Oct 31, 2004
Music’s brighter future
In September, according to comScore Media Metrix, 10m American internet users visited four paid online-music services. The same month another 20m visited file-sharing networks. The majors watch what is being downloaded on these networks, although they do not like to talk about it for fear of undermining their legal campaign. Online music might truly take off if the majors were to make a truce with the file-sharing networks. The gulf between the two worlds has narrowed now that the industry sells its product online and allows customers to share music using digital-rights management. As for the file-sharing networks, “the other side is more willing to talk and less adversarial,” says an executive at one of the majors in Los Angeles. Music industry executives say that Shawn Fanning, founder of Napster, the first file-sharing network, is working out how to attach prices to tracks downloaded from such services, with a new venture called “Snocap”. Mr Fanning tried to make the original Napster legal back in 2001, but the music industry decided instead to sue it out of existence. Sam Yagan, boss of eDonkey, currently the most popular file-sharing network, says he had meetings with three of the four major labels last summer about how his network could start selling their music alongside free content. As IE Music’s experiment shows, that is not an impossible dream. Music executives may not have the confidence yet to make a deal with their arch-enemies. But eventually they have to get bolder. It seems clear that the only way for the majors to stay on top of the music industry into the next decade is to take more risks—both technological and creative—than they have done for a long time.