Cannes, France – There's been a lot of digital ink spilled over the years regarding the impact of digital technology on the music industry. No one ever acknowledges how that industry has always been on the cutting edge of technology, not just in how music is produced but how it's enjoyed. Anyone out there remember how exciting it was to purchase a turntable that allowed you to stack singles on top of the spindle and the record player would drop them one at a time to play them? That was a great technology innovation (and funny how you didn't suddenly have music lovers insisting they had always had a fair use right to listen to singles consecutively without changing them manually, even though that technology had never existed before.)

But I digress. On the first day of MidemNet here, a panel of futurists examined the changes occurring in the digital space. Nothing earthshatteringly new, but there were some good points made, in particular by Ted Cohen, officially the managing partner of TAG Strategic but better known as the music industry thought guru.

Moderator Paul Brindley of Music Ally repeated the true, but tired, observation that the Internet empowered artists to market themselves like never before. Cohen agreed, but added that with no barriers to access, "millions of bands are vying for bandwidth." He said third-party filters, whether algorithms or social networking software, will be needed to help music fans find new music. He would seem to be correct, in that I identified at least a dozen such services here at Midem and they all seem to be prospering. The role to which rightsholders share in that revenue is less settled, however.

Brindley also said that with unlicensed sound recordings so ubiquitous online, perhaps the price point for a song should be zero. Cohen — a former label executive who isn't exactly the biggest defender of labels — took issue with this observation, noting it does nothing for songwriters, who don't tour or sell T-shirts. Artiste Management Productions' Harvey Goldsmith said that all rightsholders should benefit from touring, etc., but Cohen seemed to recognize the difficulty in tying songwriting compensation to tours.

Goldsmith had a really good point on touring; he knows a bit about it, having done major events such as LiveAid and the Led Zeppelin reunion tour. He said the touring industry is led right now by about 20 supergroups such as Zeppelin. Generally these are bands that have been around for years, and built up a following in what Cohen would call the 1.0 era of the music business, namely pre-Internet. "Where's the next generation of supergroups?" Goldsmith asked, clearly perplexed as to how such groups emerge in the sea of plenty that is the Internet. Perhaps they don't, but I don't think Goldsmith will like that answer. 

Share this:

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 6:48 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright opponents, market forces. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.