I Woke Up & its Already 2018

I’m reading this artice in Five Eight (a mag from Frukt that of course is more than a little bit biased but does offer a good round up of stats and info too) where Henry Semmence, the MD of Absolute (a leading full-service label management company in Europe) talks about what’s happened since 98 and what will have happened by 2018. I’ve had to re-read it a few times to make sure I’m not missing something or that I got the numbers mixed up or so.

According to Semmence, some of the key developments by 2018 will be that the CD will have continued to decline but due to the aging population its still a force to be reckoned with. Also, we’ll see an increase in digital downloads, especially from mobile devices. Also, apparently the development of the physical distribution network is one of the most important things for 2018.

Huh? I know we won’t have teleporters, colonies on Mars and such but that’s more of a description of today than a prediction of what thing’s will be like in a decade. By then the digital download won’t even be around, even less some piece of physical media carrying it. To think that everything will be in the cloud in 3 years is optimistic but 10 years? That should be well enough to get us of having to replicate all this data across millions of devices.

[disclaimer: I know, I know, its always easy to pick on the guy trying to tell the future… But come on! Saying that 2018 will be like 2008 already is, well, that’s just wrong.]