Next year the way the internet looks will be changed completely. As an alternative to .com and .co.uk, you will be able to own .anything, literally. With this, .music is expected to change the music industry's presence online too.
There’s no doubt that the .music domain name will be contested when it becomes available to buy early next year. ICANN, the governing body which decides who gets the right to manage these new domain name extensions, says that an application by a community of musicians, for example, would be favoured over a purely commercial application.
So a .music registry application specifically for local bands might outweigh an approach by the big record labels to capture the extension for themselves. You could, however, see a mix of the two if someone as charismatic as Apple made a play to create an online community of music lovers under the .music extension. Who will win out in this contest (or if alternatives like .band exist instead) is still unclear.
I suspect that many of the potential bidders are keeping their intensions under wraps for now. But come early 2010 and the opening of the application process, we may start to see the contenders emerge and be able to guess the future shape of the .music internet landscape.
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