It’s the 40th MIDEM (the music industry’s oldest annual gathering in chic Cannes, France) and the first few days of 2006, and so I figured it’s a good time to throw these ideas into the mix and present this paper for public discussion.
The debate over the licensing of digital music is raging and growing exponentially every day. Around the world, calls for flat-fee, open, and “public” music access systems have been get¬ting louder and louder (see the French Parliament, the Ger¬man Indie Label Organization VUT, Martin Mills/Chairman of the Beggars Group in a recent Music Tank essay, Gilberto Gil in Brazil, etc.). And, despite the huge – and indeed very respectable growth of online music sales – “legal”/paid digital music services are far from beating the ever-popular file-sharing networks, darknets, and countless other digital music-trading methods. Will it be a cold day in Hell before the legitimate offers are good enough to at least have a real chance of beating the shoddy experiences of the unlicensed P2P services?
In fact, rather than the universally desirable and much discussed “monetization of conduct” and the “flat fee licens¬ing” of P2P networks (yep, this could have been done back in 1999!), the biggest thing to really happen in music, in 2005, was podcasting – for which most music is, once again, not made available or licensed at this time, with the exception of some recent and very laudable first steps by AIM in the UK). What does that tell you? IMHO, it confirms that indeed very few initiatives for significant change are coming from within the industry; almost every major change seems to be coming from the outside.
Now, despite the overall quite impressive number of ap¬proximately 830 million downloads that Steve Jobs just an¬nounced at Macworld, I think iTunes (but not iPod!) sales will be flattening severely as everyone who has any economically realistic view of life is now realizing that they cannot continue to spend $/€/£1 per track for yet another version of the same track, again.
“flat
On the other side of the digital music sphere the Janus-DRM’ed Windows Media-powered music services such as Napster and Real’s Rhapsody are struggling with the heavy handicaps that their technology neither really protects anything nor is really easy to use for anyone. In fact, all the ones I have tried have plenty of “most likely does not play when you really need it” problems. No such troubles with eMusic, which I like a lot, but…very little, if any, music from the major labels there.
The bottom line is that the system, the very operating para¬digm, is broken at the core, and thousands of band-aids will not make it well again. These attempts at reviving an almost comatose record (but not music) industry will just keep us go¬ing until we can get a full set of organ (and brain) transplants.
But naturally, huge changes like these must simply play themselves out, and so for 2006, I predict that the pain of sell¬ing music the good old way (i.e., by the “unit,” whether online or offline) will become so severe that most incumbents will simply waive most currently mandatory must-have’s and finally throw their holy cows (such as not licensing anything in MP3 format, or maintaining territorial restrictions) into the digital meat-grinder, and will start heading for greener pastures, in
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