With the rapid development of streaming technology, someone might thing there isn’t anything new to be invented in terms of streaming. However, the entire evolution of music playback was followed by – This is it. It’s impossible to invent something better than this.

At the beginning…

If we take music as an example, the evolution of music started back in the 1920s and it evolved from records and vinyl to magnetic cassette tapes. With the invention of the Walkman it was possible to take your music with you wherever you go. At that moment people thought that was it. However, then the first CDs were made and shortly after that, the first minidiscs. And just about when everyone thought nothing was left to be invented again, the Internet and MP3 happened. Yes, it was very slow at the beginning and it would take you more than 24 hours to download a single album and then take our music with us on our MP3 player.

As the internet became significantly faster, the streaming started evolving. The principle remained the same – we want our music anytime anywhere. And we want it immediately.

Thanks to iTunes and Spotify, there is no need to have record collections. You can listen to anything you want online and we don’t mean listening to the radio using your portable radio headsets. We are talking about listening to the songs we choose to listen to.

And now when music is available anywhere we have come to the same question as many times before – what’s next after streaming? Is it possible to make music more available than it currently is?

Is interactive music the future?

Well, there is definitely something happening at the moment in the form of “interactive music”.

We can’t really say it’s something new. There were certain attempts of interactive music but it simply happened in the wrong time. Maybe it’s better to say that this type of music developed to a point where it can easily become a trend.

Let’s take the band Coldplay as an example. Back in 2017 they teamed up with Samsung and broadcasted their concert on Samsung’s VR headsets. It was a bit revolutionary because a huge number of people were virtually at the concert in the front row. And they had the chance to experience the concert again and again. This was something new but to be honest it wasn’t completely interactive. It was actually just a recording of the concert.

However, the main idea behind interactive music is to involve direct interaction with the musicians in real time, and to create a real-time connection between the listeners and the musicians in the same virtual environment. When you read this you may think it’s simply impossible, right? But the truth is that this had actually happened not so long ago.

You must have heard about the blockbuster video game “Fortnite”. There are millions of people playing it around the world every single day. Well now, the very popular DJ Marshmello, or to be more precise its avatar, performed a short real-time concert interacting with the players who arrived in the game to see him. Can you guess the number of people at that concert? Well, according to some sources nearly ten million people tuned in and we have to say that it’s amazing.

At the moment, only one DJ made it possible, and we can say that the interest in this concert was enormous. However, we are also sure other artists will follow his steps. Based on this we can say that the future of streaming are digital concerts. And we are quite sure that at one moment, when these digital concerts reach their peak, someone will say – Is there anything else after this?

Is streaming really good for music?

Although streaming is something we all benefit from, we have to say that it greatly affects the artists and their songs. It is natural that the artists have to make a living from the work they do. In simple words, more streaming means more money. This directly made the artists create longer pieces of music and a drastic decrease in quality.

So, the question now is – will streaming do any good to the music industry? From one side, music will be more available, but on the other hand the quality of the music will be much lower as time goes on. If this trend continues we can be sure that quality music will be rare to find.

To sum things up

The history of music playback has thought us that we can always expect something new. Nothing is final and the only thing we have to do is to be ready. The future is coming and there will be definitely things we can’t even imagine at the moment. Until then, let’s just hope that the quality of music will improve accordingly.