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 [...]

BBM Music: First Take

Today Blackberry announced their anticipated BBM Music service, which it transpires is powered by white label cloud music stalwart Omnifone (who also power the likes of Sony and Vodafone). In short the service offers: 50 tracks per month for a £/$ 5.99 fee Is available to Blackberry Messenger (BBM) users Users’ tracks are available for [...]

Five Music Predictions for 2010 (and Five Reasons Why 2009 was a Flop)

[Please note that this post first appeared on the Forrester Consumer Product Strategy blog.  Over the coming month or so I will be migrating all of my activity there.  I will soon be posting new information here for you to amend your feeds and subscriptions. Thanks] Lots happened in 2009 but it wasn’t a vintage [...]

Monkeying Around With Mobile Music (Updated)

Today the triumvirate of Universal Music, UK broadcaster Channel 4 and UK mobile operator Orange announced a Pay As You Go (PAYG) mobile music service called Monkey.  The service is aimed squarely at younger consumers, which matches the demographic of PAYG users and Channel 4’s audience.  The underlying principle of the service is that it [...]

Virgin and Universal Announce Unlimited MP3 Subscription: First Take

Today Universal Music and UK ISP Virgin Media announced the launch of an unlimited MP3 subscription service.  Yes, you read correctly, ‘unlimited MP3’.  And, perhaps even more significantly this goes hand in hand with Virgin committing to a graduated response (i.e. Three Strikes and You’re Out) policy for music file sharers.    Universal and Virgin have [...]

Why Napster’s New Pricing Strategy is More than Just Price Cuts

Napster has overhauled its pricing strategy in the US, selling pre-stored value cards in retail stores. It’s being widely reported as ‘Napster slashing prices’ but it’s more than just that.  The key things of note here are: It shifts the consumer focus onto downloads: each card has a pre-stored value for MP3 downloads as the [...]

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 [...]

Where Now for Music Retailing?

UK media retailer has just announced that it will buy 14 retail stores from its struggling competitor Zaavi, which is currently in administration, following the collapse of media distributor EUK, which went into administration following the collapse of its parent company Woolworths which was also a key music retailer. Domino effect anyone? OK, things might [...]

Amazon Launches MP3 Store in the UK. First Take.

Amazon just sneaked up on the UK music market with it’s stealthy launch of the UK version of its MP3 store.  Why the quiet launch?  Amazon promised back in Midem that they’d launch in Europe before year end.  It seems to have to taken them longer than expected to make this happen and the quiet, [...]

100% MP3, 100% Late (though hopefully not too late)

Oh the sweet irony – back in the days of the original Napster the major record labels refused to countenance that MP3 was the new format of choice for the digital generation and refused to license content for distribution via MP3.  Now ten years on we have the”MP3 100% Compatible” logo / campaign from seven [...]