Within 10 years, the Internet would account for 25 percent of record, video and other media sales … The whole information highway may have some success in the future. But what stores are doing is they’re getting bigger, better, more interactive and more fun. And customers are finding that they’re very satisfied with going to buy their music in these fun stores. We can go on the Internet anytime we want if we think it’s a viable thing.
I don’t think the Internet is going to kill retail [music] stores, but it is going to change them. There are other benefits besides sales. We get exposure and publicity online.
You won’t have to convince your record company that the album you want to make using nose flutes is going to sell enough copies to make it worthwhile. You can just put it on the Internet, and if anybody likes it, they can upload their credit card number or whatever and then just download the album.
The Internet is going to bring a flat playing field to music. The difference between a major and an independent label will begin not to matter anymore. The smallest independent label could have just as wide a distribution – even wider internationally – as the largest major.
Technophiles maintain that the Internet will put an end to the record store, just as indoor plumbing put an end to the outhouse. One day 90 percent of music purchases will take place online, eliminating not just record stores and manufacturers but also record labels.
The record store of the future will have a bed to lie in, a well-stocked refrigerator, a bathroom with a shower and maybe even a couch or two. The record store of the future will be your home … Computer users will simply click their mice on albums they’re interested in, then sit back while the music is transferred, or downloaded, through high-tech telephone lines to their CD drives, which will capture the music on compact disks. Computer printers will spit out album artwork and liner notes. Further in the future, CD’s may be abolished altogether; consumers will be able to listen to whatever song or album they want by ordering it (for a fee) on their cable television box. Record labels would no longer be necessary: anyone with a song and a computer could just put it online.
You could join a collective to purchase some information and decrease your actual cost by orders of magnitude – that is, until it is almost free. [A digital co-op could form a private online library and collectively purchase digital movies, albums, software, and expensive newsletters, which they would “lend” to each other over the Net] … increasing the margins where the poor can survive.
Cybernautic brokers of the future [will] zoom through landscapes that are the 3D depictions of marketplaces, as reported through global electronic transactions systems, in real time.
When this stuff gets implemented and gets widespread, as all the trends indicate it will, what people experience as the ordinary material universe will start to crumble away a little bit. At the very least, virtual reality will become just one of many possible places in which to spend time.
Wearing blackout goggles and a Lycra glove, or perhaps a full-body cybersuit, you might be plugging into your PC and mentally inhabiting space there. You might build yourself a room there. And decorate it. You might entertain good-looking friends there. You might fall in love.