Gerd Leonhard
Music Futurist
Switzerland/USA
"The" global music futurist. Always interesting. Always controversial. Trust Gerd to come up with something different!

Music like water: everyone uses everyone pays

By 2010 Music will be flowing in digital networks like water flows through faucets - everybody will use it, and everybody will pay for it, one way or the other. Why try to get the water for free when it's already prepaid? MusicFuturist Gerd Leonhard believes that the music industry will, step-by-step, embrace the flat fee / bundled model, and voluntary compulsary licensing within the next 2 years, and that all involved parties (the artists, the consumers, and the music companies) will be better off for it. When distribution becomes simply a given, in all digital networks, the music industry will focus on what really matters: discovering new artists and writers, and marketing them. In a Music Like Water system, 9.9 out of 10 people will use music, thereby exponentially increase the worth of the music industy.

Still some important questions remain : once digital distribution (legal or not) of all content becomes the norm, how will content creators get the user to pay attention to them? Will digital radio (like XM-Radio or DAB) serve the music user so well, anytime anywhere, that downloading or 'owning' becomes less interesting?

These are just some of the questions being explored in the Media & Entertainment stream in the Summit of the Future.

Gerd Leonhard (42), is a musician and producer, writer, strategic adviser and music business entrepreneur. Originally from Germany, Gerd spend almost 20 years in the U.S., working in the music industry, and now resides in Basel, Switzerland.

1996-2002, during the heydays of the Digital Music and dot-com years, Gerd was the founder and President & CEO of LicenseMusic.com, a company that revolutionized the B2B music-licensing space by inventing a web-based software product (and online marketplace) that reduced the average transaction time for music licenses from 6 weeks to 2 hours. LicenseMusic counted thousands of clients in the Film, TV, Advertising and New Media industries, worldwide, including Disney, McCann-Erickson, Paramount Pictures, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Fox TV.

As a musician and composer (guitar), Gerd won the highly acclaimed Quincy Jones Jazz Masters Award which allowed him to attend Boston's Berklee College of Music and, in 1987, graduate with a diploma in Jazz Performance. Gerd has appeared on many recordings, concert bills and instructional videos, and has toured internationally, including some opening engagements for major acts such as Miles Davis. As an event producer, Gerd served as the Executive Producer of the pan-European talent event EuroPopDays, in Freiburg / Germany , which featured over 200 showcases with new bands and unsigned artist, sponsored by the European Commission and covered by MTV Europe.

Gerd served as an Expert Adviser to the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium, in 1993-1996, as Senior Adviser to the London-based Rightscom Ltd, currently sits on the Advisory Board of the Music Business Management Division of Westminster University (London), and has consulted dozens of start-ups and SMEs in the music and technology sectors, both in Europe and the U.S. Gerd also works with venture capitalists and financial services companies in discovering interesting investment opportunities in the media-technology business.

Gerd is a very active writer (look for a new book to be published in early 2004), speaker and strategic adviser, and has been quoted in Billboard, Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, the San Francisco Chronicle, Business2.0, the WSJ and Wired. He publishes his music business visions at www.thefutureof.net, a think-tank site that has been syndicated to hundreds of websites around the globe. Gerd is also the Founder of www.musicentrepreneurs.com, a network platform for entrepreneurs in the music business.

Gerd has spoken, moderated and presented at dozens of music industry events, including Webnoize, MIDEM, MILIA, Gartner Conferences, Streaming Media and the Content Summits; and has lectured at Berklee College of Music, UC Berkeley, University of Miami, City University London, University of Colorado, and many others.

Gerd speaks German, English, and French, and, on a good day, a little bit of Spanish and Italian.
http://www.gerdleonhard.com
http://gerdleonhard.typepad.com

See also Book Shop
The Future of Music by Dave Kusek, Gerd Leonhard
Publication date: March 2005