San Francisco Music Technology Summit shows positive trends in digital music industry
I attended the San Francisco Music Technology Summit a couple of weeks ago to talk on a panel about concluding licensing deals with rightsholders. I was pleased to look out from the stage to see a tough, cynical and badly dressed crowd – I knew then that I was speaking to the real digital music industry.
My overall impression of the event was that, despite the usual doom and gloom that we’ve gotten used to this year, it was a fabulously positive event. Some trends were clear:
- There has been a huge growth in the number of services that leverage data to produce recommendations and other results that help drive consumption. The success of these businesses is measured in both an objective and a subjective way, but the overall message seemed to be that they are here to stay and will soon migrate to other areas of the Internet – books, films, television and beyond.
- The legal backdrop for licensing music and content on the Internet is still fraught with difficulty. In the face of this, many new services are trying clever and interesting ways in an attempt to avoid licensing altogether. Almost all of them are doomed to failure – record labels won’t stand for it, and rightly so. However, it’s a shame that they feel compelled to go that route. Licensing music needs to be much easier and laws need to be clearer. And, as I was politely reminded in the bar at the end of the event, there are far too many lawyers in the music business.
- The advertiser-funded content model is being scrutinised closely. In a declining ad market, companies that pursue this option have to do their sums carefully and adapt their service to take full advantage of every single monetisation opportunity to survive. Given that advertising has funded television services for many years, I’m hopeful that the best ad-funded sites can make it work. I am a huge fan of Last.FM, MySpace and Spotify, and want them all to flourish.
From the sunny climes of the West Coast to the rather less sunny weather in London, we are waiting for the release of the UK Government’s Digital Britain report next week. The report will set out what steps ISPs will have to take to assist rightsholders against piracy. The government has been making weaker and weaker promises to the content industries in the run-up to the release of the report. In light of recent legal developments in France, I wonder how far they will go?
