The Music Industry... What's next?

1877, the phonograph.
1888, the gramophone.
1962, the cassette tape and 1979, the Walkman.
1982, the Compact Disc and 1984, the Discman.
1995, the MP3 and 2001, the iPod.
2003, the iTunes Store.
2006, Spotify and the cloud.
2015.... what's next?

Music, as we know it, has evolved throughout the years not only in genre, beat and melody, but as well as how we treat and manipulate it, at a dangerously high speed.

 

It seems as if Moore's Law has it's own take on the evolution of music players as storage capacity increases, and smaller devices are produced. But here's the kick, since recently, carrying a device for storing your favorites is barely needed, since high speed mobile connection allows you to access your "cloud" instantaneously from your very own smartphone, with the help of platforms such as Spotify or Pandora Radio. This implies heavy consumer behavior changes. For instance, 15 years ago we would spend amounts of time in record stores and would create a huge space in our homes allocated to storing our precious CD collections, whereas now record stores are in the road to extinction, and our CD collections are but just another dust target. 15 years ago, we would have probably have listened to the new hits on the radio, whereas now we find them through social media word of mouth; friends Like them on their Facebooks, tweets. This all makes me wonder, what comes next? Predictable devices such as micro earphones with 3G connection could be launched as soon as today. But the truth is that anything can happen. In the "cloud", the sky is the limit, literally.

Prototype 3G Earphones