Music Tank Conference

Recently I attended an all-day conference held by the London based Music Tank, an organisation trying to move the British music industry into the modern world.

The basis of the event was a report called ‘Beyond The Soundbyte’, written by manager Peter Jenner. In it, he addresses all the problems besetting the music industry (you know what they are) and doesn’t propose solutions so much as lay out alternative ideas – some of them quite radical. You can download a copy from the Music Tank site and I recommend it to anyone trying to figure out how to make a business in music right now.

The event was sometimes insightful and frequently depressing. Depressing because so few people seemed to realise how radically the music buying audience has changed; because the music label people had such a narrow view of what could constitute their business; because I could see that the microscopic inching being done was going to go on for quite a bit longer. An outsider from a mobile phone company likened it to a meeting of Antiquarian Booksellers – people passionate about the art they handled and the business they conducted, but who wished the world hadn’t changed.

I’m going to pick up some of the themes in different postings, so in this blog will give you some of the more interesting comments and quotes.

Michael Bayler from Rights Marketing Company, who analyses social networks and tribal behaviour in popular culture, said that these days the music industry is in the attention business and that success relied on stepping back, observing audience behaviour, and then addressing it. In other words – you no longer have control.

Mark Selby, global Head of Multimedia at Nokia, had an interesting story about an unnamed band who discovered there was lots of their video material on YouTube, which had collectively been viewed several million times. Their immediate response was to have it taken down, until someone pointed out that the annual hosting cost for what was in effect free promotion was about $85,000. At which point they started planning how to put more material on the site.

He also said that the most popular ringtones on UK mobile operator 3’s portal were self-made tones of burps and farts! To which one wag quipped, “Is it copyrighted?” I had to ask, “Is the second burp-tone a cover version of the first one?”

Musician Billy Bragg proved very articulate and interesting. Talking about how MySpace allowed him to get “incredibly close” to his audience he said to the label guys, “You’re a service industry for me. I relied on you to get my records into Melbourne, LA, Tokyo. More importantly, I relied on you to collect my royalties. Now, I don’t need you.”

Much discussion about the need to collaborate with outside forces that effect the industry. It was pointed out that the UK ISPs could be meeting across the street about the problem of music on their networks and no-one in the room would have any idea it was going on. Too much music business was “either/or” and it needs to become “and/and”.

[How refreshing to hear that one! A few years ago I was developing Interactive TV services for Cable & Wireless. Every industry I talked to was eager to tell me how their business worked and what their business model was, so that we could work out how to make money together. Until I spoke to a music company. Asked to explain their business model, they immediately said, ‘why?’ and refused to listen.]

Gerd Leonhard, author of the book “The Future of Music”, was in the same area as Mike Bayler, saying that the music labels need to be in the “monetisation of attention” and that current copyright laws don’t address this. “Copyright is treated as a function of ownership, when actually it’s a function of sharing.”

(Invariably, lots of discussion about copyright and rights, which I will cover separately. A lot of it was hopeful, some of it was frankly unbelievable.)

Said Gerd, “The old way has to come to an end. We have to make money from the whole group of revenue streams. We have to protect the artist as a brand.”