Music Ally

Now the dust has settled from MidemNet and MIDEM, we thought we’d round up all our coverage from the show in one post. Read on for a reminder of the news and liveblogs we posted from the conference.

NEWS
Pharrell Williams: Illegal downloading is ‘just taste-testing’
Spotify: 250k paying subscribers and a ‘double-digit million Euro’ ad business
Vodafone reveals 450k music subscription customers
Labels criticise unlimited downloads business models
YouTube now monetising 1bn+ videos a week through ads
Shazam now selling 300,000 track downloads a day

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At a MIDEM session this morning, Coca-Cola’s Emmanuel Seuge gave an interesting insight into the process of choosing the music for its upcoming World Cup campaign, saying that it was about as far from the old model of licensing a track from a label as you can get.

“The people we talked to the longest and the most strategic were the artists,” he said. “Choosing the right music was important.”

What happened was this: Coca-Cola figured out what it was looking to achieve from the campaign, as well as the key values it should represent. Then it threw that out to music firms – labels, music agencies, artists, producers and managers – in what was effectively a pitching process.

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There might be discussion around the viability of YouTube’s ad-supported business model in the music industry, but the company’s director of video partnerships Patrick Walker tried to dispel them in yesterday’s closing session at MidemNet, where he shared the stage with Spotify’s Daniel Ek.

“Now we’re monetising over a billion videos per week,” said Walker, who also claimed that 75 of the world’s top 100 advertisers ran campaigns on YouTube last year, and that the site signed 500 new partners during 2009.

Walker also said that YouTube is generating CPMs of between £15 and £30 in the UK for pre-roll ads on the site.

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Getty Images CEO Jonathan Klein had a blunt message for the music industry in his on-stage interview at MidemNet yesterday: don’t try to fight technological progress.

“Don’t stand in the way of technology, and in the way of what the customer wants,” he said, claiming that when Getty Images launched, its industry was facing as frightening advances and business model disruption as the music industry has been.

Klein said Getty chose to embrace them. “We were the first people in the world to sell an image online,” he said, before suggesting that a more hands-off approach to licensing and content ownership might benefit labels.

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Is the advertising industry ready to get behind ad-supported music downloads? You might think so, with news that FreeAllMusic is striking deals with major labels, while Guvera is raising a $20 million funding round.

However, David Jones is CEO of Havas Worldwide and Euro RSCG Worldwide – one of the most powerful advertising industry bosses in the world – and he’s decidedly unconvinced, judging by his comments at MidemNet on Sunday.

“I don’t believe the interruption models will work. The models about ‘if you watch our commercial, we’ll give you music for free’ will fail. That’s the model from thirty years ago… Today you’re in an engagement model.”

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Ted Mico from Interscope / Geffen / A&M says mobile apps offer a host of possibilities for the music industry, but only when done well. “Great apps are like babies,” he said. “Very easy to conceive, but very hard to deliver…”

He was speaking on a panel session devoted to mobile apps this afternoon. Mico highlighted the fact that artists have to be prepared to genuinely support their apps, rather than simply launching and then forgetting about them.

“The content has to be immediate and authentic, not some canned EPK content – if you’re not prepared to do the work, you’re not going to get the results,” he said. “The artists who are willing to do that are going to prosper… At the moment, the evidence is stacking up in favour of doing the extra work.”

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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.

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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.

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Hal Ritson from the Young Punx gave a punchy assessment of how artists should be using social media to connect with their fans at MidemNet today. The key lesson: they have to truly embrace it.

“You have to do it passionately and personally,” he said. “People are interested in the artists, not in somebody from the marketing department.”

For Young Punx, this includes podcasts that regularly get 10,000 listeners, and which have become one of the key ways the band’s music gets discovered around the world.

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Just that. Outstanding.