I’ll be honest, I don’t connect with many of Gerd Leonhard’s opinions on the music industry and where the whole music landscape is going but he does have some good snippets in many of his presentations. This is one of them from this presentation:

“The first question is not: shall I pay money for your music. The first question is WHY shall I pay attention to you.”

The above resonates with my previous post on how fans connect and follow artists and that just liking your music is not a good enough reason.

Why don’t I connect with some of Mr. Leonhard’s predictions and suggested solutions? Because many of his opinions are of a futurist, and futurists are continual predictors of supposed and wished for directions and solutions that rarely happen or are unrealistic to execute in time and space. The consumer will ALWAYS be ahead of the online marketing, social media and digital music industry. It’s easy to say that the walls surrounding copyright and pay-for-music should come down and that the future of music is free and paid for by advertising. But we all know that this isn’t sustainable and the ad revenue model doesn’t even work.  Continually predicting what should be done always “tomorrow” doesn’t bring us any closer to executing solutions that deal with today’s issues, no matter how out of date they are.