Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’*

Today Apple introduced new MacBook Pros.  Which a large percentage of the public will never even consider, because they’re so damn expensive and if you want a portable Mac you go with the much lighter Air and so many people are forgoing laptops (or as the industry wants you to call them "notebooks", so when you burn your lap you can’t complain) for tablets that Apple didn’t even bother to have a dog and pony presentation to introduce them, they just put out a press release, next week they’re gonna do the full-on show for the new iPad.

But the new MacBook Pros have a feature that may look insignificant today, but will be very important tomorrow.

Look at it this way.  Broadband paved the way for YouTube.

And before that, FireWire paved the way for the iPod.

That’s what got the public stealing.  The iPod.  It worked so well, it was an elegant solution that introduced the public to digital music not on a disc and the music industry has never been the same since.

Now we’ve got Thunderbolt.

It’s twenty times faster than the USB 2.0 transfer protocol you’ve got in your present computer.  And it’s available TODAY!  (As Steve Jobs so famously says…)

In other words, hard drive swapping just got so easy, you can have someone’s entire library on your ever-deceasing in cost storage medium in moments.  So if you’re thinking the future is files and you’re combating piracy, you’re delusional.

The music industry has always been one step behind ever since the turn of the century.  Which is kind of strange for an industry that used to pride itself upon being cutting edge.  If you haven’t seen the Justin Bieber movie many times before, and I’m not speaking of the 3-D extravaganza, you’re under twelve.  The mainstream music industry has been playing it safe for over a decade, and you must pay attention because these companies hold the rights, and whoever holds the rights has a huge say in the future.

You know why Justin Bieber’s album eclipsed Mumford & Sons’ in sales last week?  Because Wal-Mart was loaded with Bieber CDs at a discount price.  The figures were much closer online.  Where there’s unlimited inventory and price and positioning isn’t all about muscle.

In other words, the mainstream is playing an old game and the new one just got shot into hyperspace.

We’ve got to go to streaming because in the file world, rights holders have lost.  It’s just too easy to get the stuff for free.

Thank you music industry!  YOU MADE IT FREE!  By not selling it in a way the public wanted at a fair price.

The public doesn’t know it wants streaming, but it does.

Just like five years ago the iPhone wasn’t even invented, and now you’re addicted to it.

The sooner we convince the public that music is a service, the sooner we get to a workable model for revenue in the future.

Netflix convinced everybody to rent but now considers itself a streaming company.  The music industry has convinced itself that nobody wants to rent and is still debating the viability of streaming.  Huh?  Amazon snuck in the streaming backdoor via Amazon Prime and the music industry still wants to sell complete albums on shiny discs.  Huh?

What kind of crazy fucked up world do we live in where the movie industry is in front of the music industry, where it leads?  Using Thunderbolt movies can be swapped in no time, thank god the movie industry is embracing streaming.

But we’re not.

I wish Spotify’s codec was better.  I wish the music industry wasn’t about to make these guys incredibly rich, granting them a near monopoly by refusing to make equitable deals with others.  But Apple is waiting in the wings, Google too.  

We don’t know who is going to win the streaming war, but we do know that ownership is dead.

Don’t e-mail me that you’ve got a collection and you don’t want to depend on a wireless signal.  You just don’t get it because you haven’t used it.  And you don’t need a connection to play thousands of tracks, they sync like you own them.

Now I’m wasting time on the naysayers.

Forget them, they screwed up this industry bad enough.

For those with a bit of vision…  Don’t you see, this new technology makes the transfer of files so fast and easy it’s a game the industry can’t win.  And it’s unpoliceable.  There’s no connection to snoop upon!

And broadband is only going to get faster.  And Verizon has already launched LTE and Sprint has Clearwire.  Do you see where this movie is going?  The horse is out of the barn, the old game is dead.  Either enter the new game or get out of the way, for the times they are a-changin’.

Thunderbolt

* If you don’t know the introductory lyrics are from Bob Dylan’s "The Times They Are A-Changin’" you’ve got no sense of history and are doomed to repeat it, doomed to try and corral the public into an old solution that befits them not a whit that it rejects.  Once upon a time our musical performers were leaders.  Today we’re told an uneducated nitwit like Britney Spears is an icon that influences the world. Huh?  Dylan knew the silent majority was out of step, that we were experiencing a youthquake.  Now we’re experiencing a techquake. Explain to me how you love Facebook yet can’t see the future is music streaming?  You had no idea you needed social networking.  You have no idea of the power and joy of having the history of recorded music at your fingertips.