Why It Doesn’t Really Matter Whether Adele Sells More Albums Than Lady Gaga This Year

You may have noticed the unattractive furore surrounding Adele’s contest with Lady Gaga to become the biggest selling artist of the year.  The momentum appears to be with Adele, with her hugely successful ‘21’ album yesterday becoming the first ever album to sell more than 1 million digital copies on iTunes in Europe. But the [...]

The Socially Integrated Web and Facebook’s Content Strategy

Click on the video below to view my latest Music Industry Blog podcast.  This episode addresses the Socially Integrated Web, the term I use to describe Facebook’s content strategy. Topics covered in this episode include: Joining users’ digital dots The four types of digital content ecosystems How Facebook will extend its ecosystem reach The universal [...]

Why Digital’s Next Steps Can’t Be Baby Steps

What follows are highlights from my speech at the Westminster Forum on the UK Music Industry 2011 and Beyond I want to spend the next few minutes building the case that digital music is in a period of transition, a stage that presents us with a unique and ever narrowing window of opportunity to drive [...]

Spotify and Virgin Media Take The Third Way

UK cable broadband and TV provider Virgin Media and Spotify today announced the partnership deal they’ve been working on for some time.  The deal will ensure that Spotify is delivered across the web, mobile and TV to Virgin customers. On the surface this might not seem like such a big deal, but don’t be fooled, [...]

Putting the Crowd in the Cloud

[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] [Posted by Mark Mulligan] Follow me on I have [...]

Why It’s In Everyone’s Interest to Get Music Videos Back on YouTube in the UK

YouTube have announced that they will block access to music videos for UK viewers due to a dispute over licensing terms with UK collection society PRS for Music (formerly known as the MCPS-PRS Alliance). This is the almost inevitable result of two long-term strategic courses which have ultimately been on collision path: On the one [...]

Music as Free: When Discovery Becomes Consumption

Regular readers will know that I’ve dedicated quite a lot of time to the debate over the threat that free music poses to the music business, but that I’m also a strong believer in embracing free as a legitimate business in the right way. It’s a difficult equation to balance and I’m not going to [...]

Why Warner Need to Have Some Patience With YouTube

It’s not been the best of years for YouTube, what with all the copyright suits from the likes of Viacom that could cost the company billions. And the momentum of the online video world shifting to the new services like iPlayer and Hulu from ‘old-world’ TV broadcasters. Not to mention the largely unsuccessful efforts to [...]

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 [...]

The Ever Changing Face of Ovi: Why It Means So Much to Nokia

I spent the first half of this week in Barcelona at Nokia World.  I was fortunate enough to spend  time with many senior Nokia executives in small group sessions with my Forrester colleagues and also one-on-one sessions.  There were a lot of big announcements, not least of which was the superb looking N97.  But I’m going [...]