MIDEM is the world’s largest music industry trade fair, which has been held annually in France, since 1967. Sounds like a party that gets smaller ever year.

This year many of our blogger friends got the chance to soak it up at Palais des Festivals in Cannes with the likes of people like Terry McBride, Nettwork Music’s Godhead.

Terry, as always, embraces the future of digital music. He knows cloud technology is going to be the standard for the next while. So with that in mind, he warned his fellow industry players that if they don’t act on cloud technology they will risk losing another Napster type battle.

“We’re on an edge of whether this business falls off the edge, or jumps to a new edge. And it’s all to do with control over the music.”

….People will be pulling music from their smart devices, and they will consume the music that way. They won’t own it, they’ll just pull it.”

“If the music business does not get moving and start to understand this shift in behaviour… some kid in Russia or India or somewhere is going to create an app that works with those cloud-based systems, where the artists don’t share in the revenue created by it.”

“We need to change how we look at this,” he said. “There’s an opportunity, but there’s also the opportunity of falling off the cliff.”

McBride thinks the music industry will actually grow in 2012, based on the shift in behaviour. “It’s no longer going to be about the sale of music, but the performance of music.” But he hopes that all the rights holders understand that “this is going to happen whether they want it to or not”. (via DigitalMusicNews.com)

Music Consciousness
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