5 posts tagged “music”
...at least if the royalties they charge for use of their material are high enough to make torture uneconomic.
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
business support
skills development (basic and advanced training)
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.]
He remains prolific from beyond the grave, but I'm not complaining.
Download "Bethe Bethe Kese Kese" (mp3)
from "Dub Qawwali"
by Gaudi + Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Six Degrees Travel Series
More On This Album
I first remember noticing nostalgia in 1987 when the media made a big hoo-hah over "It was 20 years ago today" and saturated us with Sgt Pepper. At the time I found it tedious. Now our heritage-obsessed pop stars are recording an "It was 40 years ago today" version of the album. Lord, please save us from Oasis, The Killers, Razorlight, James Morrison, The Fratellis, Travis and the Kaiser Chiefs. Prize pillocks. Nostalgia isn't as good as it used to be -- and it used to be crap.
Surely something interesting must happen to music in the next 20 years... Please?
Don't you hate No.1 albums? Aren't they always crap? The Official Charts Company organised a poll of the hundred most popular UK No.1 albums. Here's that all-important chart rundown.
I thought I'd check to see how out-there I really am by counting how many of the hundred I own or have at one time owned. It turned out to be more than I thought: I own 13 of the 100, and I once owned three others (Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, Black Sabbath's Paranoid, Abba's The Album), but sold them on more than a quarter of a century ago.
- Can you guess the 13 I still own (hint: Harvest isn't one of them)?
- How many have you got?
