Our cultural future? Software-based musical instruments, intelligent accompanists, and music as information, according to author/futurist Ray Kurzweil in a keynote speech delivered at a 2003 Audio Engineering Society convention — The Future of Music in the Age of Spiritual Machines.
The issue of protecting intellectual property goes far beyond music and audio technologies, but the crisis has started in the music industry. Already, music recording industry revenues are down sharply, despite an overall increase in the distribution of music. The financial crisis has caused music labels to become cautious and conservative, investing in proven artists, with less support available for new and experimental musicians.
The breakdown of copyright protection is starting to impact musical instruments themselves. Synthesizers, samplers, mixers, and audio processors can all be emulated in software. It has been estimated that at least 90 percent of the copies of "Reason," one of the emulation software leaders, are pirated.
Music controllers still require hardware, but when full- immersion visual-auditory virtual reality environments become ubiquitous, which I expect by the end of this decade, we'll be using virtual controllers that are essentially comprised of "just" software. When we have the full realization of nanotechnology-based assembly in the 2020s, we will be creating actual hardware at almost no cost from software.
We are not far from that reality today, and for the recording industry it is already clear that the principal product music is pure information. In all industries, the portion of products and services represented by their information content is rapidly increasing. By the time we get to the nanotechnology era, most products will be essentially information.
