Is the Music Industry able to See Far Enough into the Future?

Every startup begins with a 10-year vision.

Not because founders are naturally optimistic, but because the industry demand it. Before a single product is built, before a single dollar of revenue is earned, founders have to imagine, where will this be in a decade, and how can I make enough money for myself and investors (If I bring them on).

That question gets asked early enough that it becomes part of the company's DNA. Build value now, yes but build it as a step toward a defined future state. The short-term and long-term are connected by design. The vision exists before the product does.

That's the world technology companies are born into. It shapes the very foundations of what the product could become and how they see the industry they're building for in a decade from now. When a tech company sits down with a music business, they have already spent years thinking about where music is going. They have a thesis. They have a position and a plan to execute.

The music industry has a release schedule.

For most artists and independent operators, the planning horizon is 6 to 12 months. The next record. The next run of shows. The next pitch to a label or a brand. When income is unpredictable and leverage is limited, long-term thinking stops being a strategy and starts being an indulgence. You manage what's in front of you because you have to.

The major labels sit a little further out. With catalogue revenue, market power, and institutional scale, they can see 2 to 3 years ahead. That's still a fraction of where technology lives. But it's enough to give them a meaningful advantage over every other music business in the room.  The disconnect for them is they still aren't creating the future of the industry, they have happy with the status quo continuing until they see a threat on the horizon.  They aren't incentivised to change.

The gap is structural, not cultural. Time horizon is a function of the promise of financial stability and a long-term vision that leads to it.  Whether that happens or not doesn't practically matter, it's about the promise that it could.  The more precarious your position, the more your attention collapses to the immediate. Artists aren't short-term thinkers because they lack ambition. They're short-term thinkers because the way the music industry is built gives them no other option.

What does that mean?

That gap has meant the music industry has spent decades reacting to technology rather than shaping it. Streaming didn't come from inside the industry's vision of its own future. Neither did social monetisation. Neither did AI licensing. In each case, a technology arrived with a 10-year thesis already behind it, and the industry scrambled to respond.

That pattern holds until something changes structurally. Not just who earns money in music, but how it flows, how it accumulates, and how many people and organisations it gives a longer runway to.

What needs to change?

This is the discussion we should be having: What are the alternative pathways from here so the industry can evolve into a model that gives aspiring artists (like aspiring founders) more hope and the ability to see and create that future?

We don't have clean answers, but we think the questions are overdue.  What could be that future?