DISQUS

Also, don't forget the importance of live shows. Some artists are already giving in on MP3's, distributing music for free, and focusing on promoting live events. There is a lot of money in the concert biz and nothing can ever replace that. Historically, concerts were used to promote record sales. Maybe in the future MP3's and streaming services will be used to promote concerts.

http://hightechweekly.com/the_music_business

I think another great thing is that Google can use App Engine to enhance its other offerings. AdSense will look better when it's rendered on a webpage served from the same infrastructure (better load times). Google image search will be faster when Google maintains the images it needs to search. Google would probably love to store websites on its own infrastructure because it gives tremendous access to the data used to handle search queries. This is positive for developers because Google has other value in providing their web services, so they don't have to monetize it as heavily. Amazon only offers AWS to make $, but Google can do it just to better its other services...so it'll probably be cheap and great. Over time, I think it'll become a hiiiiiighly used platform.

This post absolutely stopped me in my tracks. I'm very interested in web technologies and music, and have heard all these ideas in bits and pieces from various sources. But I have never read one concise statement like this that truly sums up the future of music in a way that makes EVERYONE happy: artists, the users, and the content providers (perhaps MySpace will be the next form of record label?). You clearly see the big picture and can look around the corner before anyone else. You inspire me as a lover of music and the web, and as an aspiring entrepreneur. Thanks.