Musician David Bowie is known for a lot of things, namely his music and choice of wardrobe. On Sunday, the man who turned himself into “Ziggy Stardust” turned 65. Ten years ago, Bowie made a bold prediction about copyright and the music industry that has recently resurfaced.

In an interview with the New York Times, the man who has sold 140 million albums suggested that he soon wouldn’t want to be on a label because copyright would be dead by 2012. It’s 2012 and copyright isn’t dead, but he’s not far off with his predictions:

I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.

Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.

If you take out the bit about copyright not existing, Bowie is right on target. Everything about the music industry has indeed changed, and he called it way back in 2002. With services like Spotify and Rdio allowing listeners to wade through massive databases of music, the idea of purchasing an album is becoming extinct. Of course Apple’s iTunes isn’t suffering at all, but I’d bet that complete album sales are showing signs of fatigue over the past few years.

Not all musicians are embracing new technologies, as we learned with Coldplay’s stance against streaming music. The band wants to control its own distribution and doesn’t allow its music to be streamed. With digital music sales surpassing physical last year, we’re not done with the evolution of music yet.

For new artists who are trying to gain a following, touring is the best option to get in front of fans. No longer do you need a label to get you a spot on MTV or Radio, the Internet can easily turn you into a star if you have the chops. Just ask Justin Bieber.

There was some talk a few months ago about whether or not certain large technology companies should consider buying up chunks of the failing music industry in order to get around the regular headaches of such things as licensing and access to content. Since then I’ve been wondering how this might actually work in reality and whether it would really benefit the acts themselves, as well as the listening public.

The first thing to consider is that – if any one of these large tech companies were to purchase a major label or even take the brave steps of setting one up themselves – it would not, either at first or likely ever, be part of their core business. The past has some interesting lessons to teach us about organisations who have run music labels alongside other businesses, such as the case of EMI and The Sex Pistols.

The label signed the band in October 1976 for a two-year deal but trouble soon followed, most memorably the band’s behaviour on the Today programme on December 1st that year – the fallout from which cost EMI a major manufacturing contact and forced them to drop the band to preserve their reputation as a manufacturing company as well as music one. In this case, EMI had experience of dealing with artists going back forty years and were still unable to contain the chaos caused by their hot new signings – one can only wonder how Apple would deal with an internal crisis like that.

The point here is one of expertise and knowing your markets – companies like Microsoft and Apple understand the best approaches around their existing products and services all too well but the music industry is something far more unpredictable and volatile than the technology market – essentially a gamble on public tastes and interest with risks far beyond the norm. After all it’s not possible for an Xbox or iPod to throw a TV (or even maybe itself) out of a hotel window or punch a photographer in the face and create an onslaught of negative publicity.

Would it really work?

In terms of what benefits there might be to the artists themselves it’s easy to imagine some kind of idyllic situation where music businesses are managed by tech companies like some exercise in philanthropy – essentially offering artistic freedoms with a blank cheque but I suspect the reality would we very different indeed. After all, existing record labels are used to taking huge financial risks in an often unpredictable market and allowing their artistic commodities some space in order to thrive but even with huge budgets to spare companies like Google and Microsoft would be likely unable to adopt a ‘hands-off’ approach when historically projects are managed in a very structured and often inflexible way.

A certainty of this imagined takeover of the music industry by tech companies is that music piracy would almost certainly be reduced as it’s inevitable that these organisations would build in every possible limitation and restriction to their platforms to prevent loss of revenue. In turn this could be beneficial for artists, especially if they were able to renegotiate their contracts to be more generous around percentages of music sales. However I feel innovation around music platforms would certainly flourish in this situation especially when you bear in mind that large tech organisations have already gone down this road and have always been keen to develop new means of selling and delivering music but have always been held back by licensing issues and the reluctance of music companies to embrace technology.

Regardless of whether the music industry finds itself being bought off piece-by-piece by technology companies or not, one thing is for sure – it won’t go down without a fight and if some of the new and existing platforms for music distribution such as iCloud and Spotify actually succeed in generating a strong new revenue stream for them, then the very technology companies that could hypothetically buy them out might end up actually being their saviours.

I was reading about the making of Brian Eno’s “Another Green World” earlier I found myself wondering whether it would be possible to record and release such an ambitious album in these times, where record labels are acting like frightened animals, cautiously guarding their IP and making easy moves – no doubt fearful of any further financial hemorrhaging.

Another Green World was made in 1975 in a top London studio that Eno, following a stint in Roxy Music and two well received solo albums, had booked – along with a group of the top musicians of time – without actually having planned much out first. This kind of thing went on a lot in the seventies, where after two decades of lucrative rock ‘n’ roll the money was there to make anything possible and confidence in artists (and not just their managers) was at a peak.

It’s a widely held view that we’re living in a kind of polar opposite to this these days and that the web, with its core principles of openness providing an easy sea for music pirates to sail on, is somehow to blame for this. It doesn’t stop there either – social media advocates that have tried to introduce the need for interaction with audiences to musicians, managers and labels have recently been met with waves of negativity and a sad yearning for “the good old days” when all that was needed to sell thousands of records was a few interviews and some decent radio coverage.

As you’d expect from massive corporate entities, major labels themselves have always been slow to embrace technology and therefore often highly suspicious of it – for instance the delays that have beset the launch of Spotify in the US have apparently been caused by a lack of confidence in potential revenues for the service. This is despite its success in Europe and the fact that these labels own forays into selling music via the web have been massive failures – not to mention the current alternative of continuing to release music only for it to be sold once and then endlessly pirated.

This might be a good time then, if they want to actually be around in ten years time, for labels to begin investing in emerging music technology themselves – rather than be at the mercy of smarter, web-savvy companies that will control their future interaction with audiences, and perhaps even one day seek to usurp them. A wise place to start would be to look into future formats, since MP3 is unlikely to be around forever and has proven to be a medium which suits audiences far, far more than it does the labels. Also, with licensing and IP issues no doubt being a major headache for them in terms of time and resources, perhaps harnessing technology as a means of dealing with these would be wise – although I can see a few people in the legal system resisting this one.

A forward thinking view with regards to the data around their music and artists would benefit them too. You only have to look at LastFm, whose API provides artist and song data to range of popular sites or The Echo Nest, which has recently struck deals around their music data services with two broadcasting giants in the form of BBC and MTV to see that this has a real value in terms of the kind of mobile apps and web services they can provide their audiences in the future.This is certainly something worth thinking about if these begin to replace traditional formats like singles and albums as a means of experiencing music, something that some are starting to believe is very likely. Bearing in mind that this new type of media might allow labels the chance to once again exert some control over the way audiences purchase and interact with music it would be unwise to ignore this trend in the way they ignored the rise of the mp3 fifteen years ago.

As much as I can see that record labels have been overly defensive and almost comically foolish when it comes to the Internet, few things would bring me greater pleasure than to see them recover the confidence to allow them to start investing in artists again and I honestly believe that it’s technology that holds the key to this. Let’s hope we start to see this in the coming years – who knows, maybe one day soon we might get to hear a musical endeavor as glorious as “Another Green World”.