We have learnt that News Corp is trying to put together a joint venture for Myspace. This joint venture will be similar to their current video joint venture with NBC Universal. In other words the joint venture will be for content providers to place their music on the service and in return gain an equity share in the company. The companies involved would only consist of the four major labels, Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI.

Im guessing the music will be DRM free but will have some sort of ad support or watermarking to it. Since the Myspace deal with Snocap there has been no real use of the 7 million bands on myspace to sell some music. Im sure if this was done properly there is a chance for the service to become a real challenge to Amazon and hopefully iTunes.

 

Chris Anderson over at The Long Tail has compiled stats showing that the music industry as a whole is still growing! Overall a lot has been happening in the music industry in the last few weeks, Radiohead, Madonna (leaving her label and signing with LiveNation), Prince, NIN, etc. The results of these have fueled great discussion about the industry and where it is headed. Chris mentions it is a big mistake to equate the major labels and their plastic disc business with the industry as a whole, and when you stand back and look at all of music, things dont look so bad. Stats are as follows: * Concerts and merchandise: UP (+4%) * Digital tracks: UP (+46%) * Ringtones: UP (+86% last year, but probably just single-digit percent this year) * Licensing for commercials, TV shows, movies and videogames: UP (Warner Music saw licensing grow by about $20 million over the past year) * Even vinyl singles (think DJs): UP (more than doubled in the UK) * And, if you include the iPod in the music industry, as I’d argue a fair-minded analysis would: UP, UP, UP! (+31% this year) Only CDs are down (-18%). They’re around 60% of the industry not including the MP3 players, but just around 25% if you do include them. So the problem with the music labels is not that music is an industry in decline, but that they have a too-narrow view of what business they’re in. Madonna’s switch from a label to a concert promoter should be a clue. I am not too sure if I agree with Chris that portable music players should be part of the music industry, but the remaining facts show the true story. I see the entire industry moving close together and the majors are slowly losing market share and overall industry dominance. The huge majority of new releases are from the independents and I can see the industry becoming a lot more cut throat thus giving greater opportunities to unsigned and independent bands and labels to make a healthy living without losing huge royalties to the major labels.

While Prince is famous for his eccentricities as much as for his music (I never knew how to pronounce that ♂ thing) his latest foray into the news has been more than usually self damaging. He recently launched legal attacks against some of the biggest names on the web, accusing YouTube, eBay, The Pirate Bay and some of his own ‘unofficial’ fansites, of breaching his copyright. These attempts to limit the unlicensed transfer of his material hardly seems compatible with the decision to give his latest album away ‘free’ with the Mail On Sunday back in July. If he is concerned about the level of sales he’s attaining surely giving his new album away to the entire nation for the price of a newspaper wasn’t the smartest move, and attacking your own fans is unlikely to be constructive under any circumstances. I will be watching with interest to see the effect of this giveaway was on physical and digital sales nationally and globally in comparison to Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want excercise with ‘In Rainbows’. The prospect of success in this aim are debatable; YouTube has previously taken shelter in a ’safe harbour’ clause of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act protecting service providers from acts committed by their users (inserted presumably to prevent the possibility of me suing BT for allowing that heavy breather to keep calling me), who must be responsible for their own actions. YouTube also apportions an amount of it’s earnings to combating copyright theft, and has a policy of removing any offending material from its site once contacted by it’s owner. The Pirate Bay takes a more impish attitude to these attacks, of which it has parried many, and it’s founders suggest that even if the site is outlawed in their native Sweden they will merely relocate and continue operating. Whether his or any other lawsuits against sites that host user submitted content are successful or not, I think Prince et al are missing the point. Napster got taken down as the first head of the p2p Hydra back in 2000, and many other sites sprang up to take its place. While I don’t condone copyright theft or piracy in any form, the undeniable truth is that until someone designs and implements a legitimate channel covering the same breadth of catalogue and ease of access as the p2p networks there is no hope of slaying the file sharing dragon. This said, the Spanish courts illegalised personal peer-to-peer sharing more than a year ago, introducing a small tax on media like CD-R’s and flash memory drives as a means of generating funds to compensate copyright theft victims with. and pay for policing. While I can’t imagine they’ll be able to catch many pirates, or easily calculate the value of damage done to copyright holders it is a piece of lateral thinking that I admire. Like the TV license fee levied by the UK government on behalf of the BBC it generates an income at grass roots level, enabling the enjoyment of a facility by all without specifically victimising individuals (unless they cheat the tax). The ultimate truth that the internet has freed consumers to get their content however they choose, means that the solution to copyright theft must be to make the legitimate channels so much easier, better and more convenient to use than the illegal ones that everyone shifts over out of preference rather than the remote fear of prosecution. The people that are making efforts in this direction are the ones succeeding in the market and reaping the rewards - of which more in my next post. Update: Warner Music Chairman echoes this sentiment. 13 Nov ‘07 - Edgar Bronfman, Chairman and CEO of Warner Music Group speaks to the GSMA Mobile Asia congress: “We used to fool ourselves… we used to think our business would remain blissfully unaffected as the world of file sharing was exploding. We were wrong… By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find… and as a result of course, consumers won. “