'The music scene needs to let go of the past. It's getting so retro, so safe. There don't seem to be many young people making contemporary music - instead they're in boy bands and very manufactured scenarios. I want a 17-year-old to walk through the door saying, "This is going to change the world!" It's weird that the most influential people, like Madonna, Fatboy Slim and Massive Attack, have been around for such a long time. It's not cutting-edge in the way a Grandmaster Flash record or even the first Massive Attack record was when it came out.'
Trevor Nelson (Radio 1 R&B DJ/presenter on MTV's The Lick):
'I'll be putting together a huge R&B website. I've helped spread R&B in the UK, but I increase on that without using technology. Once, if you were into a certain type of music, you had to get up and go to a club to listen to it. But now you can get it on the Net - which enables you to be as knowledgeable about, say, [major hip hop players] the Wu-Tang Clan as a New Yorker.'
Pete Waterman (the man behind Steps):
'The way we buy and distribute our music will change drastically. Not via the Internet, as most people think, but digital TV - the digital shopping services will blossom in the next five years. It will open music to women and older people who may be intimidated going into a record store. You'll find people coming back to buying records for the first time in 15 to 20 years. Because of this older age group, the industry may look at rock more positively than it has for the last decade. The other big thing is that music markets worldwide will converge. Arguably, with this current Latin thing, you're seeing a genuine global trend. Records like Ricky Martin's sell globally now - or Steps. You'll have massive international records, sales of 10 to 12 million albums.'
Colin Barlow (Polydor A&R - responsible for Boyzone, The Lighthouse Family):
'Pop is the biggest phenomenon of the moment. Kids are buying records, or adults are buying records for kids like never before. But overall, I don't see any massive trends. There's so much choice that it's no longer possible for one thing to take over. There'll be lots of small trends instead. Gone are the days, too, when you desperately needed radio to break artists. You can do it purely through television these days, which we've done with an artist like Lolly. Her success shows how much kids are in tune with TV and cable channels like the Cartoon Network. The Internet is positive as well: you find records you never knew existed.'
Lincoln Elias (Sony S2 A&R - responsible for signing Jamiroquai, Des'ree, Reef):
'People have started testing records for radio - particularly the independent local radio stations. Housewives are rung up and asked, "What's your favourite part of this song, or can you remember it?" It will make it harder for bands like Travis or Radiohead, who build sales over a few albums, to get on those stations. It's all to do with speed, people wanting things now. You're pressured into making artists have hits very quickly. But then there wouldn't have been a U2 or a Bob Marley & the Wailers, because they didn't sell very well on their first few albums. Musically, the guitar thing will definitely come back. People want good live acts again. Machines will always be around, but there's nothing better than a human playing with a genius spirit. You can't put that into a computer.'
Keith Wozencroft (Parlophone A&R - Blur, Radiohead, Supergrass):
'You can make music a lot more easily and cheaply now. People can make an album in their bedroom. It's also very easy to put out a record - you can even burn your own CDs. People no longer have to get through to some corporation to get their music heard. But also, a lot of good bands who in the past would have been left to develop on an independent label or signed to a major on much lower deals are now being signed for a fortune and trying to break as a pop act with their first single. They haven't developed, and some creativity has been lost.'
Jonathan More (half of pioneering DJ/ producer/multimedia team Coldcut):
'A combination of video scratching and digital DJing is the future. You can download a lot of the programmes off the Internet. There's one called Real Jukebox that allows you to take a CD with one track you really like, then put it with another track from somewhere else. You could just carry one laptop, and do anything from playing your own M-Peg files [M-Peg is like a portable Walkman that doesn't need CDs or tapes] to creating music live. DJs will also start producing visuals to match the music they're making. Or the audience could create the music. You could have a club where people e-mail their requests, and the computer mixes them with other stuff. I don't know how it could tell what people enjoyed - maybe you could have sensors on the dancefloor telling the computer how much the floor shook.'
Tom Rowland (half of the Chemical Brothers):
'There's a real trend in electronic music to do everything inside computers - from the creation of the sounds, to the arranging and structuring of the music, to putting on the effects or processing. A lot of records are made like that, and although it sounds "out there", there's too much control. We like to have the computer running, but we like the sound to get outside the computer before it becomes committed. It's more interesting when machines come out into the real world.'
Mary Anne Hobbs (DJ whose Radio 1 show mixes rock and dance styles):
'When I grew up in the Seventies listening to music, it was compulsory to join a tribe and wear your colours. Were you a mod? Were you a punk? Were you a New Romantic? And there was a whole uniform that came with that. People aren't living in ghettos any more. Audiences are ambitious and experimental, they want to dive in and out and pick out what they like about a particular genre.'
DJ Vadim (Russian-English hip-hop auteur):
'In Moscow there's an emerging middle class: people who have set up independent labels and are able to support underground music. Legal Business and DA108 are probably the best hip-hop groups. They've got a new rhyme flow, a rhyme pattern which isn't a copy of the American prototype. All the rappers have rapped in Russian for ages, but now it's done in a Russian way. As long as there's no more financial crises, the market for it will expand quickly. There's more information now, more magazines, radio and equipment available. Anything you can buy in the West, you can buy there - it's just expensive. The music is centred on Moscow, St Petersburg, then perhaps Kaliningrad, Kiev, or up in Riga. I even met this group called Via Chappa from Ufa at the bottom of the Urals.'
Paul Oakenfold (the most successful DJ in the world, according to the Guinness Book Of Records):
'I'm doing live shows on the Internet. We did one already at [Liverpool superclub] Cream, and had 35,000 people logged on from 57 countries. Next year, I'll do it monthly, taking it to kids who aren't old enough for clubs yet, the next generation. Last month I was in Shanghai. The kids there want to get into it. The first step is DJs like myself going over there, but there aren't many clubs. TV isn't going to show it, radio isn't going to play it, so you go through the Internet. We're touring 30 UK universities in October, and setting up our own live gigs on the Net from various locations. We're also encouraging the students to become a part of it with monthly chatlines. It's important: it gives me a direct input to where students are at.'
Sasha (globetrotting DJ and star of underground trance):
'As technology gets more complicated, the interface will get easier. There's a system called Kyma that morphs sounds together in the way they morph two images together, but you have to know how to programme in code. But I've seen a newer, easier system where the user-interface is a touch screen, like something out of Star Trek - although, unless the inspiration is there, it's still going to be for the computer boffins. I've got a laptop, and I make a lot of sounds on it. Eventually, I'd like to be able to sit under a palm tree on a beach and ISDN [send by digital phoneline] a track back to London!'