Once again its award season in the music business. In the USA well have the Grammies (which are a worldwide benchmark) and in the UK the Brits. Both award ceremonies are designed as marketing tools, to highlight the ‘best’ recordings and product out there. Following the high point of the holiday season where sales are at their highest, the award ceremonies help keep the music and acts in the public eye.

Columns and web pages will be focused on these events. The industry hopes, as always, that they will create a direct boost in sales for the nominated acts (and winners) and indirectly get people into record shops or online stores, where they might pick up other music whilst browsing. 

In the UK we seem to allow the story of how well our acts are doing in the USA  to dominate proceedings. It is similar to the Oscars. Even though we have our own ceremonies (the Brits for music and BAFTAS for movies) we still think that doing well at US ceremonies is key. Thats not a ridiculous position, in that the USA is a huge market. However, surely what matters just as much is whether those acts are funded by US or UK labels. Its possible to have US acts which are owned by UK labels, and in many ways its healthy to have a portfolio of acts from around the world. 

Additionally, perhaps we should be concentrating on how well UK labels (or acts) are doing in other markets, such as Russia, China, India and Japan. Clearly those are difficult markets and not worth as much as the USA. Japan, excluded, all those markets have major piracy problems, but the potential for growth there is huge. If UK labels don’t invest in those markets (accepting that in the short term they might loose money) then they will loose out. At some point a home grown market will emerge from those markets, and if not challenged will could then ‘dump’ content back on our market.

This is not an argument for cultural protectionism, but for cultural aggressiveness. Just as the UK strives to have its content do well in the states, a mature well developed market, it should also be making huge steps into these new markets. Finding great talent, and developing it. Perhaps adopting different business models for different markets. After all, how much music do major labels sell in Africa? Not a lot as they do not see their model working there. However there is a working model out there and there is money to be made, its just a different model to the one in the USA, EU, Australia and Japan. 

Of course these award ceremonies are built very much around the traditional model. The idea of having an album of the year award, helps market a bulk of work in one go, but how many people actually buy albums over buying individual downloads? How many people are now just streaming the odd song?

What happens if artists sell a subscription or membership to their channel and then drip feed songs. They might never be packaged as an album, but are just a stream of content released over a long period of time. We can still have song of the year, and Act of the year though. I would expect that as new formats take form, we will see a change to these ceremonies.

For now though we are sometime away from that reality, so lets sit back and enjoy the fact that the Brits are back in town. Again.

Its been rumoured on a number of sites now that Itunes will be dropping DRM. Well hurrah if they do. Lets quickly go through the pros, and cons of this decision. 

Cons -

From Apple’s perspective they loose a reason to buy an IPOD or to keep buying an IPOD. Traditionally music bought was tied into that piece of hardware. It would not play on anything else

Music which is exclusive to the Apple’s, Itunes Store can be copied and shared with as much ease as any other material.

Pros - 

For the last two years, people have been able to buy music, legally, without DRM from a number of players in the market. That music would work on an IPOD. So Apple’s business model had actually become a barrier to them growing the Ipod market, as consumers would soon become use to the idea of music download interoperability (remember in the early years, Apple were not the only company with closed DRM).

It should also be noted that the Ipod has now grown beyond its original functionality. Its now a phone, a games machine and slowly becoming a business smart phone which is competing with Blackberry. Hence, there are lots of different ways Apple can make sure it still has content exclusively tied to its hardware by having the best business applications and games to play (adapted uniquely to its hardware). 

Apple still has the Itunes store, and for many that is of value in itself. The Apple hardware, with a dedicated ’streamlined’ (some people think that the Itunes Software needs a MAJOR makeover) software application for purchasing and managing content is a major plus. There are still very few competitors with a fully joined up experience such as Apple’s (Sony are slooooooowly getting there with their PS3 and PSP platforms).

All we need is the record labels to allow Apple to lift DRM across its entire catalogue. Does this mean Apple was always telling the truth when they said it was the Record Companies that forced DRM on them? Well I suspect, that yes, in their continual fear of anything which is not some form of physical distribution system they did insist on DRM. However, I reckon that Apple then saw how they could make it proprietary and use it as a way of making sure no one could ride their success in developing the Ipod platform. 

That market reality has now gone, and now we look forward to a world where, music at least, has no locks on it. The question remains will the Movie Industry follow suite and also allow Apple to unlock the films and tv shows? That would be superb boost to the world of legal digital content, and would result in many more people embracing it.

After all EMI recently stated that since they had lifted DRM via a number of download sites they had not seen an increase in illegal sharing. Those that want to break the law always will, and for the rest of us, if the price is right, if we feel we own the content and can use it across all our hardware without being punished - well we always buy it.

After all we can STILL buy it on CD/DVD and rip it with ease. If companies were THAT concerned with stopping Piracy they would have stopped making CDs and DVDs by now!

Recently Nokia has announced its Comes With Music range of products. This is where you get one of their handsets and can then legally download an unlimited amount of music via their service for a year onto your newly acquired phone. 

Now when we say ‘unlimited’ that always means ‘within reason’ or that which could be ‘reasonably’ listened to by an individual in a year. 

The point is, this is slowly becoming a mainstream model. Sony Music is launching its own version (it has in scandinavia already) along with Sony Ericsson. I think we can expect that a similar deal will eventually work with the PS3/PSP platforms (at least for Sony content) and EMI recently went into a joint venture with Warner Music, not tied to a piece of hardware but allowing ‘unlimited’ downloads for a one off fee. 

Now in many respects these deals with labels add REAL value to music. The labels will get paid a slice off the hardware price or package fee (as with the EMI platform). The customer values music enough to want it and pro-actively download it, but they have lost the sense that they should pay individually for each track/album. Yet this way they are still paying for it, without feeling that they are - and then the money is distributed through to the labels and appropiate artists/songwriters etc etc. 

The flip side is that it could be perceived as the nail in the coffin of the traditional value system. The system which says:

‘That an artist or collection of artists and skilled individuals spent ‘x’ amount of time on this track/album. By purchasing it you are supporting them directly (and not the label - even though must of the money used to go to the label) and making sure they can continue to make music to the same high standard.’

Also it could be a way of blocking off the long tail. I.E. if an individual or band cannot get with a content aggregator.  They may also find that these new services only push material from major labels, as by associated with material with high cache levels adds value to the hardware and is a win, win; for the labels and tech companies. 

Does this squeeze out the individual, semi-pro? If they are left to ’sell’ their music, it would put them at a perceived disadvantage in the market place compared to the labels who have their ‘price hidden’ in the cost of the phone etc etc. 

Times are a-changing as they have been non-stop for the last 10 years. However, is something fundamental happening in front our eyes? As labels panic and seek to find an income (something which is kinda important for a business) are they undermining, further, the very product they wish to make money out of? Or, are they smelling the roses and leveraging the content the best way they can, today, making sure there is money to invest into the music of tomorrow.

Also does this mean that it will impossible to have a complete music collection in the future? Might we see a situation, as with movies and Blueray, that certain acts can only be listened to on certain playback devices? I’m not too sure thats ‘bad’ as its the norm for videogames and as I said, movies. However it would be a complete change for the consumer. 

Discuss……