Music Ally

Hypebot blogger and industry consultant Bruce Houghton got his five minutes on-stage this afternoon at MidemNet, in a similar slot to that occupied by Ted Cohen and Terry McBride earlier.

The topic: monetising music. “The one thing that we do know is that people still love music,” he said. “The problem is that people have become unaccustomed to paying for music in its recorded form.

He presented a five-item checklist for filters to judge the ideas and services presented at MidemNet.

Item one: there is no one ‘answer’ to the challenges the industry faces. “My first filter eliminates anyone who claims to have ‘the answer’,” says Houghton.

Filter two: simply moving analogue content online isn’t enough. “The companies that are going to find the answers to our music monetisation dilemma will be focusing on building new revenue streams, rather than just moving old models to the web.”

Filter three: any product or service that Houghton is going to believe in has to feel revolutionary, but also feel comfortable. He gives iPod as one example, or frictionless purchases on Amazon. So any service has to be elegant.

Filter four: Services have to “crush as much distance as possible between the artist and the fan”. ‘Nuff said.

Filter five: These services have to be viral, where “each consumer has to be cheaper to win than the previous one”. And that’s how he thinks MIDEM attendees should judge any new music service or technology that claims to be The Future.

Tags: bruce houghton, hypebot, MIDEM, midemnet

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Digital Music Strategy, midemnet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.