“As things stand now, digital music has failed.”
So says Forrester Research analyst Mark Mulligan. Of course he doesn’t mean digital music isn’t being consumed – just glance around any train carriage – what he’s pointing to is an abiding anxiety that the MP3 revolution is almost over and the record companies still aren’t across it. Not that you’d find many industry executives echoing this sentiment. Most will tell you that, as long as they can continue to bear down on piracy and intervene to make it almost impossible to download music illegally, their fortunes will rally.
In the board rooms of large record labels there’s a strong but vain hope that a position can be reached where any file sharing site will be blacklisted from the entire internet by ISP providers. It’s part of a call for a graduated response system which would see naughty up and downloaders warned several times before being thrown off the web. What’s more, the record companies (if we can still call them that) are still eager to chase every torrent service into the nearest court and nail them to the wall. They’ve made a start with Pirate Bay and LimeWire, having tasted blood by the distant closure of the original Napster.
Excuse the comparison, but this is urinating in a force ten gale.
Again and again ISPs have indicated they have no appetite for punishing their valuable and lucrative
customers for using the web for whatever the hell they like. With good reason. Who wants to be known as the first service provider to deny subscribers access to the very product they sell? And besides, it is completely unenforceable. There are now so many ways to connect to the web, all competing for a large but discerning market, it is simply impossible to persuade them all to close the door on a group of file sharers (subscribers likely to pay for high speeds and other extras,
lest we forget).
The harder the recording industry chases the ‘bad people’ the further behind it will lag in the digital race. If the inability to police the distribution of their products doesn’t persuade, they might consider this: most pirate downloaders are big fans of music. That is: the very people whose disposable income the business requires to survive.
However, survival only stands a snowball in hell’s chance of working, if the business forgets the amateur crime fighting and invests in music download platforms to genuinely meet the needs of users. Sitting back and congratulating one another on the success of Spotify and Grooveshark is as insufficient as it is idle. And it’s crucial a rapid move is made away from a strategy which seeks to make life increasingly difficult for these outlets.
Whether iTunes has a realistic business model or not is still a matter of considerable conjecture. But if major record labels imagine Apple’s innovations will wash them back to massive profits on a wave of i-Pods, they’ll find themselves mistaken. In fact, the music industry is now locked into damage limitation – they are simply managing decline. As Billy Bragg says ‘The music scene is in fantastic shape. It’s the music industry that’s in trouble.’
Can that really be it? Is the party now over for the big labels?
It rather depends what’s next. The iPod may have put mobile music back on the map and in the pocket, while Spotify may have unveiled the first accessible virtual music library, but the industry has completely failed to capitalise. MP3 players actually inspired the illegal torrent market, largely because the pirates strolled into the vacuum created by a legitimate business, baffled and angry at new technology. If they’re lucky, the majors have one last shot at getting this digital thing right. As long as further media revolutions (and recording artists) don’t conspire to exclude the old buffers.
To stay in the game, the music industry has no choice but to strive to ensure any forward strategy completely coincides with the highly fickle desires of the consumer. And that demands an agility and deftness they have failed to display for many, many years.
So says Forrester Research analyst Mark Mulligan. Of course he doesn’t mean digital music isn’t being consumed – just glance around any train carriage – what he’s pointing to is an abiding anxiety that the MP3 revolution is almost over and the record companies still aren’t across it. Not that you’d find many industry executives echoing this sentiment. Most will tell you that, as long as they can continue to bear down on piracy and intervene to make it almost impossible to download music illegally, their fortunes will rally.
In the board rooms of large record labels there’s a strong but vain hope that a position can be reached where any file sharing site will be blacklisted from the entire internet by ISP providers. It’s part of a call for a graduated response system which would see naughty up and downloaders warned several times before being thrown off the web. What’s more, the record companies (if we can still call them that) are still eager to chase every torrent service into the nearest court and nail them to the wall. They’ve made a start with Pirate Bay and LimeWire, having tasted blood by the distant closure of the original Napster.
Excuse the comparison, but this is urinating in a force ten gale.
Again and again ISPs have indicated they have no appetite for punishing their valuable and lucrative
customers for using the web for whatever the hell they like. With good reason. Who wants to be known as the first service provider to deny subscribers access to the very product they sell? And besides, it is completely unenforceable. There are now so many ways to connect to the web, all competing for a large but discerning market, it is simply impossible to persuade them all to close the door on a group of file sharers (subscribers likely to pay for high speeds and other extras,
lest we forget).
The harder the recording industry chases the ‘bad people’ the further behind it will lag in the digital race. If the inability to police the distribution of their products doesn’t persuade, they might consider this: most pirate downloaders are big fans of music. That is: the very people whose disposable income the business requires to survive.
However, survival only stands a snowball in hell’s chance of working, if the business forgets the amateur crime fighting and invests in music download platforms to genuinely meet the needs of users. Sitting back and congratulating one another on the success of Spotify and Grooveshark is as insufficient as it is idle. And it’s crucial a rapid move is made away from a strategy which seeks to make life increasingly difficult for these outlets.
Whether iTunes has a realistic business model or not is still a matter of considerable conjecture. But if major record labels imagine Apple’s innovations will wash them back to massive profits on a wave of i-Pods, they’ll find themselves mistaken. In fact, the music industry is now locked into damage limitation – they are simply managing decline. As Billy Bragg says ‘The music scene is in fantastic shape. It’s the music industry that’s in trouble.’
Can that really be it? Is the party now over for the big labels?
It rather depends what’s next. The iPod may have put mobile music back on the map and in the pocket, while Spotify may have unveiled the first accessible virtual music library, but the industry has completely failed to capitalise. MP3 players actually inspired the illegal torrent market, largely because the pirates strolled into the vacuum created by a legitimate business, baffled and angry at new technology. If they’re lucky, the majors have one last shot at getting this digital thing right. As long as further media revolutions (and recording artists) don’t conspire to exclude the old buffers.
To stay in the game, the music industry has no choice but to strive to ensure any forward strategy completely coincides with the highly fickle desires of the consumer. And that demands an agility and deftness they have failed to display for many, many years.
