will be all about the subscription.

As it is, everyone is in talks with the bit torrent guy. Torrent it responsible for something like 1/4 of all web traffic today. Looks like this is how it will all pan out: Subscriptions and unlimited downloads.

Why is it that when I start a thread and I come back later to see it buzzing with replies...
All I see is this: (Replace the bus with my thread)



Seriously, not just this article, but everything seems to point to this being the reality, in the very near future. It's just a matter of time before labels become agents and every artist website is branded with some product.

The good thing is that once this model is up and running we'll know what people are really listening to (downloading/sharing). Not just what "sold".

Artist brand will be more important than anything. There's good and bad to this. There are way too many talentless brandable people. That's the downside. The upside is that established artist will be able to bypass the label and deal directly with Pepsi or whoever.

...

Yup, I saw another article about this online (excerpt below). Apple fights with other companies about Propriety and Digital Rights Media, and meanwhile, most online music fans are still sharing mp3s-- there's more activity on file sharing networks than all the online music retailers combined....

Excerpt From Wall Street Journal Online

(http://online.wsj.com/pub...71206.html)



In a Turnabout,
Record Industry
Releases MP3s
By ETHAN SMITH and NICK WINGFIELD
December 6, 2006; Page B1

".....Since the rise of the original Napster in 1999, the music industry has largely blamed the free online trading of MP3 files for a 20% decline in its sales. As a result, it has insisted that when music is sold online by iTunes and others, it be delivered in formats that use special software called digital rights management, or DRM, to prevent copying and redistribution.

But music companies have grown increasingly troubled by Apple's unwillingness to allow music it sells to play on devices from other manufacturers, or to allow music sold on other mainstream sites to work with the market-leading iPod. Music companies worry that those hurdles are holding back legitimate sales of music on the Internet. For instance, cellphone companies this season are rolling out numerous handsets that can play music, but most of them won't play songs purchased from iTunes, cutting off a potentially major new market.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling declined to comment.

For Yahoo, a new mp3 distribution deal with EMI represents another step in a long-running effort by David Goldberg, the vice president and general manager of Yahoo Music, to persuade recording companies to abandon their insistence on antipiracy software. Mr. Goldberg publicly floated the proposal at a music industry conference last February, but initially found few takers.

His reasoning: Antipiracy software on music isn't helping the industry because the same music is already available without copy protection on CDs and through Internet file-sharing programs. What's more, many consumers don't like the limitations that copy protection imposes on how and on which devices they can listen to their music. If DRM benefits anyone, Mr. Goldberg argued, it's technology companies like Apple, because it makes it trickier for consumers that have made hefty purchases of digital music through iTunes to switch to non-Apple music devices in the future.

"It just isn't working," he said. "It's not solving piracy. It's not helping consumers: They view it as a tax."

For music executives, allowing Apple to gain increasing control over digital music sales -- iTunes accounts for more than 90% of the tracks sold online some weeks, according to people who work in the music industry -- is shaping up as the latest in a long series of strategic blunders that have helped create powerful new gatekeepers between them and their customers. (Past middlemen have included radio broadcasters, MTV and big retailers like Best Buy Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Even as digital sales have stalled, peer-to-peer networks that traffic in pirated music -- virtually all of it MP3s that can be played on iPods and other devices -- have much more traffic than all the legitimate retailers put together.

Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne LLC, which tracks peer-to-peer traffic, says more than one billion songs are traded over those networks every month. "It took iTunes several years to reach that particular mile marker," he notes. "The pirate market -- if we considered that a market -- would command better than 90% of the online marketplace."

One online retailer has, in fact, made a healthy business of selling MP3s. Dimensional Associates Inc.'s eMusic has made itself the No. 2 digital music retailer, by units sold, by selling all of its music as unprotected MP3 files. The catch: The company offers only music sold by independent labels, which don't generally have the same stringent policies requiring copy-protection software that major labels do.

Sony BMG, Warner Music Group Corp. and Walt Disney Co.'s Hollywood Records have also made a handful of selections from their catalogs available as MP3s. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG, sold MP3s of a Jessica Simpson song earlier this year, as Hollywood did for Jesse McCartney.

Yahoo, which promoted the sale of MP3 tracks by Ms. Simpson and Mr. McCartney, didn't see "massive, massive" sales of the music, but the results were satisfying, says Mr. Goldberg. He adds that Yahoo is also talking to independent labels about getting their music in the MP3 format and hopes to have a significant catalog of songs by next year....."




...

paligap said:

Thanks. The unavoidable reality is that music is becoming the giveaway and the artist is the brand that product companies will directly align with.
Much of the money will be generated by ad revenue and subscriptions. The one with the larger brand and the most buzz gets the bigger deals.

The scary part of it all, is that in some biz models, the lines of music and all other "buzzworthy" content may begin to blur. What happens when the guy on Youtube that does nothing but make crazy faces, gets more buzz and generates more traffic than a valid artist?