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Mankind is remarkably adaptable.

While invariability many will resist change, as it is stressful and for most people requires some work and discomfort to make it through the adaptive process, once the change has been made folks tend to adjust to new conditions rather quickly.

Which is a darn good thing as in the first decade of the 21st century most of us are experiencing a faster rate of change in the way we live than at any time in history.

One example is how much the Internet has effected the way we all research for information on any topic, book our travel arangements, buy books, send flowers, get our daily up to date news, blog on any subject that we choose, and then almost immediately have our opinions published and accessible to countless millions around the world.

Not that we automatically have a huge audience waiting for our opinions. But if we write well, think well, and promote well, in time we can have our views distributed to millions of people. And if your audience is large enough there can be a nicely profitable business model built around your writing and publishing.

This is great news for some and an unpleasant prospect for others. For instance, if you are in the hard copy newspaper business you have very likely experienced a decline of several percentage points in sales and profits for each of the last six years or so as so many of your former clients now get their news over the Internet and have largely discarded newspapers as being old fashioned.

The same can be said for many hard copy magazines and broadcast TV programs. Some traditional publishers and broadcasters have resisted the change to an Internet driven distribution system and have lost big chunks of market share. Others have been quick to adapt and after a bit of a learning curve are now beginning to see the benefits from being early adapters.

A good lesson to learn for anyone interested in Internet business is that the rate of change is incredibly fast. Those who quickly adapt, or better yet are in the forefront or the initiators of change can cash in very quickly. Those who fight the inevitable and resist adapting to new conditions are going to take a beating. Maybe to the point of going broke and driven entirely out of business.

Even if you are a marker leader you can not afford to rest on your past achievements for very long. A good present example of this are the traditional Internet major portal sites , like Yahoo and MSN, who have recently seen market share slip.

The hot area of growth for the moment is highly interactive sites where the membership base can set many of their own niches to operate in and can highly customize their own Internet space and establish their own networks. These sites have started to cut into the market share of the Yahoo type portals.
Sites that have grown tremendously fast using these concepts are UTube and Myspace. With these sites the content and group structures are largely supplied by the members, not by a group of in house writers and editors. Now, that’s a real democracy in action. People voting by their acceptance or rejection of their peers creative and communication abilities.

The music industry is yet another industry where rapid change in the distribution model has forced the traditional music firms to restructure. For all types of music lovers the Internet music industry has given access to music like never before. If you love to groove to the latest hip hop track or relax with classical music, no problem. You can find what you like on the Internet and download it within minutes.

By using special software you can now legally download just about every song that has ever been written. That’s a lot of music and should keep you happily busy for a good long while.

The Internet really has changed the music industry. At first the music industry powers that be misunderstood the Internet. They ignored it thinking that it was a geekish fad that would soon past. Let the nerds download a few songs from here and there. No matter. How many music loving nerds are out there anyway?

Apparently millions. After just a year or two, as the few nerdy downloads tuned into a flood, the music moguls decided they had better fight back. They brought lawsuits to bear upon poor average folks who enjoyed listening to music, especially free music they were collecting with peer to peer networks on the Internet. Good hard working folks like your uncle Bob and even Grandmother Beth were served with scary legal papers demanding that they cease all of that Internet music stuff and repent.

But folks love that Internet music. The more the music moguls sued and threw fits over revenue losses the more downloads took place. Millions and millions and zillions of them. Clearly the music bosses were on the wrong side of this issue.

Finally the lights begin to flicker on inside the heads of those calling the shots in the music industry. Perhaps the lights would have come on sooner if they had been thinking clearly about how big a deal the Internet and computers were to become.

But one can’t be too hard on the music executives. It’s hard for anyone to think too clearly during and after a three martini lunch. Let’s cut the music guys and gals some slack here.

Eventually the thinking changed. The music industry began to adapt to changing conditions. They finally realized that it would be would easier and much more profitable to make the thieving rascals who were stealing all of the good music off the net customers rather than criminals.

Trying to scare them into becoming legal music lovers by issuing frequent threats and letters from expensive lawyers just didn’t seem to work very well. Millions and millions of music downloads continued.

The music industry bosses realized by 2004 or 2005 that the Internet was not going to be a fad after all and that never in the history of this world has there been a better way to distribute a product, especially a product that could be digitized like music, and distributed worldwide over the Internet at so little cost.

Hey, there’s money to be made if the music goes through the proper Internet distribution channels. Their channels. Those shopping mall stores cost too much to operate anyway.

In the grand scheme of things what does it matter that it took the music industry guys until 2005 to fall into love with the Internet? Now they are in a firm loving embrace and are happy to have zillions of folks from all over the world paying them a little bit every time they download a song or two.

After all when you multiply any little old number times a zillion the total surely does add up fast.

There are still plenty of folks who like to download free music but the paid sites are a lot more convenient to use and there is a lot less chance of sucking in some malware, spyware, or some really nasty computer virus during your download. The sound quality will be much better at most of the legal download sites as well, which is important to music lovers, so the pay for downloading model seems to be quite sound.

The future of music distribution, artists websites, movie distribution, software distribution, in fact anything that can be put into digital format and downloaded to your computer no matter where in the world you are located, looks to be bright.

For instance, video seems to be the next killer application and those who jump on board now with a sound business model focused on video should do quite well. At least for a little while until there is another leap forward with some sort of new technology.

People everywhere love their music and the Internet is just a dandy way to get it to them fast. The music industry moguls having adapted to change should easily be able to afford those fancy expensive Hollywood lunches for a very long time.

Of course, now they will tell you that they knew that distributing music over the internet would be a big winner someday. In fact, to hear them tell it now they planned the entire new distribution model.

To cash in for yourself you have to be able to look forward a bit and visualize new conditions and new market demands that rapid change brings. Then you have to be an early adapter and help others to embrace the changes and adapt to them.

Don’t be afraid of rapid change. That’s where the opportunities are in this fast paced technologically driven world of today.

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