Today’s post is inspired by a conference I went to last night marking the London return of the seminal internet networking event, First Tuesday.
The keynote came from my ex bosses boss, Patrick Vien who is now the CEO of Warner Music International. I found the breakdown of Warner’s future plans both clever and disappointing: He spoke wisely about experimentation and education as they look at new business models, new revenue streams, taking more control of artists ‘multi-platform’ strategies (including live performance) and re-analysing revenue streams including advertiser funded music. Warner will survive and remain a big player in the future, and might even get there with less pain that the other music majors.
But equally at the end of the speech I felt disappointed; partly because the topic of the moment, DRM wasn’t touched upon. More significant was that whole thought process behind these clever actions was that of a controlling, top down organisation working out how to leverage value from content they have ‘created’ and decided to market. In fact majors now maximise their efforts on a very few international artists – so weirdly the internet has created less choice, from the majors at least. Like I said, Warner and the others will be around, making nice profits, but I still see pain for them as they contract and change– and it does also seem like they are cutting out the ‘nursery slopes’ where the new 50 Cents get exposure and learn their craft.
Who I found much more exciting, were the new ‘bottom up’ players that were about enabling and helping consumers discover music they like, as opposed to convincing them to purchase through marketing and advertising. These are disruptive industries that are changing the face of the industry, the ones taking a positive lead and forcing the majors to change their models.
There were 2 very interesting players there, and 2 complete stand outs.
Interesting:
Jamendo is somewhere between Bit Torrent and iTunes that essentially gives you free music, with ad revenue split 50/50 between the company and the artists. You an also chose to ‘donate’ to artists you like. It doesn’t seem to come with many strings and I can see it filling a successful niche helping new acts gain exposure. It’s got a mainland European tinge to the music, and if you’re not a nationalist snob you can find some interesting artists on it.
Another great niche player helping new artists is Sellaband which in a non-sexy description allows you to become a ‘business angel’ investing in bands you like for $10 a pop and sharing in the bands profits, as well as discovering great music. Again, I don’t see it replacing EMI, but it IS a stepping stone to the big time. It’s fun to use and helps new talent shine without the Pop Idol schmaltz. I think I’ll enjoy this site.
Stand Outs:
There were 2 sites that I thought, yeap, I can see them being big mainstream players.
One is already established in the
What kind of impresses me is that instead of this being a purely software led operation, they actually have a team of 50 musicians analysing the musical qualities of tracks which then gets fed into the system. It has a nice interface and I like the way they’ve integrated the advertising into the site. Pandora already has half a million tracks already covered, classical coming next – I found to hard to find an artist they didn’t have – and a ‘wiki pandora’ is on its way too on top of their facebook widget. If they can sort out the very complex issue of international rights issues, they’ll go far.
The last site on today’s post is we7 from music via web pioneer, and music legend Peter Gabriel - he previously pioneered legal music downloading in
Take a look, discover and please post your thoughts by hitting the comments button.
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