Last fall, a group of music industry heavyweights gathered in New York City to do something they'd mostly failed to do up to that point: work together. Representatives from major labels like Universal, Sony, and Warner sat next to technologists from companies like Spotify, YouTube, and Ideo and discussed the collective issues threatening their industry.
And there were many. For decades, major labels have watched record sales nose dive. Meanwhile, streaming services are growing in popularity but drowning in lawsuits. In 1998, the industry reported revenue of $13.8 billion; in 2016 it had dipped to $7.65 billion—and that was considered a good year. “It's a really fragmented industry,” says Dan Harple, founder of Context Labs and one of the organizers of the meeting. The participants of that confab would later form a group called the Open Music Initiative.
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