It's old news that the Music Industry had to completely reinvent itself
around its core business, and I'm not even sure they have found a
solution yet.
The disruptor? The Web.

The Web sole-handedly brought a complete, established industry to its knees.
Next in line was the News and Publishing industry. Again, very scandalous.
And now, we can aleady see the red dot on the forehead of the next
pair of victims: Banks and Retailers.

If that sounds too far fetched for you, remember that neither the Music
industry nor the News industry perceived the size of the threat they
faced until it was upon them, and things are going even faster today.
You need to take a mental leap in order to see how it will happen in
concrete terms. And the reason it is so hard to see is because this is
the result of a complex system with many converging dimensions.

But the endgame is this: Information will flow freely following the
path of least friction. And that includes money of course.

But thinking in such abstract terms leads you nowhere. The trick is
trying to layout the roadmap: How will this actually happen? What will
happen first? Is there an opportunity for me in any of these
mini-earthquakes?

I recently gave a talk about this and lots of interesting facts and
observations appeared as to which concrete changes would be the first
indicators of a major, subterranean change. Now, after watching the
PayPalX innovate event, I get that feeling that most of the "will
happen" milestones are now in "just happened" status.

* Business Payments over PayPal with small fees
* Some sort of Facebook integration
* Simplified/unobtrusive experience 
* Compelling, radical examples developed atop PayPal API
* Micropayments
* Micropayments
* Micropayments 

And I emphasize Micropayments because they imply a deep cultural
change. Once you learn to pay, say 50cents for small things, then a
complete new "instant" economy is born: The Attribution Economy :)

So most of this is already there. With real world use-cases.
Boy was that fast...

But it has to be. Money is a TERRIBLE solution to a real problem (
exchanging goods and services ). Bad solutions get replaced as soon as
a viable alternative is found.

The beauty of all this is that, from a certain level of abstraction,
all the industries that are being negatively affected by the web are
about tapping into some kind of information flow ( music, news, money,
offers ).

* Music and Digital content: Check
* Text Medium based content: Check
* Offers and Commerce: In progress ( we need more structure. Web 3 is
doing its magic here )
* Money: In progress ( we need just enough momentum to overcome
cultural and regulatory issues. PayPal is upping the ante here. Turbo
speed )

The flipside of this is that there is huge opportunity to innovate,
and this also applies to the current behemoths. But. If history has
taught us something, it has taught us that their size makes them blind
and too slow to react.

I give Banks, say, 4 years before they enter the panic phase.

If you haven't already, I highly recommend you go watch the recorded
live stream from the PayPalX innovate event:
www.ustream.tv/paypalx