Music Ally

Nettwerk Music Group boss Terry McBride kicked off the afternoon session at MidemNet today, talking about what works for him in terms of music monetisation.

“What is the future? Whatever I say is gonna be out of date by the time that I’ve said it…” But he pointed out that the fastest growing piece of music media last year was vinyl. Comeback! Can I get it on BitTorrent? Oh…

But seriously, McBride went on to talk about the “clutter” around digital music – “a teenager’s digital locker was as messy as their bedroom” – they were downloading lots of music, but not using much of it.

McBride suggested that technology to help organise that clutter is important – the idea of Digital Valets, as represented by the new breed of digital services (Spotify, Pandora et al).

What’s more, content isn’t king any more. “Context is king” – i.e. anything that can put that content in context: the digital valets. “In the countries where those services are gaining traction, file-sharing is going down,” said McBride.

“We sit at a time when there’s still a lot of opposition within the music business into allowing this to happen. They’re all focused on how do we make money from it? We’re focused on do subscriptions work? Do ad-funded models work?”

McBride thinks this misses the point – the value is not in the content, but in how it’s used. “How much money will Bing and Google and Facebook pay for that data in a year or two from now? It will be in the tens of millions of dollars.”

So this leads to? A rev-share model. And if the industry doesn’t go with it, the kids will create their own digital valets that aren’t paying any money. And that was that.

Tags: MIDEM, midemnet, terry mcbride

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 2:47 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.