 Anyone who thinks they should wait and see how things progress will be left behind in the dust of societal, economic, cultural, and political change. The job you will have tomorrow may be in an industry that is just being born today. The products, markets and companies of next month and next year may not have existed 6 years ago. Facebook opened its site to the general public just six years ago.
This article is a great testimonial to the power of change driven by technology. Now in YouTube stars are born, serious money is made, and the global economy feels more and more like a neighborhood. A decade ago the record industry’s gears clicked along more or less as they always had: Labels signed up promising acts discovered by A&R scouts, paid those acts advances against future music sales, and hawked that music through a sprawling network of radio programmers and retailers. Today, with album sales continuing to plummet—in 2004, 666.7 million albums were sold; by 2012 that number was down more than 50 percent, to 316 million—labels and artists depend more than ever on touring and merchandise for revenue. Songs are ads meant to help sell tickets and T-shirts, and YouTube is beginning to rival radio when it comes to breaking those tracks. Recognizing this, the trade magazine Billboardrecently overhauled its formula for determining the most popular music in the country, giving YouTube plays more weight. The following week, Harlem Shake topped the Hot 100 chart—the first instrumental track to do so since Jan Hammer’s Miami Vice theme in 1984. Five weeks later, it was still there. Read more at Bloomberg BusinessWeek
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