Here are my rough notes from this interesting Chinwag Live event on Tuesday.

Steve Bowbrick

This is an industry driven by hyperbole, and change is always massive, and disruptive. At least micromedia sounds small!

Gerd Leonhard

Deal mostly with the issue of control: how can you make money from content if distribution is effectively free. Social networks are becoming the new broadcasters. In the future you'll be adding feeds for music, video as well as for web pages.Most companies are going to be 90% syndicated, as few can afford the investment to create a major brand. Traditional media says control = media. The new guys say attention or trust = money.

Google has this aura of openness, but their core, the algorithm is closed. Microsoft, which used to be closed, is now opening up. So it's not a matter of straight black/white comparisons.

Miles Lewis, Last.fm Europe

Have been at last.fm for 5 months, previously at Yahoo. Last.fm's homepage only has 3% of hits. Most traffic (40%) comes in from widgets, and none of those widgets have been written by Last.fm. We are about music and nothing but music. Taking that chaos of music has become a badge for our users. There was iPhone application within two hours of the iPhone reaching the market. No audio ads at the moment. How many users will bugger off if we add them? Don't know. Expect 50% of visits to be via widgets, some of which have 50,000 users, others have 3.

Mitch McAllister, Product Director, MySpace Europe

The whole genuinely is greater than the sum of the parts. When YouTube widgets first started popping up on profiles, we weren't sure what to make of it. We're expecting to see 50% of our traffic in the future on mobile or non-PC devices.

Neil McIntosh, Guardian Unlimited

Many of us are content creators as well as conduits to an audience. We are run by a trust. Meet audiences where they are. No one wants to be a channel. Issues for us: not just about our need to sell ads, also about context: what surrounds your content.

Umair Haque

I run the Havas Media Lab, a small media consultancy.Wrote a presentation called The Age of Plasticity. When we break things down and remix them, we get productivity gains. That's what micromedia is all about. Last.fm andMySpace have solved real problems, the music industry, which was incredibly shitty. We do ourselves a disservice by speaking of widgets as small and frivolous.I hate the 'monetization' word because you have to create some value before you can capture it. It's not just about shoving more shitty ads down people's throats. We in London think media is entertainment, but it's a hell of lot more.

MySpace should go to advertisers and brands and explore with them how they can reinvent their relationship with consumers; how to turn advertisting into listening.

Generally I felt Tuesday's Innovation Edge event played it a bit safe, but here are my notes of what I found to be the highlights. For once the 'star speakers' were truly stars.

Tim Berners-Lee interviewed by Jonathan Freedland

If you find these notes interesting, you can see the full video of the interview.

Didn't see the 'vague but exciting' comment until his boss died. Both men (Tim & boss) knew they had no remit to work on this, so boss didn't say yes, because he couldn't, but didn't exactly say no either.

Should employees be allowed to potter? 10-20% time is a good idea, but generally putting employees on a long leash to tackle problems. Don't expect people to tell you what solutions they're going to come up with before you give the support.

Apocryphal quote from Einstein 'If we knew what we were doing, we couldn't call it research'.

If the web is still in its infancy, what are your hopes for its adolescence and adulthood? Perhaps it's already a teenager, but I hope it will be responsible member of society We need to experiment with new ways of doing science and running society. I hope the web will support both of those.

Blogs are one of the things I call social machines. They're invented. That creates a large-scale phenomenon. A large number of wikis are created, and one of them happens to have grand ambitions. Blogs are what happens when people get into the blogosphere. People are behaving like adolescents and testing things out here, getting hurt sometimes, and hopefully maturing a lot.

The Web Science Research Initiative (Southampton University and MIT, part supported by NESTA). The really interesting things fell between stools of, say, psychology and economics. There are more web pages out there than are neurons in your brain. The web is big and complex, and we don't know what its properties are. How does the blogosphere interact with the press? Does it keep it honest? What if it flips, and hatred and rumour spreads faster than love and truth?

Would the web lose its spontaneity if you were try to pin it down? The key to understanding the web isn't pinning it down. Example of eBay as interaction between micro-level individual interactions and macro-level system that results,

Is the web more fragile than we realise? It's more subtle than that: will it be stable? Will it be a force for good? There are some reputable sources of medical information on the web. That's the good bit. Drug companies also produce some information that looks similar and may also be useful, but tends to conclude with a list of drugs. Will the web get pulled towards the latter? Email worked very well for a long time, and then commercial email became acceptable use, and there was a tipping point that you couldn't predict from the specs: thus spam.

Is innovation from now on going to be a collective rather than an individual endeavour? [Some not very articulate stuff about new ideas and words that people take on and spread] You can't ask people how they thought stuff up and expect an accurate answer. My goal for the web would be to enable that stitching of ideas when they are in different heads on different sides of the world.

Bob Geldof

Here's the full video. Great entrance.

Bono is short and fat, and I'm not. The power of unreasonable people (George Bernard Shaw), who find themselves uncomfortable in the world and persist in trying to change it. Thus is necessity the mother of invention, and desperation is the father of necessity.

The future will have terrible wars, terrible economic problems. History has shown that people are unteachable. In 01908, they had no inkling of the War, that flu would wipe out more than the War, or of the 01929 crash.

We turn to innovation because we're forced to in a period of change.

Business finds a way to make progress pay. But progress towards what? We can't have more of everything. We have to rearrange things. Everything is running out: air, water, time.

Social entrepreneurs are the people GBS was talking about. Examples of microloans in Bangladesh.

I'm Irish:I came here because Britain had that entrepreneurial culture. Ireland had this crouching deference to the UK. In the last quarter of the last century, the UK dominated in culture.

Tim B-L fits the British mandate, and you love him more because he didn't make any money out of his invention.

Daily Mail makes its living from contemptuous sneer at those who try and fail. I was just desperate, and a rock band is a classic cooperative entrepreneurial venture. NHS and Open University were created out of desperation. Can those institutions survive as they are: what kind of review and revision do they need.

Britain defines itself in opposition to almost everyone/anyone else.

You can't encourage the young to be entrepreneurial.Born not made.

Existential problems are looming in front of us. We are desperate. The political body doesn't give us solutions any more. The notion of leadership comes to your self.

I was innovating in charity. In the UK, you can't say 'charity' without saying 'chaaridee' or 'love' without 'lurve'. We are embarrassed about using these words without irony. Innovation may come from society not from the top: if enough people give to a charity, government policy has to adapt. And now organisations need talented people more than talented people need organisations, so the organisations have to change to attract them.

Helen Alexander: you have to worried all the time that the entrepreneurial spirit is fading. You have to keep an eye on it. But also allow for the fact that people can be successful without being entrepreneurs.

Are social networks the new cities?

Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council

Quick answer: no. Virtual world is an adjunct not a substitute for real world. Core of an innovative city is its innovative people: have to create space for them to be creative. Government has to know when to get out of the way and when not to. Organic processes + institutional processes to ensure that creative ideas come to something. Question of survival. Facilitate networks within the city: bringing people together in a physical space.

Jon Gisby, Channel 4

Collectively we're watching trillions of hours of TV, and that's not going away.Two big changes: 1) Rise of on-demand. 2) New expectations of an audience that can participate.

Michael Birch, Bebo

Moved to San Francisco because my wife is from there, and it happened to have a thriving IT community. The users were critical to the growth. We modelled Bebo on a city. Milton Keynes and Welwyn Garden City are not great, so we tried to avoid being too contrived.At the start, there's no one there so it doesn't matter how good the code is.

Yesterday Matt Mason spoke at the ippr about his book, The Pirate's Dilemma: How Hackers, Punk Capitalists, Graffiti Millionaires and Other Youth Movements Are Remixing Our Culture and Changing Our World. I liked him as a speaker: he did not come across like he was full of himself, or full of sh*t. Which is a good start.

Kay Withers, Research Fellow

We at ippr have done some research on IP regime and how it can adapt - but it's fair to say that we don't know the answers yet.

Matt Mason

We are all copying machines, copying and imitating each other. The internet is the greatest copying machine.The average US citizen does $millions of copyright infringements daily, unwittingly (irrespective of knowingly sharing music files).

Had to get involved in pirate radio at an early age. Spent most of weekends at the top of tower blocks. Despite what they say, the police and DTI were surprisingly lenient. Major labels used to collaborate.So it's recognised that pirate stations add value to the music scene. The most popular pirates tend to be the ones that innovate and experiment the most.Radio 1 is a copy of the pirate Radio London.

Pirates have even founded whole nations.Piracy was involved in the creation of the USA: the only reason that the country was able to industrialise so quickly was by explicitly flouting copyrights. The etymology of 'Yankee' goes back to the Dutch 'Janke', meaning pirate.

Hollywood was located on the West coast to keep out of reach of Edison's patents. Pirate radio spotted the opportunity for ad-supported free music.

How do pirates do this innovation?

1. pirates look for gaps outside the market: see an opportunity to make money and go for it
2. if they're doing something that adds value, they broadcast a message to society since the medium is the message
3. they're also able to harness the power of the audience, and at the point there is no way you can fight them.

We need IP laws. If pirates are adding no value, we should absolutely fight them (e.g. counterfeiting of Colgate toothpaste).

But if they are adding value, what are they doing and what does that tell us? The record business was historically very good at co-opting youth culture, but failed to do this with file-sharing. 95% of young people today are pirating music in one way or another. The business is not just the little plastic discs.

Steve Jobs: compete with pirates. Nike also realised that Japanese pirate of their sneakers was onto something, and started to appropriate some of his adaptations and buy shares in his company.

If a remix is adding value to the original, it causes sales of the original to increase.

The right to hack and remix computer games is a right of passage. Castle Smurfenstein was remix of Castle Wolfensteing on Apple II. The hackers become leaders of the video game industry.Created a pool of amateur modders -- essentially free labour.

Some unforeseen things happen. Machinima creating films with games by using the settings as locations. MTV has a show called Video Mods. A whole subgenre of film.

Hollywood now in the business of selling experiences, not movies i.e the social experience of watching in a cinema. Pirates have started to complain of piracy of their DVDs.

Companies and governments need to learn to copy pirates -- if they are adding value -- not fight them. Other alternative is to compete with them. That's the dilemma.

Q&A

Whose dilemma is it?
Not us and them any more. We are all pirates.

Is success just commercial? What about aesthetics?
Culturally we do benefit.

Whenever pirates invade a space, they create a kind of chaos where the value of products/services is up for grabs. And then it gets institutionalised.

Below are the notes I made on this Music Tank event yesterday evening. Each of the panelists made introductory comments (Ryan Regan was 'keynote'), and these comments are the first paragraph under each name. Subsequent paragraphs are comments made in the Question and Answer discussion.

I tried to make notes as faithfully as I could, but I am fallible. Beware of taking these notes as direct quotes from the named individuals: they are not, unless indicated by quote marks. If you spot anything that you know to be incorrect, please alert me via the comments, and I will correct my mistake(s).

In due course, a full transcript and recording of the event will be made available to Music Tank members on their site. That will be the definitive version. I hope this one may be of some interest in the meantime.  

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Ryan Regan, CFO, Last.fm

Devised to be the last place you'll need for music online. Only VC round was in 2006. Launched free to use, ad-supported, on-demand streaming in January. Available in US, UK and Germany - considering other territories. Allows people to get involved in discovery without commitment of downloading application and building a profile. Structured deals so that every time a song plays, the artist or rightsholder receives some money. Fully licensed. Currently 2.7m tracks available on-demand, and looking to grow this. Good opportunity for advertisers as audience is highly engaged, doing something they're passionate about.Visitors are up 83%, listeners are up 150%. It used to be that only a small proportion of users were using the streaming, now it's up to 40%.Still early days, and need to grow the business to make it serious for all the interested partners. Need to get the brands online. CBS have lots of experience of monetizing listening. Bring in more partners to provide content.Will be launching a subscription service offering something beyond free on-demand service.

We've always respected rightsholders [Charles Caldas: "I know a few people who would beg to differ with that statement."] Streaming was always a small part of Last.fm, and not the main reason why we had the valuation we did when CBS bought us.

In a world of ubiquitous access, we believe Last.fm services will still have a role to play in helping you choose what to listen to next, even if they're not the people providing the streams.

Agree that technology, not licensing, is the limiting factor for the celestial jukebox, but expect this to arrive within five years.

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Alex Valassopulos, Head of Business Development, Sony BMG

Download to own is still top priority because of the economics. Subscription is next most valuable. Streaming and micropayments are third, because the figures aren't great yet - but still interested in this. Need to trial every model out there. We may have to add in 'parameters' to ensure we're not cannibalising other revenue. Streaming deals are the discovery end, but ownership is still key. Only slowly learning what a good CPM rate is.

Slacker might fit within a couple of parameters: we'll have to have a look at it.

The three tiers will be swept away if we arrive at true ubiquity of access, the real celestial jukebox. This is utopian. It's not licensing that's holding it up, it's the technology, WIMAX and all that.

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Jez Bell, Broadcast & Online Licensing Director, MCPS-PRS

Collecting societies are sometimes an afterthought in the licensing process to the labels.Different approach to Sony BMG's ranking of priorities. More even-handed approach. Everything we do is precedent-based - this takes away some flexibility. What's good for one part of the supply chain may be not so good for another part. Massive amount of activity over the last two years with Web 2.0 models. Challenge for a collective licensor is to maintain simple access to all rights, which has the flexibility that licensees want. Being fair and equitable is not always consistent with flexibility. Key thing we fought for in the copyright tribunal is to have licensing schemes that balance flexibility with minimum value for the music that's being used. Want to provide a clear and consistent message to the market and licensees.

Publishers have given us the message to go out there and license - there are no taboos.

Getting the subscription model working would be a Holy Grail, because it provides consistency and predictability of income. Worried about potential risk of cannibalisation.

I think the celestial jukebox is already with us, whether through Last.fm, We7, Spiral Frog etc. Once the consumer has access to all the music they want, you have the experience of the jukebox.

ISPs never complained about illegal filesharing because it was part of the demand that built their customer bases. It's ironic that when a properly licensed service that genuinely engages users (BBC iPlayer) comes along, the ISPs make a fuss.

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Charles Caldas, CEO, Merlin

Merlin formed specifically to deal with the issues being talked about today. The independent sector needs to create some efficiencies in order to participate in the new licensing structures, Accounts for 30% of the market, but represents thousands of small labels. The music has created value for the likes of MySpace and Last.fm, but has not seen the rewards from this. Merlin is not for profit.

Part of the reason Merlin was started was as a response to businesses using music to build value and then selling out.

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Clive Gardiner, We7

Only in the streaming business for a week! Challenges: would anyone come to our site? Would anyone license to us? Would advertisers support the model? Started with downloads. Mediagraft technology grafts ads onto the music tracks. The 30-second preview is not enough. All downloads are MP3. Streaming front-end is important: traffic seems to be up ten times in the last week. Display ads on their own will not work.

Targeting is the future for getting ad rates up.Have to listen to the three points of our triangle: listeners, rightsowners, advertisers. Our streaming service is a form of permission marketing.

Paid downloads (PPD) account for 80% of digital revenue, so that's where most attention is now, but We7 represents a move away from this to new models.

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Adrian Drury, The Cloud

We're the ugly boring bit in delivering the Celestial Jukebox to mobile devices. The multiples are much bigger: you change your audience by a factor of ten if you can market to them during their dead time away from their desks. The Cloud is building a mobile broadband network that is fit for this purpose.No difference for the user in buying a track on a mobile device, compared with at home. Streaming: have done some work with Slacker in the US, a mobile network Walkman. Slacker have created their own music right, caching music on device for a limited time. Also exploring location-based downloads and ads: very specific demands for music associated with a gig.

Is FM going to stick around, or are we going to move very quickly from an FM world to an IP world?

Bittorrrent is a nightmare for us: users just sit there and chew up bandwidth. Worried that someone could bring out a Limewire client for Nokia handsets.

[Keith Harris: are you going to police the network?] We block specific ports. Only a tiny fraction of miscreants know how to switch ports.

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Keith Harris (chair)

Worried about the attack of harmony between panellists: either someone isn't telling the truth, or we're not living in the world I thought we were.

Do rightsholders want too much money from small start-ups to allow them to get off the ground.

Problem with revenue-share models is that it's often not clear what counts as revenue. Is it just the ads, or is it the other strands of revenue?

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PPL

Same issues as Jez: level playing fields, precedents. However, with regard to on-demand streaming, the labels are choosing to exercise the rights themselves rather than via PPL. So we are not currently in this business; we're observing.

I had to leave after just 20 minutes of this event, launching Adrian Monck's event, as I had a ticket to see Laurie Anderson at the Barbican, so I missed the contributions from Andrew Gilligan and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, and the audience questions.

Evan Davies (BBC, chair)

You can ask about trusting politicians, estate agents etc, but you wouldn't ask if you can trust the speaking clock...

Adrian Monck, Professor at City University

Premise of the book is that he got fed up with hearing about a crisis of trust (Paxman, Thompson)

This stops us asking the important questions.

Newspapers versus the newcomer in the '50s: television.

Had to convince advertisers that they had a special relationship with readers, and they chose trust as. Walter Cronkite turned out to be the most trusted man in America, even after he'd stopped reading the news for CBS.

The standards of truth and accuracy we expect from medical studies...[?]

Trust adopted by the BBC as a metric to replace authority.

Trust is very closely correlated with use. Google News is highly trusted in the US, but produces no news; it's just an algorithm.

Ofcom now poll on trust, even though some of them recognise that the polls are useless.

Want to get people away from talking about trust, because underneath this are lots of important issues about access to data and sources.

The claim that's got the most attention is that no one ever lost any readers or viewers by losing trust.

Trust is a balloon that we ought to burst and talk about some more important things.

Charlie Beckett, Director of Polis

Agree with Adrian to a great extent. We're all in favour of trust, but not sure what it means.

How can you check the veracity of Andrew Gilligan's pieces about Ken Livingstone? You can't.

TV presenters get high trust ratings because they look human and they talk to us.

We might recognise that our newspaper is highly biased, but we might trust it because it speaks to our circumstances and perspective.

I don't think mainstream media ever had a great reputation for truth.

Network journalism: journalists are going to have to get used to involving citizens in the process of producing news.

Notes from a Chinwag event at Internet World Expo yesterday. If you spot errors, please let me know via the comments and I will correct

Will McInnes, Nixon McInnes

Serendipity-loving hippies vs bean counters

Nuances and subtleties of how we communicate online

Has started Measurement Camp

What you measure is contextual

Danielle West, Nedstat

Should be audited by an independent third party like ABC

Clients from B&Q to Five TV

Everything can be captured

Dig a bit deeper at granual level

Rory from another agency

Listen to conversations in social media

Human analyst reading every single one! Then slice and dice it.

Number of people sharing conversations through Digg, StumbleUpon

What is the ROI from Web 2.0 campaigns?

Alex Bermaster, Nielsen, Buzzmetrics

Mixture of automated capture and human insight

No two campaigns are exactly the same

Clients are successful if they define their goals very specifically

Set up Google alert for your brand.

Find out how many people bookmark your domain on del.icio.us

Measure social media so that you can build a response

Make your business like a village bakery where you know all your customers

Natural language processing to sort and cope with thousands of emails

Customer service is the new marketing.

Eric Peterson, download his presentation from NEDSTAT

See also his Big Book of Key Performance Indicators

Network mapping: identifying key nodes. Privacy issues.

Unedited notes from presentations at the AIM Music Connected event yesterday.

Paul Brindley, Music Ally

Wrote New Musical Entrepreneurs, IPPR, 1999

Pricing

Price pressure is intense. 7 Digital selling new Kylie album for £5, which became best seller for 2007, Sales do pick up at lower prices. Not going to be saviour.

End of DRM
All majors now licensing, which helps to open up Apple's dominance. EMI was first but did not see major increase in market share as a result.

A La Carte
iTunes still the biggest digital music provider. Lots of dabbling and experimenting, but this doesn't add up to much. Cherry-picking is one of the reasons that digital is not making up for drop in physical sales. Don't believe the future lies in this model. US a la carte sales are leveling off. For a la carte to survive, have to find some way to reduce price, either via ad-support or bundling.

Subscription
'Pure' rental model already on its way out. Virgin and HMV in the UK have replaced rental offerings with something more simple. Still faces the 'ownership' hurdle. But subscription is bound to grow eventually. iMeem and We7 streaming services: 'feels free'.

Mobile bundled services
Comes with Music/MusicStation feels free. CwM doesn't exist yet; but Nokia has very deep pockets. 'All you can keep' subscription service. For 12-18 months you will be given a key to unlock all the music in the Nokia store. After that, your code will no longer work, but the music you have downloaded will. It will be difficult to get your music off the Nokia handset and onto an iPod! It's going to be all about the kind of advance you get from Nokia – Merlin may be critical in this. Orange refused to stock some Nokia handset simply because Nokia had launched a music store. Radical ructions with operators may be ahead

Ad-funded
Qtrax scheduled to speak here but pulled out. We7 have changed model: away from ads embedded in downloads to streaming model. People don't like having ads on downloads, apparently

Conclusions
More 'permanent' tracks and 'free to access' models, more bundling. A la carte can only grow via 'subsidised' models. More spontaneous a la carte purchases via widgets. Operators looking at 'music' tarriffs – music as an anti-churn measure to stop people switching networks. Music discovery, recommendation and music management services. More involvement of brands with digital music/media. Less distinction between online and mobile delivery. Labels need to manage relationship between artists and fans. Find value around music, and offer broader entertainment packages.

Tom Gillet, London Connected

The digital music network for London

1. business support

2. skills development (basic and advanced training)

3. market intelligence (reports, newsletter)

Total budget £700k, with 650 from LDA and 50 privately from AIM

Organising round tables (a bit like MusicTank)

tom@musicindie.com, londonconnected.org

Ad-supported business models

Jennifer Link, Spiral Frog

Free and legal downloads, as long as you 'refresh' your membership monthly, Live since September in US. 1 million registered users. (Jennifer is responsible for rights clearance.) Universal is only major on board so far (big advance) – hoping to announce another major soon. Advertisers are most interested in targeted ads (more than invasive). There is streaming of videos on the site, but only downloads for audio. If you keep playing the same song repeatedly, the artist for that song gets more money (unlike with iTunes).

Clive Gardiner, We7

Responsible for licensing from labels of all sizes. Today is launch of streaming service, and first day with Sony BMG on board. Agree that targeted ads are what advertisers will pay for. Embedded ads can be taken off after a month. Currently have to go back to site and download new file, but future service will be integrated with iTunes and ads can be managed within that. Most of the resistance from people who haven't tried it. First million downloads took 6 months, second took 6 weeks.

Shelley Taylor, All Dig Down

Currently in alpha. Revenue-supported service, ads are one form of revenue! Streaming videos because don't think people will pay to download videos now. Editorial drives purchase. Plus some social network functions (but no UGC). Strongly against copyright infringement. Has proprietary store, with no affiliate links to other stores. Targeted as site for the culturally curious, over 25s that advertisers are interested in. Entertainment discovery site. Never going to have an open platform like Facebook. Will go live between July and September. Currently ingesting lots of editorial content. Have pre-sold all the advertising at unheard of rates for unlaunched site. 27,000 personalisation fields, like what areas of Italy do you like your wine from? Prefer to deal with aggregators. We're not paying advances and that's that.

Caroline Bottomley, Radar

Smaller in scale. Put together film makers and clients. Put video commissions to independent makers. World's first online music video agency – at lower end of market. Radar takes 15% off the video budget, and charge £10 subscription to filmmakers. Using video competition model a lot, but it's limited. There are two other agencies that do a similar function for commissioning ads.

Simon Wheeler, Beggars Group

Ad-supported business model is very young. Few companies generating enough revenue to pay for the rights. We want to support new business models, but not those that don't pay sufficiently for the rights while building up assets that could be worth billions. No Beggars music is on any of the services represented on this panel. Everyone knows what you get paid for a streaming song, and what you get paid for a download: it's clear that the streaming model makes more sense. Ad-funded will create a slice of the pie, but not sure how much. Tech companies say there is no value in recorded music any more, but they all want to use music to build their services – they can't have it both ways.

John Benedict, Collins Long

Majors want to take a stake of the company and a hefty advance. No idea where that advance goes... Some labels take the view that they can barter with the collective value of their catalogue, without being required to pass on advances to artists.

Mobile Music Mastery

Gareth Currie, Gulp!/Blackberry

Working on a music strategy for Blackberry in Europe. Blackberry are new to multimedia, moving from corporate to consumer market. Blackberry devices don't support DRM. In North America have catalogue of 1 million tracks OTA download (and to PC). Vast majority of Blackberry owners also have a digital music player.

As head of music at 3, sales rose 30% when catalogue was extended significantly.

Tom McLennan, Vodafone UK

Responsible for fulltracks and subscription services. Omnifone now been going for five months, available on 35 handsets. Musicstation service is changing to Musicstation Max, which will allow you to keep a number of tracks each month. Rental not so unattractive on mobile: compelling to have 1000s of tracks accessible directly to the device. Self-discover £1.99 per week.

Richard Wheeler, Orange

Big belief in ad-funded music,but don't know how it will work. Working with Warners on trials. Fully converged music service: online used for discovery, mobile for consumption. Don't see a la carte as a sustainable business model four or five years down the line. Working on a number of business models.

Louisa Jackson, Vidzone Digital Media

Have been around since 2000. Distribute videos for over 3,000 independent labels. All deals are minus MCPS. Moving towards being a service platform. Powering Shazam's store.

Seth Jackson, Indie Mobile

Been around since 1999. One part of the business is mobile distribution. Other part is mobile marketing, working with fans. Would provide a mobile store for a label, manage shortcodes etc.

James McGuinness, Absolute

A white label record label for independent artists. Get licensing and marketing deals for . Labels retain ownership of copyright. [As you can tell, I'm not really understanding what he's saying.]