Forrester Still Thinks We’ll Buy Music But Everyone’s Still Doomed

Forrester has published another dodgy report that suggests that CD sales are going to die and digital music sales are going to increase. Amazing insight, we agree with you, dear reader. They also suggest people are going to sell music to their friends, peer to peer like. You what?

Come on. Does anyone really expect that the vast majority of music is going to be paid for, for much longer? People pay $279 for this report and Forrester’s giving them the wrong answer.

Before we leave the report for dead, there is one interesting observation in there: they said that online music sales and many of the new models in the music business aren’t going to be around for long either. And you know us, we can forgive a futurist when they add a bit of panic. According to Forrester ad supported models and subscription services are going to die too. We suppose they’re hinting at services like Spiral Frog and Rhapsody here:

Subscription music services will show modest growth, reaching just $459 million in revenue in 2012 according to Forrester’s projections, while experiments in ad-supported downloads will be silenced by the powerful combination of DRM-free music and on-demand music streaming on sites like imeem.com.

Forrester