From Gerd Leonard’s Open Letter to the Independent Music Industry:

Technical and economic innovations have, for the past 10 years, stripped away many traditions, social and economic hierarchies and monopolies in the music industry, and if there is one thing we can say for sure I guess that would be that it’s now show-time: the music industry is finally reaching a major inflection point; 10 years after the first .com ventures shook the ground. It took a lot longer than we all thought but it’s hitting much harder now: CD sales are down between 20 – 40% YTD, and digital sales are not making up the difference, any time soon – and the one-horse race with iTunes clearly is a dead-end.

We are very quickly nearing a point to where we are forced to dive into what I like to call “Music2.0” – a new ecosystem that is not based on music as a product, but music as a service: first selling access, and only then selling copies. An ecosystem based on ubiquity of music, not scarcity. An ecosystem based on mutual trust, not fear.

As Don Tapscott says, in his great book “Wikinomics” , we can think of Web1.0 – the ‘old’ web - as some sort of digital newspaper, while Web2.0 is a canvas that allows information to be put up, shared, changed, and remixed. It’s about the interaction, the send-and-receive options that make it useful and ‘special’. And in music, it’s always been about interaction, about sharing, about engaging – not Sell-Sell-Sell right from the start.

Stop the sharing and you kill the music business – it’s that simple. When the fan / user / listener stops engaging with the music it’s all over. Today, you urgently need a canvas for music not a one-way product (such as the CD).

Read more at http://www.futureofmusicbook.com/file_sharing_p2p/index.html.