10 predictions of what might happen in a number of areas of the music business next year.
2020 has been an eventful year in music, and although much of the chaos is a result of the pandemic, the normal evolution of the business had a lot to do with it as well. With that in mind, here are my 10 music business predictions for 2021 in no particular order. Despite the support from the Save Our Stages act,50% of venues will still close regardless of the funding. Many will have lost leases, and face increased insurance costs and neighborhood gentrification that will make reopening not an option. That said, new venues will pop up to take their places (the entertainment industry hates a vacuum), although that most likely won’t start until 2022. TikTok use may have peaked in 2020 thanks to the pandemic, but 2021 will see the slow decline of the video platform. With all the major streaming platforms introducing their own short video versions as well as direct competitors like Triller, it will be a death by a thousand cuts. Plus TikTok’s major demographic of 13 to 24 is both extremely fickle and more likely to grow out of the need to use it daily. There is no new “latest thing” on the horizon yet, but something new under the radar may emerge soon to make the platform even less attractive. The Biden administration will concentrate on bigger fish to fry than a no-win attempt to get parent Bytedance to shed its U.S. operations to an American company. The Chinese government was never going to allow it, and there are plenty of other things for the Justice Department to concentrate on than a potential threat that was never proven. Speaking of lawsuits, there are plenty of state and federal government agencies that want to break up Facebook into its separate parts of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
