Unlimited-download models may be gaining in popularity – but slowly enough that turning the music biz on its head is still a past-time of renegades…
At MusExpo Europe ’09 in London on Tuesday, Billy Bragg manager and International Music Managers’ Forum president Peter Jenner repeated his earlier calls for a blanket license to authorise ISP and P2P subscription services: “The business of the 21st Century is about the selling of music as a service rather than as a product. There is no hope for the industry if we’re going to rely on unit sales.”
Jenner said Danish ISP TDC had managed to reduce its own churn and give money to the music biz by giving bundling downloads with subscribers’ connectivity: “It can lead back to income growth for the music industry. We are getting worse and worse at getting paid for what we provide – because the record business has been involved with selling bits of plastic.”
Companies trying to do just that are Nokia (NYSE: NOK) with Comes With Music, Omnifone with its MusicStation offer and both BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) and Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) with early ISP agreements with Universal. But the European licensing framework is still complex enough to make it difficult nad, as labels tentatively accept that money may be recouped by dropping their prices enough for ISPs to pay, how much – if anything – is really to be gained?
A tool to find that out was launched today by Jenner, UK advisory firm Detica, Atlanta lawyer Leron Rogers of Hewitt & Rogers and US royalty collector SoundExchange. The data-driven free APriceForMusic.com lets stakeholders plug in numbers for all kinds of hypothetical variables, to test out how likely the model is to save the music business from oblivion. Release.