The Times Freakonomics Blog just posted a long piece on “the future of music,” featuring input from a number of industry folks.

Related-ish: Stylus posted a piece about indies going digital (I can’t believe the article doesn’t even mention Tunecore).

What I’m thinking, and I know it doesn’t seem very likely *right now*, but I am starting to believe that the only possible logical future for music will a subscription service (done correctly). Once broadband Wi-Fi/Wimax enabled devices become the norm, and you can access the music anytime, anywhere, that’s what’ll do it. Years ago, when Steve Jobs said “People want to own their music,” it was true. But I think it’s less and less true every day. I mean, let’s consider what Steve might have possibly meant with that statement:

Did he mean that people want to be able to use their music where and when they want to, without restriction? Because, if you had a broadband, portable wireless device, that could, anytime/anywhere, access a library of practically any song you could want (and that could be supplemented with local files of any music that’s somehow not in the library), that would take care of that, wouldn’t it?

Did he mean that people want to pay for their music once, and not have it “disappear” if they didn’t pay their bill each month? Think about this: how many people do you know that drop HUNDREDS of dollars every month on their cell phone service, internet service, cable service? How about the electric bill? Water bill? Gas for the car? You’d think people would only want to have to pay for a car once, and not have to pay all that money on gas every month just to keep it going, huh? It just seems to me like a monthly “music bill” is something that people could easily get used to and start sucking up. It’s just a bit of an alien concept right now, I think.

But, in the end, maybe Steve meant that people have a personal connection to music; maybe he was thinking back to some beloved old, dog-eared Beatles vinyl albums he had at home, that he’d hung onto for years, and that were very important artifacts for him. I can understand that, believe me, I can understand that. Sadly though, there’s an entire generation now who will *never* understand that– it’s just not like that for a lot of people any more. Most of their music amounts to nothing more than a directory of digital files sitting on a hard drive, and how much attachment can a person have to that?