So how will localisation, niching markets and the long tail all work together to change our future?

Take the music industry. Right now it's a short tail. A handful of artists sell millions of records. They are heavily promoted by a handful of record companies that make millions of dollars.

The Internet is changing that. Music distribution has the potential to benefit from a long tail effect online. That's a good thing for artists.

It's reasonable to assume that as time progresses music distribution will occur online more than through any other means. CD's will be a thing of the past, but we're not quite there yet. ITunes is good, but it still focuses on mainstream music and Apple has to buy the rights to the music from the big record labels. It sells mostly a short tail of music, millions of the same few tracks.

In the future a service like iTunes will be for music what Amazon.com is for books. Amazon operates in a long tail. Millions of different books sell a lot more combined than the top selling individual books. So while bricks and mortar bookshops make the most from top selling books because of limited capacity and scope, an online store has an inventory of millions and has the capacity to cater to millions of tiny markets and consequently makes more money from the total sales of a millions of different books rather than a select few.

The music industry is a huge economic divide. How about this for a gap between the rich and poor - a few thousand artists are living the dream, world-wide celebrities with fame and fortune, while millions of musicians struggle to make a living and work part time "real" jobs while they attempt to get their music careers going. It's not a happy picture for someone who's passion is music and should be playing and performing for a living.

In the future independent artists will be able to do what most successful small business Internet entrepreneurs do now - niche and localise their market. Most artists may not become multi-millionaires, but by marketing locally they will be able to establish a niche following. As search engines and content delivery methods become more and more individually tailored, localised and instantly delivered, services like iTunes will be like Amazon, offering a massive inventory of unsigned independent artists compared to the few thousand CD's available at your local HMV. Better still, distribution will be instantaneous with tracks downloaded and consumable on demand, taking instant gratification to a new level.

Better still it spreads the wealth around so more artists can make a living doing what they enjoy and less money is funnelled off to the big record label marketing machines. Instead of slaving away at hundreds of free gigs, working like a dog to spread the music for no monetary reward, artists operate like micro-businesses and earn direct rewards for their output. Something is not right when an artist has to do hundreds of free gigs in the hope of being picked up by a label that is just going to commercialise their music, take a stranglehold on their image and take a huge chunk of their future earnings.

The future of music presents an opportunity that is a win-win for artists and music fans. Artists gain the potential to make a living from their work and control exactly what happens to their career and image. Fans receive exposure to a much greater variety of music choices and will no longer be hand-fed mass-media commercialised music by iron-fisted profiteering corporate institutions.

My only wish is that it could happen a lot sooner than it appears it will. We need to hurry up and strip the powers away from the old record labels. They've had too much control for too long and they are not adapting to the future. Innovate or die.

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