1) The house beat finally becomes completely inescapable. Pounding like a two-day-old migraine, it's insidious four on the floor pulse easily vanquishes all memory of polyrhythm and rhythmic diversity from the collective human psyche. Soon, every commercial, folk song, wedding and school dance will be soundtracked by the maddening, repetitive thump-thump-thump of the electronic bass drum. Everything will move in synchronized motion like a well-oiled machine or a really boring scene from "Stomp." On the plus side, we'll finally be able to dance the robot to anything.
2) The T-Pain Mic will be the snowball that begins the avalanche that will bury the human voice. Now that auto-tune comes embedded in our toys, our telephones will be next, followed shortly by pitch-correcting hardware larynx replacements. As the loss of emotional nuance in the worlds languages is replaced by choppy clips of robotic song hooks, our brains will actually lose the ability to understand emotion. Auto-tune will turn us all into Spock. On the plus side, everyone will be decent at karaoke.
3) Cloud-based music storage will go internal. We'll begin to store our music libraries in our hippocampus instead of our laptop, but when the hardware goes awry there will be a constant and unstoppable stream of music playing in our heads. The resulting sleep-deprivation will lead first to grumpy people, then angry people, and finally violently frustrated people. On the plus side, the ensuing riots will have personal soundtracks.
4) A deadly virus will sweep the world's continents, leading to hordes of people roaming the earth in search of brains. Civilization will collapse. On the plus side, Tom Waits first release after becoming a zombie will be really good. Or has Tom Waits already released his first record as a zombie? Hard to tell.
