We Need To Talk About Streaming (again)

Last night I participated in a Music Tank seminar on streaming music.  It was a vibrant and valuable debate with a healthy diversity of opinion.  Below are brief highlights of my opening keynote, including some exclusive data from record labels and from Spotify. Streaming isn’t the paradigm shift, increased convenience of music access is Streaming [...]

Release Windows, the Cure for the Access vs Ownership Debate?

Back in early 2009 when I was at Forrester Research I wrote a report proposing that the Music Industry should adopt release windows.  It seemed to many something of an anachronistic concept, written just at the time with the Movie Industry – that bastion of release windows – was deeply engaged in a dialogue about [...]

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 [...]

Sopa Highlights Media Industry Strategic Failings

The controversial US copyright and piracy acts Sopa and Pipa (see this Wired piece for a Bluffer’s Guide on what they are) have been thrust centre stage by Wikipedia’s planned protest black-out on Wednesday.  It has taken an entity the size of Wikipedia to bring the debate out of the confines of the digerati and [...]

Is the Music Industry Going the Way of the Newspaper Industry?

The newspaper industry has had to grapple with a seismic shift in user behaviour over the last 15 years: people just aren’t buying newspapers in the numbers they used to and crucially newspaper buyers are getting older, to the extent that the long term prognosis is for the bulk of newspaper buyers to die off….literally.  [...]

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, [...]

Is Digital Music the Next Eurozone Crisis Waiting To Happen?

Much of the contemporary debate about digital music’s financials centres around perceived inequities in artist pay outs, particularly from streaming services.  These are very valid concerns and I continue to argue for an honest and transparent debate.  However there are two equally worrying issues: the sustainability of the stores and services themselves and the class [...]

Why Facebook Is The Real Winner With Google’s Mediocre Music Strategy

The digital music market is not in a great place right now and is in need of some major change: CD sales are still shrinking more quickly than digital revenues are growing; doubts are growing over the freemium model; overall consumer adoption remains niche.  So what do Google do? They launch another download store.  Come [...]

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 [...]