The world is becoming more and more connected, wired, and yet, also mobile.

This has already left an indelible mark on the music industry, and will yet make even greater changes that we can hardly imagine. Musicians are creating, producing and distributing music without the involvement of a major record company. This shakes the music industry to the core. What kind of musical landscape would we see when we take down, brick by brick, the immense wall of recording companies? As a consumer, it is easy to imagine a world without record conglomerates, for we see their impact so rarely. But for a musician, the record business is everywhere. It leaves its stench when it approaches and as it departs. The frustration of signing contracts in a language few can interpret, the exhaustion of being on the road constantly, going from show to show, rarely resting, the anger brought out by countless commands by suits and ties with little artistic understanding. How could we see a world without those pressures that have always been chained to professional musicianship?

Allow me to paint a picture. Imagine a world where those who wield the most power in the record industry as we know it are toppled. The musician becomes more powerful, as does the manager, the producer and the sound engineer. Those are people who are knee-deep in music, rather than businessmen who only know how to calculate strategies, who know little of art and the importance of taking risks. Those in charge of record creation, for the most part, are people who did not build the music factories that they own, but rather bought them. Those inside them are investments, not artists. That is how the industry exists as we know it.

When we topple the system we have now, we can only expect a flood of musical diversification. Artists will rise and fall based off of how much they tour, rather than whether businessmen are willing to invest in them. How one gets one’s name out will take precedence over what the popular style is. The internet is central to this effort. Spreading of music via P2P sources will become the mainstay of one’s career, rather than the enemy. It is becoming a widely accepted idea that artists do not make much money off of albums, so this so-called musical “piracy” is becoming more and more common. Why buy a $15 album when the artist makes a dollar off of it, at most?

However, as with any new development of technology, there is a dark side. Speaking of “dark side,” remember the great albums of yester year, such as, “Dark Side of the Moon?” “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?” “Led Zeppelin?” You can very well kiss goodbye the idea of having a comparative modern version. With the decreased importance of albums comes the death of the album altogether. And with the deluge of diversification we can expect after the fall of record companies, you can also forget about ever having a “Beatles of this generation.” The Beatles were a band that came around at exactly the right time culturally, spiritually, politically and, most of all, technologically. If a band or artist with the contemporary artistic might of the Beatles came along today, they would never reach the status that we call “Beatle-mania.” There’s just too much other music to listen to.

So, you lose the concept of a “classic.” Is that so bad? When you eliminate the possibility of “classic” status in modern times, it makes the true classics more valuable, correct? Correct. Yet one further downside exists, though it is less of a pragmatic concept and more of an idealistic one. With the increased importance of the internet in daily life, with the omnipresent hum of the television, with the tempting unreality of creations such as “World of Warcraft” and “Second Life,” what societal impacts can we expect? Already, for decades we have tracked the dramatic fall of reading for pleasure. We may be even able to link such learning disabilities as ADHD to the dependence on the instant gratification of internet information gathering rather than more classical forms of learning. What it all boils down to is one question: How much time is healthy to spend in front of a glowing screen? Is life not better experienced in the flesh? When music, too, is best discovered while crouching before a computer monitor, rather than while exploring that which lies beyond the walls of one’s house, how can we expect the world to change?

That is something we have yet to answer. But with tomorrow’s philosophers walking through the world, plugged into iPods so that they don’t have to acknowledge the reality surrounding them, these fears may never be eased.