By Tom Mulhern
Three things you can still count on in ten years: Death, taxes, and increasing bandwidth. How much bandwidth is enough? Let’s say that hundreds of Megabits per second, instead of mere kilobits (as in 56k modem) will be the standard "pipeline diameter" that people will take for granted. Running even the heaviest bandwidth-hogging applications–like high-definition, full-screen video–will be no challenge at all. Today, bandwidth limits what we can do with audio on the Internet. In the future, it won’t be an issue, at least for most people living in or near metropolitan areas. As a result, it will be increasingly easy to collaborate, record, and distribute music.
Computers will be frighteningly fast–probably in the 5GHz range (maybe even faster). Machines equipped with multiple processors will provide even more computing horsepower; and extremely large amounts of memory will be commonplace. Taken together, these elements will establish the computer as a recording and collaboration tool of unprecedented power.
Storage will also be incredibly cheap. And musicians will benefit most from these huge amounts of affordable storage–compared to those involved in video or 3D graphics–because audio, even in multiple tracks, places fewer demands on a computer than visual media. And almost every device capable of audio or video recording or reproduction will have Internet access, full-time and without wires.
Virtually all storage will reside outside your recorder or computer. This means that dedicated multitrack recorders may be smaller and provide more tracks and greater power–including plenty of space for surround-sound and other enhancements. Wireless connection to servers (and your storage devices out on the Internet) will make it easier than ever to take recording rigs outside the studio for remote recording.
When you need greater storage, you won’t buy a hard drive: You’ll order more space online in your own personal data warehouse. It’s likely that the latest, greatest signal processing will also be accessed online, with a web-top interface that appears on your screen.
Instead of buying effects processors, you’ll rent processing power. Think of it: You want to do a mix and have 25 different reverbs, 8 echoes, and 10 compressor/limiters. Instead of spending a ton of cash to buy a lot of hardware to accomplish your mix, you may give your credit card info, choose the processors from a menu, and use them. You’ll be billed by the minute, hour, or whatever. Same with samples–someday, you may rent access to the sounds instead of purchasing samplers or sample discs. In fact, recorders themselves may be online, with your computer providing the visual interface, and a rack box hooked to the computer acting as the connection to your instruments (assuming you aren’t using only samples or virtual instruments).
Resolved between now and then will be the issue of copyright. More specifically, protection of copyrighted material will be simplified. How? Copyrighted music will include something that does more than protect against unauthorized copying: Embedded in its code will be a heavily integrated subcode–like a watermark–that says who created it, who has the sole right to grant reproduction of the material, and a "snitch-and-thwart" feature: If someone tries to redistribute an unauthorized copy, it will be reported to the owner the next time that the material is played on an Internet-enabled device, plus it will automatically expire the playability of the music. Therefore, would-be pirates would be left with a bunch of bits that can’t be reproduced as music, and those bits would rat them out to the rightful owners.
The only recourse for pirates? Delete the material from the audio device. If they try to distribute it, even in its unusable state, it would snitch anyway. There would be an audit trail that makes it quite clear that the music was rendered useless as a result of this attempt to redistribute it.
This copyright protection wouldn’t be audible, and it wouldn’t add appreciable size to the files, but it would save musicians and other audio artists from being ripped off. Why is this so important? Simple: Today, it’s too easy to duplicate music and redistribute it. This isn’t much of a problem for any artist who doesn’t expect to make money from their music anyway–trying to get exposure is job one, and the plan is to make it big through word of mouth. However, once the so-called starving artist makes it big, then everyone wants to copy and redistribute their music (mp3, CDs, etc.). And the income goes from paltry to. . . paltry. As an artist, how do you compete against yourself, when someone is giving away for free what you sell to make a living?
Another add-in could be the "snitch-and-charge" feature: When you buy audio, you provide a digital "signature" that says you are who you say you are. (For those unfamiliar with it, a digital signature is an encrypted, nearly impossible to crack code that you are the sole owner of.) The terms of the purchase will state that you cannot redistribute the copyrighted material (as is the case with most software today). However, there’s an added twist: When you purchase the music, you agree that you will pay for any unauthorized redistributed copies that bear your digital signature–i.e., that come from your audio playback system/computer. So, you can make copies for your own use, as long as your digital signature is also on the playback devices you use. But if a copy makes its way to an Internet-enabled audio device that doesn’t have your digital signature, a note of this will be sent to the copyright holder. And guess what? The person with the pirated copy doesn’t get billed. You do. Automatically. After all, when you purchased the music, you agreed to not redistribute it.
These are the easy things to predict. Harder to envision is the role that music will play in other media (before 1981, few believed that music and video would fuse so solidly, so don’t rule out other mass-consumable media interconnections). But it’s a sure guess that musicians and recordists will still be among us, and they’ll have as voracious an appetite for creative expression as we do today. There will simply be fewer hurdles to jump.