Read Martin´s thoughts on music and the internet. Well worth it.
The first thing labels will have to do is skip the record prefix in their name and start calling themselves music labels. To be able to take the important full scale step from the physical world to the internet labels have to break a huge psychological barrier. The barrier of doing things in the way they’ve always been done.
I believe that the future of the internet as a distribution channel is all about filters. Here the music label has a big role to play: Creating artistic contexts for musicians to work in and consumers to find new things in. That is – labels will have to start focus on their core business again. They have to take a dozen steps back and set a side anything that haven’t to do with finding musicians they believe can influence people to the bone. This is something labels have been really good at in the past and is the reason why they once were created.