposes a model of the future music value chain where litigation and the proliferation of a digital rights management system will maintain the status quo with respect to copyright and its benefactors.

(I’ve linked to the versions that were originally cited…)

All three of these articles introduce a vision of the music business where intermediaries, that is any system or stage between the producers of content and the consumer, will have new and different roles.

Dolfsma and the Carlson School of Management are polarized in their vision of copyrights role in the future, but their proposed model for intermediaries are both similar to Bakker’s.

Both “The end of the CD as we know it” and “The Move to Artist-Led Online Music Distribution” do not examine the effect of the potential for new value-added features contained in physical media.

Advances in audio technology, storage capacity and new media formats as potential sales drivers should be considered when predicting the future of the music industry market.

Today, we can see a wonderful combination of both digital distribution of music, and the traditional distribution of value-added physical media. The best example, in my opinion is Radiohead’s Rainbows record. Anyone reading this is probably aware of Radiohead’s “pay-what-you-want” digital strategy and their kick-ass physical project promotion.

There are a few bands that could pull off such a campaign without a label, but the vast majority of acts can still benefit greatly from the knowledge, experience and resources of a major record label.

Even though the points of view of the above authors are different, we can find similarities within their conclusions that display a reasonably realistic image of the future media industries.