Nokia “Comes With Music”

Credit to Nokia for walking where others are only talking. We all know that music buying is a broken system. We’ve all heard the solutions on offer: suing the bastards in one country, threatening Internet connection cut-off in another, and claiming that advertising will pick up the slack wherever pundits draw breath. Nokia has decided to fight free with free and “give” the music away. Thursday night, after months of speculation, Comes With Music was unveiled at the glamorous Koko Club in London.

Comes With Music is a one year subscription that ties unlimited free music to a variety of Nokia phones. The flagship model is the 5800, a touch-screen model that will be endlessly compared to the iPhone. Subscribers to the service can download music to their heart’s content and at the end of the year keep it. The four majors are licensing their material as well as many of the major indies, so breadth and depth isn’t going to be an issue. But there are limits: the files are WMA not MP3 and have DRM - just as all the labels have dropped it. It will only play on the mobile phone or a PC. To burn tracks to a CD requires buying an additional license. Of course, Apple have a similar walled eco-system but also have the advantage of being a very smart niche manufacturer with one of the world’s best industrial designers and a flawless marketing philosophy. Nokia, on the other hand, is the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer and doesn’t have either a great designer or marketing. Personally, I don’t buy from iTunes because of the limitations and I won’t be subscribing to Comes With Music for the same reason. But I support the fact that Nokia, with their massive global scale, is attempting a solution that gives the audience what they clearly want while enabling musicians to get paid.

Let’s Talk About Sex
Have you noticed how iPhone owners like to put their phone on the table? How they like to fondle it? I haven’t seen such phone-envy since the late 80s in Hong Kong, when the background sound in every location was the clunk of mobiles hitting the tabletop so everyone could marvel at the clunkee. But to me the really innovative design is at Sony-Ericsson; some of the Walkman phones are the best industrial design of the last three years. Against this, the Nokia 5800 looks ordinary. I won’t be clunking it on the table.

But as the great scientist Richard Feynman said, “What do you care what other people think?” Because after 15 minutes playing with the 5800 I was in love. Smaller than the iPhone, it was designed to be operated with one hand. Finally, the music system, from download to playing, is simple and intuitive. It can play movies. It supports both keyboard typing and handwriting. It will record video up to the limit of the memory. Like the iPhone, it’s essentially a PDA that makes phone calls – with the added advantage that you can put your four most frequent contacts into a bar on the home page, allowing instant phone calls, texting or email. It also has very good stereo speakers, which I dread having to suffer from chavs on the Underground.

Will.I.Am – Visionary

Although Nokia marketing isn’t flawless, they pulled the excellent stunt of bringing Will.I.Am on stage. Like all music stars, he started talking as though he had nothing planned, stopping in mid-sentence as though words were strangers to his mouth. But consider what he said: that the four minute song is a function of the technology it served, the vinyl disc and the CD. Since the Internet is infinite, what is an album nowadays? “Is a song four minutes any more? I don’t think so.”

He threw up his web site for the song “Yes We Can”, written earlier this year for Barack Obama specifically for the Internet. After it was released he invited the world to make and upload their own version. He clicked to the resulting page, two portraits of him and Obama, but made up of everyone’s contributions, so that as the cursor passed over each face individual contributions blew up and became the lead audio version.

So, he reasoned. If you can do that, why can’t you treat a song the same way? At a certain point, there might be a link into another piece of music, or when it’s played in a club the dancers could take a photo of themselves and upload it into the track, so their image becomes part of the song. This, he said, was what Black Eyed Peas were grappling with as they record their new album here in London – redefining the song.

In parting, he said that the Obama song was given away on the Net because not everything is about money. “You’re supposed to make change with music.” Let’s see if Comes With Music achieves that.

Will.i.am with job description

Channel 4 Executives Split Over Future Of Digital Radio

When I wrote on the future of the music business for The Word, I wasn’t expecting how fast some of the predictions would become reality. It was clear that digital radio was in for a rough ride, but events are snowballing. Since January Virgin Radio and GCap Media have both pulled the plug on some or all of their digital stations. In today’s Guardian it is announced that Channel 4 executives are effectively split over the broadcaster's digital radio venture and whether to invest further.

The UK government is committed to switching off analogue radio within a few years, but the public isn’t buying into it. Nor, it seems, are private investors.

The Guardian, 4 March: Digital radio rift at Channel 4

We Have Seen The Future Of Rock And Roll…And It’s Complicated

At the end of last year I was asked by The Word magazine to write a feature on what the future of music and its experiences are likely to be. Specifically, to look at emerging trends and extrapolate 2 – 3 years forward. What's emerging is best summed up by the title the editor chose: “We Have Seen The Future Of Rock And Roll…And It’s Complicated”.

We all know that revolt and disorder are rocking the business. What’s fascinating is the breadth of imagination being applied to the problems. Whether they can be applied fast enough, we'll soon know. In the short time since publication, my predictions are becoming fact with growing frequency.

The full article can be read here.

Here is a summary:

Introduction
Who’s going to pay for free music? Canadian musicians are proposing a $5 monthly levy on every Internet and wireless account. Many companies are relying on advertisers: We 7 gives away music with an ad attached. iMeem and Last.fm try to build audiences of millions so that advertising volume will pay the bills.

But why pay for a banner ad if you can be a patron of the arts? That’s Nokia’s approach (they invented the ringtone after all) with their new Comes With Music service.

Are these the new ways to do business? Nobody really knows because this is a brand new game. But when even the squares on Wall Street have figured it out and publicly downgrade a music label’s share value, the problem is very serious.

If the music labels can embrace convenience and customer behaviour and learn to capitalise on the new ways people experience music, then the next few years could be an open frontier seldom seen since the late ‘60s. Screw it up, though, and it’s possible that within two or three years the multinational owners of the major labels will break them up and parcel them off to anyone with a taste for adventure.

Music Labels
The 360 deal, as executed by Madonna: many executives think it’s the way forward for the business, though Jessica Koravas, European Manager for AEG, owners of The O2, says, “I expect there will be some spectacular failures as some players discover that the other guy's job is harder than it looks.” It’s not even a new model. Motown was a prime example of an independent record company aligned with Jobete publishing and organizing the Motown Revue tours. But the 360 Deal looks modern and sexy.

To those not seduced by big advances and the myths in rap videos, it’s possible to conduct a career outside the music label system. The artist-as-business-unit tends to favour intelligent, arty “legacy bands” such as Gang of Four. Their bassist Dave Allen blogs regularly and in November published an intriguing manifesto which can be summed up as: make it cheap, make it quick, post MP3s as music gets rehearsed and recorded, enrol the most rabid fans as marketing agents, partner only with an indie label. Gang of Four’s activities invoke the experimental punk spirit that created them.

In 2008, expect to see music labels be simultaneously quite pig-headed and embrace the new reality. Though the shouting will continue over the necessity of DRM it will probably disappear. How to monetise the anarchy of p2p has been an ongoing backroom exploration for most of last year and it’s highly possible that a license service will become reality this year, with music downloaders paying a monthly subscription to legalise their ongoing file sharing activities.

Live Performance
While Prince got the publicity for selling his album to The Mail On Sunday (who chose to give it away) the real innovation was doing a 21-night tour in one location.

The appetite to see famous bands that quit before you were born just can’t be sated. CD reissue programmes have made everyone contemporary and there is no such thing as a forgotten group – even Shed Seven can reform for a tour. To keep things lively, one of the band members will dissect the tour on his blog.

As managers learn there is money to be made from controlling their band’s online and mobile concert activities, the activity increases between fan, band and show. At the recent O2 Keane show, ticket holders were asked beforehand to sign up for band content and could then stream or download videos from the show afterwards. There were 30,000 downloads.

In 2008, it’s a certainty that other major artists will announce a residency at places like The O2. If all the greedy parts in the payment chain can agree, you will be able to buy the tickets via mobile phone.

As artists finally accept that there is an unending appetite for live recordings that audience members are happy to provide, there will be a growth in “official” concert recordings. (Do you want your live experience enshrined as a shaky mobile phone video on YouTube when you can easily provide an HD version with stereo sound?)

Mobile and Internet
After years of promises, the Internet is finally moving to the mobile phone and that will mean big changes for music. By 2010 it’s estimated there will be 4 billion mobiles in the world, dwarfing the number of computers. There’s no official news, but rumours continue that Google is developing a gPhone, betting their business can grow just as big.

Phones like the gPhone, iPhone and some Nokias use wi-fi for Internet connection. It means music and videos can download faster than on 3G and the evangelists say that soon not just mobile music and video downloads will be common, but Internet radio, live concert TV and on-demand videos. The only downside is the cost of all that data. Mobile operators hate low charges.

2008 is a transition year. The iPhone’s functionality and originality has made a big impact. By year-end expect to see more mobiles being sold as media players that also make phone calls. Nokia will try to become your indispensable mobile assistant, storing Facebook profile, interactive contact list, photo books, maps and music in one place for easy access. Comes With Music won’t be a big success but Tesco Music might. The country’s biggest supermarket has quietly become a very successful mobile network. They dominate physical music sales, so why not move it online and onto your mobile?

Radio
The UK government wants us to switch from FM to digital radio. We don’t care. Even the biggest digital-only station has only 3% of the nation listening and the City boys bankrolling the digital radio expansion are starting to pull the plugs, with Virgin already slashing its digital-only stations. Instead, we’re listening to radio on the Net. Six of the Top Ten iTunes podcasts are regular BBC shows.

A further problem is commercial radio’s seeming inability to compete or collaborate with companies building Internet broadcast empires. They’re fixated on competing with the BBC, beholden to shareholders who want them to consolidate into two or three consortiums. There’s even the launch this year of C4 radio, a public broadcast competitor to the BBC.

The big issue for radio is to work out whether it’s in the content business or the delivery business. Radio needs to concentrate on reaching audiences in the ways they want to be reached, not in the ways it wants to reach them.

Digital radio will continue to suffer and the government may have to review and revise their digital radio strategy. Meanwhile, Internet radio keeps growing.