3AW’s Mark Holden and Morris Miselowski discuss the Future of the Music Industry.
Business Futurist | Foresight Strategist
If you’ve read this far, something probably connected.
Maybe it put words to something you’d been sensing but couldn’t quite land. Maybe it made something complicated feel clearer. Maybe it unsettled a position you thought you’d settled.
Good. That’s where this work lives.
Not forecasting. Not scenarios at 2050. Not more noise. What’s already moving. The shifts most organisations can’t yet see, name, or understand the full weight of. What it means. What to do about it while it’s still a possibility, not a problem. Short term and long.
Morris Misel has been doing this for 30 years across 160 industries, with boards, executive teams, and leadership groups in Australia and internationally. More than 2,800 engagements. Over a million people a year through conferences, boardrooms, and media.
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Choose Forward.
The music industry is being reshaped by streaming economics, AI-generated content, and direct artist-to-fan models that bypass traditional gatekeepers. Revenue is shifting from ownership to access, while discovery algorithms increasingly determine which artists get heard. Understanding these structural shifts matters for labels, artists, and anyone navigating the music industry’s immediate futures.
Artists and music businesses need to diversify revenue beyond streaming — live performance, sync licensing, merchandise, and community membership models are all gaining ground. Building direct fan relationships through platforms you control, rather than relying solely on algorithm-driven discovery, reduces platform risk and creates more sustainable income over time.
The core tension is valuing human creativity when AI can generate plausible music at near-zero cost. This creates downward pressure on licensing rates and commoditises certain content categories. The challenge for the industry is maintaining a clear distinction — and a viable economic case — for human-made music with authentic cultural provenance and story behind it.
Music was the first creative industry to be fully disrupted by digital distribution, making it a useful foresight signal for what follows in publishing, film, and visual arts. The pattern is consistent: disaggregation, platform intermediation, revenue compression in the middle, and bifurcation between commodity content and premium human-authored work that commands loyalty.
The next significant shift is AI personalisation at scale — music generated or remixed in real time to match mood, context, or environment. Combined with spatial audio and immersive formats, this raises fundamental questions about authorship and royalties. Music industry leaders need to engage with these questions now, before platforms set the standards unilaterally.
