Future Business Models for the Pirate Bay and Historical Revenues

Yesterday evening I spoke with Hans Pandeya, CEO of Global Gaming Factory, the company that bought Pirate Bay.  I asked him a few specific questions about his plans for the Pirate Bay.

The plans revolve around building a new  peer-to-peer network from scratch, with a new application that uses smart peering technology to ensure bandwidth usage is as local as possible.   The intention is then to sell this localized peer based distribution capacity to ISPs (though I’m not quite sure why ISPs would buy back this bandwidth when it is theirs in the first place).

Mr Pandeya stressed his commitment to supporting rights holders’ interests and incentivizing users to download legal content.  The direct implication of incentivizing users of course is that they’ll get to chose from unlicensed content also, which suggests that the commitment to rights holders will fall far short of what they’ll need.

Besides likely rights holders problems, the other challenge will be to convince Pirate Bay users to download a new application to run on a new  and unproven network that at outset will have minimal content.

He also explained that he expects to generate strong ad revenues from the Pirate Bay website.  Yet the site, which he positions as a ‘search engine’ is a massive series of links to torrents which have been established in the Swedish court to contain extensive unlicensed content.  So either he removes these and loses his traffic, or he retains them and puts himself on a collision course with the rights owners.  Basically it looks like the Pirate Bay site could just be continuing as is with stronger and more robust financial backing.

My Pandeya was very bullish about the ad revenue potential of the site (though he insisted the peering business would be the main revenue source).  Based upon his calculations of Pirate Bay impressions and page views he expects the site to generate €40 million a month.   (FWIW those numbers feel high to me, but I’m not an online ad expert).  When I asked him what he though the Pirate Bay was currently earning he said he didn’t know because it had been ‘illegal’.  I found it hard to believe he will not have done the due diligence.  Indeed, to have such a strong sense of the inventory and audience of the site suggests he has in fact delved deeply.  So I pressed further, and eventually he said he thought that the Pirate Bay “probably” generated about €3 million a month in ad revenue, but that he “couldn’t know because it was illegal”.

Even if we say that Pirate Bay was earning a third of that, it still gives the site an annual income of €12 million, which doesn’t sit very well with the founders’ claims that it was not a strong revenue generator.  Indeed if you consider the upper end of Mr Pandeya’s estimates the Pirate Bay was a €66 million business.  Not shabby at all for a bunch of Robin Hoods, and far above the $1.2 million estimated in the trial.

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 come to the negotiating table with their highest stakes and in doing so each has got their respective Holy Grail.    And don’t underestimate how high those stakes are for each party – basically Universal and Virgin have each delivered as much as they have to offer and conceded as much as they can give: they’ve both played their Aces.  Once again Universal put themselves in the position of digital trailblazers, leaving the other majors to follow in their slipstream.

Also, there’s no coincidence about the timing of the announcement i.e. the day before the final Digital Britain report is published.  The graduated response approach runs counter to the more modest ‘technical solutions’ that the then Culture Minister Andy Burnham suggested the Digital Britain report will propose.  He even went as far as to say that the graduated response approach wasn’t workable.

But he also told the music industry and the ISP’s to fix their own problems rather than wait for the ‘heavy hand of legislation’.  Given that this is exactly what has happened, it will be interesting to see how the government responds.  Its also worth noting that the release is at pains to stress that disconnections will be temporary and that Virgin will not use its own traffic management technology to enforce the action.  Thus the ISP’s arguments that their traffic management technology isn’t well suited to dealing with individual accounts remain in play.

The service itself will come in two tiers: a premium tier which is the unlimited MP3 offering, in return for a 1 year broadband bundle subscription commitment, and a second lower tier that has limited MP3s.  Unlimited streaming is available on both also.  The 12 month MP3 model is what I’ve been advocating should happen with music subscriptions for some time now, and leaves Napster’s UK offering looking even more in need of fundamental revision.

The pricing of course will be key.  UK consumers have historically shown little appetite for premium subscription services: HMV and Virgin Megastores both tried and failed – though HMV is back for a second stab, Napster has failed to break out of a small niche, Wippit closed shop and Yahoo and Rhapsody didn’t ever bother to launch here.  Of course, none of those were as compelling an offering as this, and this is smartly targeted at households not individuals.  But pricing will be key.  Price it too highly and you’ll miss the disengaged music households this and just switch over already high spending ones.  Price it too low and CD sales will be cannibalized.

It will also be interesting to see whether this announcement means that the UK’s other major label backed unlimited MP3 offering Datz will be breathed new life.

Whatever the political fall out of this announcement, there is no doubting that this is a massive step forward and shows that where there’s a will there’s a way.  If the other majors come on board Virgin Media will have a market leading digital music service that will bring real value to their subscribers.  At the same time the labels will get a major ISP implementing a twist on their preferred anti-piracy measures without needing the government to do it for them.

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 seem to be some distance from the ISPs being empowered with truly compelling music services they can offer to their subscribers as a genuine alternative to file sharing.

On the surface of things this week’s reported tie up with Sky and Omnifone for a music subscription services seemed like a positive step forward. However, the lightest of scratches beneath the surface reveal it to actually be a microcosm of broader problems. Omnifone’s press announcement pointedly doesn’t even mention Sky as a partner for their new ISP white label offering. Although many press reports imply Sky have signed up, the only actual substance is that Sky are considering using Omnifone to power some of the technology on its offering.

The nuanced specifics here are important. Last year Sky and Universal Music proudly announced a music JV. Details were scarce in the extreme but the strategic ambition was bold. Sky has since then not been able to add any of the other 3 majors onto the JV roster. Part of this may well relate to the other majors getting increasingly narked about UMG’s highly proactive (even aggressive) digital strategy. But more broadly it talks to the fact that there is a lot of distance between what Sky wants to be able to offer its customers and what the labels feel they can provide for the financial terms Sky are willing to consider. This follows on the heels of Virgin Media dropping pursuit of PlayLouder’s MSP offering due to label concerns and also 7Digital so far failing to get any ISP to take up their white label offering.

The root of the problem is that the ISPs want to offer consumers more content and flexibility for less money (and pay the labels less) than the labels are willing to countenance.

But most UK ISPs have good reason for having high demands, as do many other continental European ISPs. They’ve been burnt once, launching poorly featured, weakly differentiated services near the turn of the century. Their inadequacies (and the subsequent failures) weren’t the fault of the ISPs per se, rather they were products of their time, restricted to the terms that the major record labels were willing to countenance back then. (e.g. 99 cents downloads that could only be played on your computer)

Apple changed the rules of the game and the failings of the ISP services were only accentuated.

The ISPs know now that if they get back in the game they have to be differentiated and be able to compete with Apple. But they also know that most of their file sharing subscribers are unlikely to be able or willing to pay much either. So the ISPs want compelling (ideally MP3) services that cost little or nothing to consumers. The labels business models can’t support that model without the ISPs picking up a lot of the cost, which they can’t afford to do due to falling broadband ARPU.

So we’re in a stalemate that nobody really expected to be in. (Indeed back in the summer of last year BMR CEO Feargal Sharkey said he expected to have something to announce “within a matter of weeks”). The labels thought the ISPs would lap up what they had to offer, and the ISPs thought they’d get more. The record labels are not about to change the fundamentals of how they value their IP, but there are some viable mid term compromises that can get us out of this malaise:

• A series of Joint Ventures: MySpace have created a blue print for using this approach to get favourable licensing terms to deliver free music that wouldn’t have been financially viable otherwise. And the labels get lots of potential upside and to extend their role in the value chain. JVs would bind the ISPs and labels closer together, create common purpose and engender greater strategic flexibility.
• Focus on free, not MP3: the success of Spotify has shown that MP3 isn’t everything. Free music streaming with good catalogue and easy to use UI is actually a winning formula. The business case for hiding the cost of a streaming service in the access subscription is a lot stronger than for MP3 downloads
• Leverage all elements of the multiplay: ISPs typically have multiple products (TV, mobile etc.). Fully leverage these. Creating a compelling music offering means going beyond a balkanized online vs mobile vs TV strategy. Fully integrate and actually drive other business areas in the process e.g. extending a streaming music offering to mobile via an on-handset app will drive mobile data usage

Time is of the essence: every day that goes by, file sharing grows in popularity and becomes more entrenched. So agreeing on intermediate solutions with a view to a longer term roadmap is far favourable to stalling until the perfect solution can be agreed upon.