MADE

Mobile is the future of communication and collaboration. You know it is because of its meteoric rise all over the world. According to Morgan Stanley, 42% of Americans now own a Smartphone.

There’s a prominent venture capitalist by the name of Fred Wilson who wrote a brief post on his blog titled The Golden Triangle. He says that there are 3 mega trends in the Web/Tech sector that are going to revolutionize interaction, and consequently business and commerce. They are mobile, social and real-time.

The iPhone, Facebook and Twitter represent each of those three trends. Those three applications are redefining the way we market. And by market, I mean the way we communicate with and persuade people outside of our immediate family; something that commerce and business have been based on since the beginning of civilization.

So it’s a pretty huge deal when a disruptive technology comes along that sets a new communication paradigm. Telephone , radio and print did that about a century ago with the shift from agriculture to industry. Mobile is part of a much larger trend in electronic communication that started way back in the 1960s when the Pentagon decided that it needed a network that would enable its thousands of computers to talk with one another in order to maintain strategic communication in the wake of a Soviet attack. Then you had the rise of LANs, the invention of the Internet by physicist Tim Berners-Lee, Netscape and AOL and finally the social Web.

The Web was just one platform in this evolving paradigm. Mobile is another and it’s on track to become the fastest growing and most disruptive technology of all time.

That means everyone should take it seriously. Not just as a consumer, but as a producer. I get quite a bit of pushback on this blog for proposing that things like CDs and copyright form part of a paradigm that’s becoming obsolete. I don’t make those statements because I have anything against CDs or music copyright law. I’m not in the music industry. I have no emotional stake in CDs. I don’t care about them. I care about the bigger picture.

And the bigger picture is informing us that there is an emerging paradigm that is changing our relationship with the physical world, time and relationships. When I say that the CD is going away, I don’t say it because I think there’s a man behind a curtain trying to make it go away. It’s going away because the nature of our relationship with physical products is changing.

The thing about disruptive technology is that it changes the way we think about things. I, for example, find it harder and harder to read an entire book. Not because I don’t like to read anymore, but because the Web has trained me to read and digest smaller chunks of information in a shorter amount of time. I do still read books though, but almost exclusively on my Kindle. Not because I don’t like physical books, but because my Kindle sends me books in 5 minutes instead of 5 days. Speed and efficiency have become the default, thanks to the Web.

And the thing about defaults is that they’re extremely powerful. For the last century or so, the default for anyone graduating from college has been to go out and get a job. So few people start their own businesses because almost everyone has been taught that the normal thing to do after you finish school is to get a job. Schooling has taught most of us to be so averse to risk that you almost have to unlearn the things you learn there to start a business. But 200 years ago, everyone worked on a farm or owned a little shop in town somewhere. The idea of a job was strange. We may be edging closer to how things used to be thanks to the Web.

In the new music industry, the default has become digital. Music marketing in the future is in the mobile space. It’s fast becoming the largest platform in the world. In a few years, most musicians will have to have their own mobile app the same way they have to have a website today. The cost of building a custom mobile app will come down the way building a website did. The future of music is mobile.

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