Music Start-Up Strategy 2.0

The music industry needs innovation more than most industries and yet the last two years has seen a slowdown in the number of new licensed music services coming to market and greater consolidation around the Triple A of Apple, Android and Amazon.  In this brave new world music start-ups need an entirely new modus operandi. [...]

The Music Format Bill of Rights

Today I have published the latest Music Industry Blog report:  ‘The Music Format Bill Of Rights: A Manifesto for the Next Generation of Music Products’.  The report is currently available free of charge to Music Industry Blog subscribers.  To subscribe to this blog and to receive a copy of the report simply add your email address [...]

The Digital Music Year That Was: 2011 in Review and 2012 Predictions

Following the disappointment of 2010, 2011 was always going to need to pack more punch.  In some ways it did, and other ways it continued to underwhelm. On balance though the stage is set for an exciting 2012. There were certainly lots of twists and turns in 2011, including: disquiet among the artist community regarding digital pay-outs, [...]

Dear Lucian Grainge…

Dear Lucian Grainge and co, Congratulations on your successful bid for EMI.  You are about to find yourself in charge of an unprecedentedly large share of the world’s music market.  Not so long ago, to have even imagined that regulators would countenance such a situation would have been fantasy.  But the world has changed, and [...]

OpenEMI, an Innovation Files Case Study

Following on from Part 1 of the ‘Innovation Files’ series, this post looks at EMI’s OpenEMI initiative and how it could drive transformational innovation within the major record label and publisher. EMI today announced an interesting developer initiative that aims to revolutionize the way in which developers work with EMI.  Securing licenses from record labels [...]

iTunes Pass: First Take

So Apple finally gets into the music subscription business….well sort of. Today Apple announced the first of its iTunes Pass offerings, in partnership with EMI and 80’s electronic music pioneers Depeche Mode. In return for $18.99 a month buyers get   “…new and exclusive singles, remixes, video and other content from their favorite artists over [...]

What the ISPs and the Record Labels Need to Do Next

The UK music industry and ISPs have been working towards the goals of the government-brokered Memorandum of Understanding since last summer but we’ve yet to see concrete results, in particular with regards to new music offerings. All stakeholders recognize the crucial importance of having a big fat carrot to accompany the stick. Yet we still [...]

Mamma Mia: How Universal Are Using Music from the 70′s to Build a 21st Century Business

Universal Picture’s ‘Mamma Mia! The Movie’ has just become the most successful film musical of all time with 2.25 million first day US sales and previously 1.6 million first day UK sales (which in per capita terms means that British sales were three and half times more successful.)  UK 1st week sales peaked at 3.5 [...]

EMI.com: First Take

EMI today launched its consumer facing EMI.com website, firmly in Beta mode. The ‘Beta’ label is important as in the mid-term this is essentially going to be a live lab for experimenting with new tactics, strategies and technologies. Currently the site focuses on rich artist information including music, videos, photos, biographies and discographies, though videos [...]

Are EMI Censoring the Coldplay vs Joe Satriani Debate on YouTube?

You’ll almost certainly know by now that US ‘axe-hero’ Joe Satriani is suing Coldplay for plagiarism.  He claims that Coldplay’s ‘Viva La Vida’ (an EMI recording) stole from his 2004 track ‘If I Could Fly’ (a Sony recording).  This was becoming a PR disaster for Coldplay and a couple of videos on YouTube comparing the [...]