Bob Kohn, the founder of eMusic (which he has since sold) hosted this session, in which he shamelessly plugged his new enterprise, RoyaltyShare.com. This is a site that deals with splitting the revenue from performances, digital sales and the licensing of music between the parties with an interest in the work. They’re aimed mainly at bigger record labels who have a lot of content to manage and can’t keep up with the millions of small transactions that their catalogue generates through ecommerce.

As well as promoting himself, Kohn discussed the increasingly popular view of music as a service, something like satellite or cable TV, saying that this was his favoured model for the future, and that providers would essentially be competing on user experience and content availability as much as on price. His opinion is that the bigger infrastructures involved in the industry will continue to fall away as the market value of music drops, but that more of the revenue will end up in the hands of the people who make the music, as more direct links between artists and retailers are made, as by CD Baby, Snocap etc.