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Thanks to those nice people at Zest I spent yesterday evening at an interesting seminar organised by Music Tank – a London music industry body ran by the Uni of Westminster. Some interesting attendees and discussion. Didn’t change my world but it’s useful to hear what’s hot (and not). Sadly it feels like the music industry, correction the Majors are heading down the same road they went down when the internet started, namely NoIdea Avenue. The only difference with the mobile internet is that that P2P distributed privacy is not going to happen for some time as mobile data costs are too high and the labels have two new friends(and foes) in their ecosystem – mobile operators and handset manufacturers. I just feel sorry for the artists and the fans.

Omnifone (MusicStation) got a lot of mentions – mobile music subscription with content from major labels and some indies (Beggers). Some details below having done a bit of digging

• It’s another DRM music store. Great, that’s just what this world and consumers really need
• Tracks you download will not incur data charges (which is good I guess)
• Subscribers will pay £2.99 euros weekly and the service will be pre-installed on operators’ handsets
• Claims to have over 30 operator deals worldwide.
• Launching in the UK with Vodafone pre-installed on selected number of new phones and the app made available to download for existing vodafone subscribers
• Musiwave providing the mobile backend It’s DRM. Challenge is, how will they sell it?

Some quotes, stats & links

• Twilight WAP is one of the UK’s biggest WAP sites…I’d never heard of it
• Last Qtr 07 – MusicWave reported that full track download revenue > than ringtones for the first time.
• 13.4% of tracks on mobile users side loaded tracks on to their device (seems v high to me)
• 5% of OASIS SMS subscribers who received a text about the new album went on to buy the album (how did they measure this?)
• Fans happy to give mobile details – trick is to offer a mobile carrot e.g. exclusive content or tone or image?
• “Bluecasting works but do it at pinch points e.g. queue. Not in the main stadium as no one can hear their phone bleep!
• Most operators now source mobile and desktop content via one or two aggregators. But no single aggregator dominating platform or territory
• Indies only receive 10-30p of a mobile track that retails at 1.50 (according to Richard Wheeler from Beggers)
• Future mobile ‘biz models’ may involve
• content for contact details (transaction may not be just about selling the song)
• content may be free to the user but someone is paying through sponsorship e.g. brand X buys 20K tracks wholesale and gives them away to consumers via mobile.
• Total Music (Universal/ US) – get hardware makers or cell carriers to absorb the cost of a roughly $5-per-month subscription fee so consumers get a device with all-you-can-eat music that’s essentially free. Music companies would collect the subscription fee, while hardware makers theoretically would move many more players…But more DRM me thinks.
• We like Alfie from moblog – sensible comment and opinion
• Indie Mobile - company helping small labels do stuff on mobile