At a recent music blog panel hosted by the Middle East Downstairs that they call Rock Shops (follow on Facebook for future events) that included local Boston music bloggers ClickyClicky, Bradley’s Almanac and Ryan’s Smashing Life, I posed a question about the validity of online streaming software like MOG and Spotify. My question was to whether or not the panelist thought that these new services could eventually provide the small to medium sized bands that we often talk about on our blogs the deserved (or at least in most cases) revenue for their hard work creating great music.

Here’s how this question was generally addressed by the panelists.

Brad from Bradley’s Almanac brought up a very good point and that is there’s no way that any band can live off of the revenue from a subscription service like MOG or Spotify. It’s a volume issue and at least for the foreseeable future bands can’t rely on them for much revenue support. For Brad, the real money is out on the road. You have to pound the pavement if you want to make money as a young band and at the shows you play, push the t-shirts and other merchandise that can bring in the most lucrative of revenue.

I can’t argue with this response because Brad is dead right. Even the Radioheads of the world must rely on their demanding touring schedule to support their rock star life style. But, after thinking about my original question, perhaps I should have better phrased it by saying, could these new services be a spring board for small bands to gain a following and bring out more fans to the live shows?

When the question is positioned in this fashion, the movement towards these types of services starts to make a whole lot of sense for bands, especially for bands like The Acre, who I met during this panel. If my inclination is correct, small bands should be rejoicing the day when these services enter the mainstream.

Lets pretend it’s 2012. Apple has finally released their cloud-based music subscription service and they’ve convinced about half of their iTunes desktop users to sign on by paying $5 a month for the online service and $10 if they want both the online and mobile access (Read a NYTimes article about other Cloud-based music sites to keep an eye one). Users can stream the entire iTunes library, which, unless you’ve been held up in a hole somewhere for the past ten years, has the majority of music that’s been recorded in the past 100 years. After you combine the MOG users and Spotify, which hopefully by 2010 has entered the US market, with the new iTunes service subscribers, you could potentially have over half the population that use to rely on MP3 downloads and desktop applications to upload to their iPods using these new streaming servicers. But it’s the mobile applications that are the real game changers here. And here is why.

As music bloggers, we have to come to the realization that not everyone is excited about jumping on their computers at night and sifting through the vast sea that is the music blogosphere. Yet, we also know that many of our close friends have a tendency to dig the music we listen to and love. But time and time again they forget to purchase the band we told them about a month ago. They’ve failed to upload those MP3s that you gave them (um, legally, that is) to iTunes and then add to their iPod. Now think of this new subscription based world. For purposes of this post, lets say you’re an iTunes / cloud-based subscription service because, well, that’s where the majority of music is hosted. And it just so happens that all those friends are also now using this same service. At this point, 2012, a majority of your friends have smart phones (iPhone, Android, Blackberry’s, etc.) and are using the mobile app. To stream music you’ll need to be on the 4G network (remember, it’s 2012 so this should exist by then). However, you are able to cache your playlists and even save full albums on to your phone so that when you’re out of service or in a plane you can still stream your music. Here’s the best part, within this online service you can friend people such as those close friends we talked about above. As friends, you’ll be able to easily recommend music to them and with a click of the button they can begin streaming this new found music, putting the songs in their playlists and if they’re really digging it, caching their albums to their mobile phone.

I would then envision iTunes, MOG, and / or Spotify to connect a concert listing service to their system so that when bands within your library are coming to your neck of the woods a notice will be sent to your account. And here is where we come full circle to what we were originally talking about – this is how these services can help increase exposure for the little guy and bring peeps out to their live shows.

In the end, I don’t see the ultimate revenue generator ever coming from recorded music again. As Brad mentioned, it will remain to be the live performance and how well you are in getting people to come out and see you. But if this vision that I’ve laid out above becomes a reality, then I think there’s no question these new online streaming services will be a huge boost in exposing more good music to the masses. If anyone should be scared, it’s the Justin Biebers of the world.

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