Future Of Music

I have know Terry McBride for many years now and have had the privilege of working with the entire Nettwerk team on overall strategy a while ago. I am very proud to see some of what we worked on taking shape. What I love about Terry is his ability to act on ideas very quickly and make things happen one way or another. He is not afraid to experiment. He is also not afraid to take risks and transition his revenue model to something that makes more sense and is sustainable.

He got out front very early on in forming a “network” of companies to manage artists, promote tours (remember LillethFest), create merchandise, distribute both physically and digitally, publish writers and integrate the marketing. He tried memory sticks, free downloads, free stems for people to mash up, artist-owned labels, viral and crowd-based marketing.

I met with him in Vancouver a month ago and am preparing a video interview. In the meantime, here are some excerpts from a fine piece by Mark Glaser at PBS.

“At the vanguard of the movement of crowdsourcing music and putting the fans in control is Nettwerk Music, a record label and band management service in Vancouver, BC, that has become synonymous with digital music and alternative revenue streams. The label completely revamped itself in 2002, putting digital music and Internet promotion at the forefront and downplaying physical CD sales. Fans have been able to remix albums by Barenaked Ladies and rapper K-OS — even before his new album comes out — and Avril Lavigne has racked up millions of plays and possibly millions in revenues on YouTube.

The driving force behind the digital makeover of Nettwerk is CEO Terry McBride, a man who has helped pay legal fees for people sued by the RIAA for sharing music online. After McBride took such a strong stance for digital music — and away from CD sales — he started speaking more at conferences and talking to the media to spread his vision for a “digital valet” service. He thinks we will all end up paying $5 to $10 per month for access to all music, TV and movies, with a digital valet that knows our tastes and finds media for us.

While most music labels have been squeezed by the shift to digital music, Nettwerk has had growing revenues, McBride told me, and he expects 80% of the company’s 2008 income to be from digital and alternative revenues — and not CD sales.

“In 2007, about 70% of our sales on intellectual property was all digital, and this year it will be around 80%,” he said. “A lot of physical sales comes from our bigger artists and we do print-on-demand for our smaller artists, for their mail order or for touring…My stance on file-sharing did not match what my brethren in the music industry believed. I remember giving a keynote speech three or four years ago, and having a lot of pissed off people.”

When did you realize how important digital music would be vs. physical music and CDs?

Terry McBride: We started our whole change internally in spring or summer of 2002. We did it really quietly. We had one of these executive team summits. We looked at where everything was going. We looked at the fact that 25 million [CD] sellers would be 5 million sellers. The fact that million sellers would be quarter-million sellers. And how our existing model would work within that. Would we take the same stance, to protect the castle and fight, or was there a different way of doing it?

The interesting thing then was that we had the initial digital data to look at. We saw a lot of what was happening. And we said, ‘Where will all this be in five years, and will we be ready for it?’ There was a conscious decision made at that meeting to get out of the physical music business. So we decided to retool our whole company and over the next two years, that’s what we did. For a company that had had an attrition rate of 1% or 2%, a company of 120 or 150 people, over the next three years we had a turnover of almost 25% a year as we changed almost everything.

Rather than have a marketing team with marketing meetings, and promotion team with promotion meetings and sales team with sales meetings, we got rid of all that and created silos. We created three teams that had everything from Internet to traditional marketing to sales to IT to promotion — all in one group, and got rid of the meetings. So everything you needed for an artist was in that group. There was no heads of marketing. We shifted from 12 traditional marketing people to 3 traditional marketing people and 8 or 9 Internet marketing people.

Then we aggressively went after every DSP [digital service provider] that was interested in music that we had, and we set up a team to deal with the programming of metadata behind what we were actually doing…All of our marketing is not around albums but around bands and brands. Our marketing is about understanding the social elements of songs, of music, of emotions.

Fortunately we’re a growing business right now. We didn’t protect the castle. We also made the switch at a very good time to make the switch. Avril had broken, Coldplay had broken, Dido was doing amazing, Sarah [McLaughlin] was doing amazing. The Barenaked Ladies were doing amazing. We were flush with cash. If we made those changes now, it would be very very difficult because money is much more tight.

You have been pushing many bands to start their own labels. How did that start?

McBride: That came from a point of view of how do we get collapsed copyright. How do we get an authentic relationship between the artist and the fan? How can we remove everything that we possibly can from the relationship — or between the relationship — of the artist and the fan. Artists owning their own copyrights and being able to be in direct communication is a far more authentic relationship.

There’s a risk and reward to that. If an artist is signed to a major label, then the manager has no risk, but then you’re only getting a commission from publishing and master royalties combined, maybe a maximum of $2 [per CD sale]. With an artist [label], we had to finance it, but we were commissioning off a $5 or $6 net [per sale]. So obviously we get a much better commission, but it’s a much higher risk. With these artist imprints, it takes two to three albums for them to work.

We’ve found in the digital space, that you will sell anywhere between 25% to 50% of your volume from your catalog upon release of any new albums. So you are layering intellectual property. In the digital space, where you don’t need to buy shelf space, if you create the right metadata behind what you’re doing, and market it in an effective way — you’re not marketing the new album, you’re marketing the brand. By the time you make it to album three, you are selling as much of the catalog as the new album, but you don’t have the cost with the catalog and everything starts to make sense.

So I had to get people here to believe in this, and stop people from having a heart attack over the equity we were tying up, which we had no ownership in. But proving the model that you have have an artist like State Radio, which is a great example of an artist who makes a couple hundred thousand dollars a year from intellectual property, which will help finance the next album.

Chad [Urmston of State Radio] just played to 2,800 people with a $25 ticket price in New York on the weekend. He’s marketing a brand, he’s not just marketing intellectual property. Now it all makes sense. He’s happy, he owns his future, his audience has grown with him really well. Now everything makes sense to him, where initially he was unknown and had to work from the ground up.

The Internet marketing team and his manager did a spectacular job of understanding who his tribe is and would be. Out of the eight artist imprints that we launched, seven of them are very profitable, but it took time and selling the managers on the fact that there were no commissions to be made to a certain point. If they signed an artist to a major label there was instant commissions. And it took the lawyers years to get their heads around it because they just didn’t believe in it. It’s taken time, but now the managers are looking at a very steady cash flow, and the artists aren’t fighting for their creative freedom but actually using their imagination — and those are two very different things.

For the marketers of music these days, how has their job changed? It used to be about talking to radio and retailers. Now is it about search engine optimization (SEO)?

McBride: Search engine optimization, the ability to write basic code, understanding how social networks and blogs work together, how to connect that interaction back to the sale of music or monetization of behavior or crowdsourcing music. It’s understanding all of those things, and having a very imaginative marketing plan around the artist vs. around a product. It’s really brand marketing. What are the artists’ causes? Are there cause alignments? Are there other brands we can hook up with to align our causes? And if the other brand is bigger, can we give them free music and get exposure to their audience because it’s like-minded tribes?

It’s basically social marketing. It’s understanding social tribes and peer-to-peer interaction that the social networks have taken from a small group of 20 of your peers to 250 of your peers. And not focused on recommendation engines, but the social aspect of recommendations. So it’s not a computer making the recommendation, but social groups doing it. Looking at the technology but not using it for what it was meant for. That’s what the creative arts do. The technologists build something with a certain purpose in mind, and then the creative people take what the nerds have done and take it in a completely different direction than what people saw coming.

You’re doing a lot of crowdsourcing of music, where you put out pieces of music and let people remix them. Is that about engagement and interaction more than business?

McBride: Well it’s both. We started initially with T-shirts. We found out that the T-shirts that the fans designed — even if the artists didn’t like them — the people who went to shows liked them more than the ones that the artists designed. That was consistent whether it was Barenaked Ladies, or Avril or Sarah — the fans’ T-shirts always sold more. The fans would do the designs and vote up the ones they liked, and filter them to the top, and we would take the top 3 voted designs and put them in production. And they were consistently the top sellers out there.

In 2005, we took it a step further by releasing Barenaked Ladies songs in stems [pieces of the music tracks]. That sparked the idea for the guys who created Rock Band. That was more of a remix. Now I’m more about the mix; to hell with the remix! We have an artist named K-OS, and we released all of the stems two weeks ago, and the fans have not heard the album. It’s not due out until March, so they are actually mixing the album. So we will release physically and digitally the artist version and the fan version. And when we go to radio, we will service the artist version and fan version. So we are taking it the rest of the way.

You can even take it beyond that. With K-OS, we’re thinking about having the audience vote on which 10 to 12 cities he plays in Canada. We might even take it one step further: pay as you go not as you enter. And maybe when you leave you get a copy of the fan mix for your donation, so there’s karma pricing on the exit. Let’s take this whole tribal/social interaction the whole way. Everyone including Nettwerk has dabbled with it. We have probably dabbled more than any company with a wide assortment of artists, so we have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t work. But with K-OS it’s the first time we’ve gone all the way with it.

Read the whole PBS Interview here.

Most of this is old news, but you got to love this line:

“You can’t roll a joint on an iPod,” the singer-songwriter Shelby Lynne told The New York Times Magazine early last year. And, O.K., I suppose that’s among the iPod’s drawbacks. But it’s hard to think of an electronic device released in recent decades that’s brought more pleasure to more people.

Should anyone care that in the process, the iPod has all but killed the music industry as we’ve known it? Maybe not, Steve Knopper writes in “Appetite for Self-Destruction – The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age,” his stark accounting of the mistakes major record labels have made since the end of the LP era and the arrival of digital music. These dinosaurs, he suggests, are largely responsible for their own demise.

Mr. Knopper, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, provides a wide-angled, morally complicated view of the current state of the music business. He doesn’t let those rippers and burners among us — that is, those who download digital songs without paying for them, and you know who you are — entirely off the hook. But he suggests that with even a little foresight, record companies could have adapted to the Internet’s brutish and quizzical new realities and thrived.

“The CD boom lasted from 1984 to 2000,” Mr. Knopper writes. Then the residue of old mistakes and a wave of new realities began hammering the music industry from all sides.

One of the first things the labels got wrong, Mr. Knopper says, was the elimination of the single. It got young people out of the habit of regularly visiting record stores and forced them to buy an entire CD to get the one song they craved. In the short term this was good business practice. In the long term it built up animosity. It was suicidal.

When Napster and other music-sharing Web sites showed up, the single came back with a vengeance. Before long MP3 — the commonly used term for digitally compressed and easily traded audio files — had replaced sex as the most searched-for term on sites like Yahoo! and AltaVista.

The record industry bungled the coming of Napster. Instead of striking a deal with a service that had more than 26 million users, labels sued, forcing it to close. A result, Mr. Knopper writes, was that users simply splintered, fleeing to many other file-sharing sites. “That was the last chance,” he declares, “for the record industry as we know it to stave off certain ruin.”

Read more of this book review from the New York Times.

T H E F U T U R E O F M U S I C

In our (2005) book we wrote about the “Universal Mobile Device”

June 1, 2015. Our Universal Mobile Devices (UMD) are “always-on” at 8 MB/second, and we have anytime-anywhere access to music, films, games, books, news, streaming video, online banking, stock market transactions, instant messaging, e-mail, and chats. It’s a global telephone, a digital communication and data transfer device, a Global Positioning Device (GPS), a personal digital assistant, a music/images/film storage device, a recorder, a personal computer, a gaming platform . . . and much more that we haven’t even gotten around to trying yet. Still, it is only a little bit larger than a cigarette pack, its processor is one hundred times as fast as the good old Intel Centrino chip, and with over 5 terabytes of data storage, there is plenty of room for anything we want. Our UMD can project a fairly large and sharp image onto any white surface, it can set up instant secure wireless connections to other computers, beamers, monitors, screens, and printers, and it can connect to other UMDs to exchange data and files, instantly and securely.

The UMD “off-road” version is so durable that you can drive a truck over it, or leave it out in the rain for a few days. Ten days of battery power lets us forget about hunting for electric outlets everywhere we go. In short, our UMDs are irresistible, and sometimes we even struggle with ourselves to put them away.

And how much do we pay to get this device and the wireless service? Less than what a year of dial-up Internet service used to cost only ten years ago. Speaking of those days, we are so relieved to have lost all the cables, the multiple billing procedures, the restrictions on usage, the endless calls to customer service to figure out how to make it work, the non-compatibility, and all of the other burdens. Now, the pricing—and what you get for your money—is so compelling that everyone considers it a part of their basic expenses, like the phone bill, cable television, or car registrations.

Today, the basic content service comes packaged with the monthly service fee, and a content levy is imposed on the device itself. It took ten years for the device makers, software providers, and entertainment companies to agree on a voluntary compulsory licensing scheme, but now the content providers make much more money than they did before UMDs were around. In addition, their marketing costs have shrunk to one tenth of what they used to be, their delivery costs keep falling, administration and accounting is handled by smart automated software agents, and their legal budgets have been reduced to a fraction of what they used to be because there is nothing left to sue for. Finding cool new stuff rules the day. Get our attention, and let us make a connection.

Music companies, book publishers, game companies, and filmmakers are eager for us to check out their stuff, watch their films, play their games, or try their software. The more of their content we use, the more they get paid, pro rata. We still pay the same flat fee, unless we select some premium content—which we do all too often, we have to admit. It may cost only a dollar to “sit-in” on the latest recording sessions with your favorite artist, to order a copy of an issue of Twilight Zone that is not on the UMD Network, or to watch a special backstage Webcast of the Grammy awards. Our UMDs make media and entertainment content so irresistible that our cash just keeps flowing out on the network—a “dream come true” for any content provider that can get our attention.

The UMD service and its built-in tracking software allows the content providers and their agents to find out how their content is doing on the network—how many people have tried it, how many people have shared it, how many people have rated it, and who is talking about it. If we want to, we can share some, a little, or all of our data and other feedback with the UMD service, our friends, or the content providers themselves. We can also provide detailed feedback on their content and earn free UMD “points” that we can use to get free stuff. This way, some of our friends even make more money on the UMD network than they spend on getting the content! They review new bands, recommend new songs and movies to their peers, test new games, or become part of focus groups that evaluate new UMD services.

No longer are we tethered to our computer, the LAN connection, or the power plug. UMDs have become as commonplace as cell phones were a decade ago. Gone are the days of having to worry about where to get cool ring tones, how to turn the cell phone into a real gaming device, or where to watch our favorite soccer game.
The UMD comes fully licensed, and we can do whatever we want with it because most ways of using it are simply already included in the price of the device and related service fees. “Fair use” rules and, as customers, we really like the sense of empowerment. If we want access to special content, we simply use the various premium billing options that bill our UMD accounts, deduct directly from our electronic bank accounts, or use any of the cyber-cash services that we can subscribe to.

So what about the prices? It’s 2015, and we’re paying $59 a month to get all the basic content on the network for free, plus of course, thousands of minutes of free voice and videophone calls. Stream it, download it, listen to or view it on demand, transfer it, share it—whatever we want, anytime, anywhere. Peer-to-peer has taken on an entirely new meaning, and it smells like roses to the content providers and media companies.

Best of all, the sheer amount of content on the network is more than we could ever consume: more than five million music tracks from almost any record label, producer, or lately, directly from the artist. In addition, there are more than one million books; two hundred thousand movies, television shows, and video clips; twenty thousand games, and thousands of software packages. And we are talking about the good stuff here, not just back catalog and “archives.” These offerings are instantly available, instantly archived, bookmarkable, searchable with our content agents, and cross-referenced with our network buddies and friends. The only thing we are really missing is the time to try it all!

——

Sounds an awful lot like an iPhone or Blackberry Bold to me. The only thing really missing is the processor power and storage, and then some agreement about global content licenses and a little clearer thinking on the part of copyright owners and we’ll be there.

2,015 is only 6 years away. You know what, I think we are going to get there way before that.

Forrester predicts the number of MP3-capable phones will grow from around 50 million to 240 million, or 75 percent of the US, by 2013. That pales in comparison to the mobile revolution that is occurring in Europe, Asia, Latin America. Basically the entire rest of the world. This is the future of music.

Sales of digital music in Latin America jumped over 50 percent according to the IFPI, more than twice the global average increase. Most of the sales in the region are dominated by downloads to wireless phones or embedded music on the devices.

The mobile platform will bring huge catalogs of music to our pockets coupled with, tickets, social networking and commerce. This is going to completely change that we interact with music. My iPhone with Shazam, Pandora and Twitter is already amazing. I can’t wait.

PARIS, (BUSINESS WIRE) — Music Ally, the leading digital music strategy and research company, and MIDEM, organizers of MidemNet, the international forum dedicated to reflection on the music business in the digital age, are delighted to announce the winners of the second Music Ally/MidemNet “New Business Showcase.” The winners presented their ideas at MidemNet’s 10th annual conference in Cannes in January 2009.

About the Winners

Instinctiv Shuffle
Ever thought random shuffling of music was too, well, random? Instinctiv has had that thought too, and has come up with Instinctiv Shuffle. It’s an iPhone / iPod Touch application that aims to provide a smarter shuffle feature, guessing the user’s mood by what songs they listen to and what ones they skip. The app has so far only been available on jailbroken iPhones, but has been causing a stir.

MPTrax
MPTrax is focused on bringing Web 2.0 connectivity to the live music arena, connecting bands, rappers and DJs to venues, clubs and party planners – including people arranging house parties and other small events. Currently in beta, it offers a dedicated booking platform, complete with a feedback/rating system, invitation tools, sample contracts and social networking features. It could be a crucial tool for bands looking off the beaten track for their live revenues.

Mustik
Mustik is an interactive musical instrument which allows non musicians to play music. The way you interact with the Mustik alters the way that the musical track plays back. It’s a kind of Guitar Hero on acid. Conceived from a University project on embodied interaction, this is one product you have to see to believe.

Passionato
Launched earlier this year, Passionato is a website targeting classical music fans with higher quality downloads, selling DRM-free music as 320kbps MP3 files, or lossless FLAC files for proper audiophiles. The store also builds in reviews, user ratings and community features, as well as the obligatory Facebook and MySpace widgets.

Play Anywhere
Catch Media’s Play Anywhere scheme is certainly ambitious, aiming to offer a grand solution to interoperability. It’s about allowing users to playback music that they own, or which they’re legally entitled to access, across all possible devices. The company has already obtained new Play Anywhere licences from two major labels, and is ultimately hoping to entice all players within the digital value chain, including retailers, mobile operators and ISPs.

Soundcloud
It’s been described as “a Google Docs for audio” and a “Flickr for music,” so Soundcloud has solid Web 2.0 credentials. It’s an online audio platform designed to let people move music quickly and easily, whether they’re artists, labels, producers or other professionals. It’s attracted more than 2,000 labels and 50,000 users so far without splashing the cash. It’s been winning praise for its flexibility and featureset from early users this year.

The Echo Nest
Founded at the prestigious MIT Media Lab, The Echo Nest claims to be “the software equivalent of a hardware store for music developers.” In other words, it offers open APIs covering artist information, music search, recommendation, remix applications, mash-ups and analytic tools. The idea is that clever developers tap into these APIs to build innovative new music services. Early proof of concepts have showed how powerful these tools can be.

Many people have asked me to explain the current status of royalty payments for online music.

A thorough discussion of this past year’s agreement on mechanical royalties was produced by my friends at the Future of Music Coalition.

There is also a good summary on the meeting of the Copyright Royalty Board this past fall here.

The royalties that songwriters receive from CD sales and digital downloads will remain the same, the same for both media and the same as the current rate: 9.1 cents per song. The rate for ringtones will increase to 24 cents a song, above even the 15 cents songwriters and publishers lobbied for.

However there is still great unease with the direction that things are headed on the part of online webcasting and streaming music services as they look into the reality of making payments at these levels. Pandora, NPR and others seeking a new structure want rates to be set as a percentage of total revenue, similar to how royalties are assessed for satellite radio or subscription music services. At the very least, they want a system that will favor webcasters big and small.

Webcasters are required to pay an escalating fee to copyright owners every time they play a song for a listener. This year, for instance, Web radio stations are supposed to pay 14 hundredths of a penny ($.0014) per song streamed, per listener; site operators figure that will cost them about 2.1 cents per user, per hour. That is a figure that most webcasters simply cannot afford to pay, since most sites are advertising supported and do not generate enough revenue to pay the license fees and operate their businesses. Read more from All things Digital here.

We will see what happens in the next month or so as things come to a head.

Artists will kick off about digital rights

Several artists have already clashed with their labels over digital royalties – for example the Allman Brothers Band suing UMG – but expect more rumbles in 2009. Not least because artists are potentially getting stiffed when it comes to the raft of new deals being signed by labels for unlimited, subscription-based or ad-supported music services. Expect managers to be pressing for fairer remuneration from these deals, with new bodies like the UK based Featured Artists Coalition to the fore as well.

More unlimited music services

Comes with Music (UK) and TDC Play (DK) were just the start. There’ll be many more examples of unlimited music being bundled with other products or services around the world in 2009. The unique aspect of these new models is that consumers appear to get the music for free; and ISPs, handset companies and brands are all taking an interest. We also expect to see DRM-free files becoming a selling point for these services if they can persuade the major labels that they won’t spur piracy.

ISPs under more pressure

One of the reasons ISPs are so keen to launch branded legal music services is the pressure they’re facing from the music industry to do more to combat file-sharing. And by that, we mean more than send out ‘educational’ letters scolding persistent file-sharers for their naughtiness. We predict more filtering at ISP level, if they can find filtering technologies that actually work. Meanwhile, we wonder if the recent Danish lawsuit in which an ISP was ordered to block access to The Pirate Bay will set a precedent for other markets.

The industry will wake up to web-based piracy

We wrote about the growth of Rapidshare and other online locker services last issue (27th Nov 2008), as well as the ecosystem of blogs showing people where to find copyrighted music on them. Web-based piracy – including browser plug-ins as well as these locker sites – will be much more on the music industry’s radar in 2009, even though industry bodies may prefer to keep focusing on P2P and BitTorrent in their public utterances on The Fight Against Piracy. There could be more GEMA-style legal action against the Rapidshares of the world, though.

The Torrent tipping point

BitTorrent is still a bit geeky, even though plenty of consumers are using the technology to download free music, films and TV shows. But in 2009, there’s something of a perfect storm building, with more users sitting on super-fast broadband connections, and more inventive ways of helping them find copyrighted content. If you think BitTorrenting is about downloading individual tracks or albums, think again: nowadays, people are downloading artists’ entire discographies at the click of a button.

Streaming and downloading to converge

You’ll hear a lot of blather in 2009 about The Cloud – the idea of accessing stuff stored online from any device you like. The impact on music next year will be to accelerate the blurring of the boundaries between streaming and downloading music. For example, iTunes might evolve into a cloud-based service, allowing people to stream their iTunes library to whatever device they’re using at the time, over whatever network it’s connected to. Third-party software already allows this, of course. The point is that consumers increasingly don’t care whether their music is stored locally or remotely, as long as they can listen to it right now.

Comes With Music to grow slowly

Nokia’s unlimited music scheme won’t definitively succeed or fail in 2009, but we will get a good sense of just how sustainable it is as a business model. It’s no secret that Comes With Music will roll out on more sophisticated handsets than the launch 5310 XpressMusic, and likely with at least one large mobile operator. However, we sense that Nokia may push the scheme more in emerging markets than in, say, the US. Watch for developments in Latin America in particular. We also have a mischievous thought that Nokia may ‘sign’ its first band in 2009, becoming a pseudo-label.

More DIY social media campaigns from artists

We expect artists and their managers to take social media by the scruff of the neck and dream up some really good online viral campaigns in 2009, alongside the efforts of their labels. Artists will be using the web in innovative ways because they’ve grown up with it, not because they’re following some kind of Web 2.0 marketing template. Although there’ll be plenty of people following Web 2.0 marketing templates too, in an effort to copy the (inevitably) more successful grass-roots stuff.

More high-end physical product

People don’t want to buy $15 CDs, but they are happy to buy an $80 luxury box-set collectible… things. Radiohead and NIN showed that, while US country-pop singer Taylor Swift has recently been doing great business with her own $60 luxury box set (sold off her own widget, incidentally). Labels will spend 2009 trying to shore up their physical revenues with more imaginative collections, whether it’s five albums bundled together, or an entire artist’s discography in a Blu-ray box-set.

Microsoft will launch a ZunePhone

It may or may not have the Zune brand attached, but we’re confident that Microsoft will get into the mobile handset game early in the year, likely at CES (January) or Mobile World Congress (February). The rumours are pointing to a consumer-focused handset with an emphasis on music and messaging. We also predict hundreds of ill-advised claims that whatever comes out is an iPhone-killer.

More mini-albums and live EPs

The album isn’t quite dead yet – indeed, Amazon is actively promoting the idea of buying whole albums from its MP3 store. But we predict more mini-albums following in the footsteps of Coldplay’s Prospekt’s March, filling the gaps between major releases. Although whether that’s a positive trend or an example of fleecing fans for songs not good enough for the album is a matter of some debate. Meanwhile, intense competition among digital stores will see more exclusive live EPs and remix packages, thrown together to get homepage promotion.

Subscription services are dead

At least in the form we’ve understood up until now. The only way for services like Napster and Rhapsody to survive is by being bundled into the price of other products – home streaming systems, maybe, or mobile handsets, or computers. In short, they’ll shift to being unlimited music services akin to Comes With Music or TDC Play, as part of a bigger offering. The only company that can make subscription work in 2009, we predict, is Apple. If it chooses to.

Streaming startups thin out

Can you really turn a profit from ad-supported streaming music? If you can, why are so many of the popular sites up for sale? 2009 could be a harsh year for the iLikes and Imeems of the web, despite their millions of VC dollars, millions of users, and seemingly firm partnerships with major labels. We see many of these services selling up to larger companies who can afford the royalty payments, in the face of competition from CBS-backed Last.fm and Murdoch-backed MySpace Music.

The next Radiohead won’t be Radiohead

But at least one big-name artist will do something innovative in the digital space, probably after leaving a major label at the end of their contract. But it won’t be the same honesty-box offering as with Radiohead’s In Rainbows. We’ll be keeping an eye on firms like Topspin Media or Mubito and the artists they’re working with to try and figure out what the innovation will be.

The next Rick Astley won’t be Rick Astley

There’ll be another forgotten artist revitalized by The Power Of Viral Internet in 2009, following the rickrolling craze this year that led to Rick Astley being named best artist ever at the MTV Europe Awards. Who it’ll be is another question. Our suggestions include Tiffany, Jive Bunny, Ted Nugent and Menswear. Or all of the above.

Labels will intensify their Direct to Consumer efforts

The majors have been notably unsuccessful in selling digital music direct to consumers in the past, but EMI’s launch of a D2C website this month show that they haven’t given up on building direct relationships with fans in this way. However, the interesting aspect here isn’t huge all-encompassing portals selling a label’s entire catalogue, but more the slicing and dicing of this catalogue and monetizing it better.

The growth of emerging markets

We’ve already mentioned how Nokia may target emerging markets next year; but with the recession biting in the west in 2009 we expect to see stronger performance coming from Latin America; the BRIC countries (it’s an acronym you’ll need to know in 09) and Africa where mobile is seeing huge growth.

From Music Ally, a great digital music information service.

Music gaming is a huge growth area for the games industry. Started by Harmonix with Guitar Hero quickly selling 1.5 million copies. Then came the sequels, Guitar Hero II and III, and a string of successful stand-alone titles such as Guitar Hero: Aerosmith.

Then came Rock Band (also from Harmonix) via Electronic Arts. Launched late last year in America, the game received widespread acclaim and sold four million copies, with global revenues of $600 million – and since its release, players have downloaded more than 28 million songs via the game. It has a guitar, a bass, a drum kit and mic, and you can play in single- or multi-player mode, or battle it out online against rock fans worldwide. Following its chart-topping success, Rock Band 2 was released this fall.

With CD sales in free fall and authorized digital downloads not expected to make up the shortfall, the combination of video gaming and music looks promising for the future for the music business. “Industry insiders are learning that video games are the radio and distribution channel for the music industry of the 21st century – and they’re learning quickly,” says Tommy Tallarico, a game composer who has scored more than 275 video games – a world record.

In 2007, Guitar Hero and Rock Band made more than all digital music sales from services such as iTunes. The Aerosmith single “Same Old Song and Dance” was featured in Guitar Hero III. And according to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks digital and retail music, sales of the song jumped by 136 per cent the week after the game was released in late 2007, and by 400 per cent a week after Christmas that year. Even the most successful groups are getting in on the act. Rock Band has secured the rights to release a stand-alone video game featuring The Beatles, scheduled for release next year.

Read more from Jimmy Lee Shreeve and The Independent here.

Here is an study of consumer behavior and gym memberships. It casts some light onto the motivators which influence purchasing behavior.
Paying Not to go to the Gym

The science behind behavioral bias towards all-you-can-eat plans in the attached paper “Paying Not to go to the Gym” is pretty interesting. A private equity firm recently used it when projecting how Weight Watchers would fare under a similar shift from pay-per-meeting to subscription.

“Consumers deviate systematically from the optimal contractual choice”, largely due to risk aversion (minimizing variance of payments) and the cognitive dissonance associated with having to make regular transaction-based decisions. Same reasoning so many people pay for all-you-can-eat cell phone plans.”

In other words, the market for gyms fares far better because of the ease of use and simplicity of a flat rate for “all you can work out” pricing, as opposed to individual transactions for each time you go to the gym. People appear be pre-disposed to simplifying their transactional efforts for a known quantity – assuming it delivers what they are looking for – even if it costs far more than the “a la carte” approach.

Around the world content owners and network owners (ISPs) are beginning to try flat-rate schemes in an effort to develop a new model for recorded music.

We have already reported on the digital music flat rate here.

Warner Music is trying to get colleges to test out a new approach.

More on Warner Music and Jim Griffin’s plan here and here.

When you look at iTunes as it exists, it already incorporates this notion of simplicity in it’s ecommerce engine. You enter your payment information once and it is stored, making the next transaction that much easier. One has to wonder if iTunes would be anywhere near as successful (or amazon for that matter) if the user had to enter their credit card for each and every song or book or other product purchased. The mechanics of a flat rate are already partially installed in the iTunes commerce model.

I suggest that we consider an experiment at a premium level, instead of trying to find the lowest possible price point that would work for all consumers. Perhaps the flat rate that covers “all you can eat music” might fly at higher price points than have been envisioned thus far, when properly packaged and positioned. To some people with resources, an unlimited music service, with high quality files, that reliably delivers music whenever you want it – without any legal hassles – may be worth much more that we have imagined. We might make more progress if we started at the top of the pyramid rather than the bottom.

I invite your comments.

Paying Not to go to the Gym

Telecom Report (Dec 2008)

New music and new technologies have always propelled the record industry into more lucrative markets. But is that time over? How is the record industry handling illegal MP3 file sharing and what new business models await those who are embracing the reach of the Internet and the marketing power of the mobile phone?

In this final Telecom Report for 2008 we investigate the emergence of a new music industry and talk to artists, new service providers, traditionalists and industry analysts, who agree that the record industry is dying but the music industry is thriving.

Watch the Video from Sony/Ericsson

Bob Lefsetz posted in December about Corey Smith, a fantastic artist who is blazing a new trail through the music business using entirely new ways of thinking.

Corey’s whole business model is based on giving away lots of music for free and building relationships with his fans. Last year he grossed $4.2 million with a team of seven people. He does it primarily through touring and developing seriously close relationship with his fans.

Lefsetz said “Corey was a high school teacher. Playing gigs on the weekend. Marty Winsch (now his manager) was booking a venue. Was there any way to make headway, for Corey to support his wife and two kids playing music?

Absolutely said Marty. But first they had to release the equity in Marty’s recordings. They had to make them free on his site. To everybody.

And it was this giving away of the music that was Corey Smith’s tour support. They didn’t need a nickel from a label or a fat cat. Because once people heard Corey’s music, they had to see him live.

Which they did. In 2007, Corey Smith grossed $1.7 million. This year, not even half a decade into Marty’s management of the act, Corey’s going to gross $4.2 million. Free music built the base. Fan rabidity blew the act up.

You can buy the tracks on iTunes. They’ve sold 420,000 so far. When they experimented last summer, and took the free tracks down from Corey’s site, iTunes sales went DOWN! So, they put the free tracks back up. Actually, people e-mail Marty every day, asking for a track. AND HE JUST E-MAILS THE SONG BACK!

Not everybody’s ready to commit right up front. The free music allows people to try Corey out.

They don’t want radio play. They gave a station in a city sixty tickets to give away, but only on the condition that they DIDN’T play the songs. Marty wants people to experience Corey Smith live. That’s where it happens.

And Marty wants it to be easy. So therefore, he sells FIVE DOLLAR TICKETS! Yes, he rewards fans. Tickets are CHEAPER on the on sale date. And let me ask you, how many people are going to tell their friends they scored such a deal? And maybe drag them along with! That’s your marketing. Your fan base. It isn’t about hiring a PR firm or using Twitter. Actually, Marty pooh-poohs most technology. He says you’ve got be wary that the technology doesn’t get ahead of, doesn’t overwhelm the act. He doesn’t use Google Analytics to find out where each and every fan is. Marty goes on feel. He, and his uber agent Cass Scripps just go into a new territory, and although the first gig might be soft, the one after that never is. Because Corey delivers.

Actually, that’s important. Marty has tried releasing the equity, giving away the music of other acts. But they haven’t succeeded. Because they’re just not good enough.

If you’re truly good, you don’t need anybody else’s money, your recordings can be your tour support, they can put bodies in the seats, you can build a career.

Whenever anybody e-mails Marty and asks if they can meet Corey, Marty always says YES! He tells them when to show up for the meet and greet. This is the new paradigm. Eliminating the gulf between the act and fan. Trusting your audience. That if you’re damn good, they’ll give you all their money.

You don’t have to play by the old rules. You don’t need any money. You just need good music. And good management.”

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Corey recently gave a lecture at a UGA Music Business class and talked about his philosophy and career. He mentioned that he has been influenced by “The Future of Music” book. Yeah Baby!

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Check out Corey’s Website here and be sure to get one of those $5 tickets to see his live show. This is the future of the music business.