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Business News Week In Five
The music business week in five – Friday 25 Mar 2011
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 25 March 2011
So, last Friday I joined the guys from Music Supported Here to review the results of that previously reported Ten In Ten survey, in which musicians and music business types were asked to predict what the music industry might look like in ten years time. I won’t go into the survey results in detail, because you can check them out for yourself with a rather neat video presentation here.
What was clear from the debate last Friday is that concerns remain in the grass roots music community about file-sharing and the perception that the value of music has slumped in recent years, though there was also agreement that the internet still offered a lot of potential and the outlook for the future was therefore, in the main, positive. The industry needs to sort out the way it licenses digital services, pretty much everyone agreed, though in the meantime artists should seize the agenda themselves by capitalising on the potential of direct-to-fan platforms for engaging and selling to fans.
Which leads me nicely into my weekly Great Escape plug. As you may have seen yesterday, both topics will get some quality consideration at the TGE convention this year – with a panel involving BASCA CEO Patrick Rackow set to get to the nitty gritty of how music companies should really be licensing their content, plus Topspin CEO Ian Rogers and Bandcamp advisor Andrew Dubber joining PRS For Music’s Will Page to discuss all things D2F. And we’ll be continuing the Ten In Ten debate at TGE too, inviting all our delegates to make their prediction about how the music business will look in ten years time.
As always, more about all that at escapegreat.com. Meanwhile, here’s some other stuff that happened in the last seven days in music.
01: BMG put in a new bid for Warner Music. Previously, the German music rights company made a bid for Warner’s publishing business Warner/Chappell, but the US major’s current owners said the offer price wasn’t high enough. According to reports, when BMG subsequently returned with a new offer it was bidding for the whole Warner Music Group, though there has been speculation that if successful it’d actually sell on the Warner record labels, probably to Sony. Warner’s bankers at Goldman Sachs are in talks with at least five parties about them buying some or all of the music major. CMU report | Bloomberg report
02: Citigroup talked to possible EMI bidders, possibly fearing that if it waits too long to sell off the UK-based music major all the serious money will have been spent buying up Warner. Reports this week said that while no official announcement had been made, Citigroup is already in talks with interested parties about them buying some or all of EMI. Many of those interested parties are also bidding for Warner. CMU report | New York Post report
03: George Osborne announced not much about the mail-order VAT dodge. He’d promised to reveal measures to deal with the unfair advantage enjoyed by mail-order operations based on the Channel Islands selling to UK customers – whereby for products under £18 they don’t have to pay VAT – in his Budget speech this week. He did announce he was cutting the threshold for benefiting from the VAT loophole to £15, though that won’t make much difference in the CD and DVD space. Campaigners against the loophole, though, took more heart at his commitment to explore the matter further with the European Commission. CMU report | Telegraph report
04: The DEA judicial review began. TalkTalk and BT have taken the copyright section of the Digital Economy Act to court, arguing it breaches European rules and user rights, and that the measures were not given sufficient scrutiny in parliament. Just as the review began the London School Of Economics published a report saying the DEA got the balance between protecting copyrights and encouraging technological innovation wrong. CMU report | Computing report
05: Apple sued Amazon over the name App Store, which the latter has been using on a site for developers. Amazon is likely to argue any store selling apps should be allowed to call itself an app store. Apple will disagree. Elsewhere in Apple legal news, a court ordered Steve Jobs to testify in a long running anti-trust lawsuit relating to iTunes DRM used back in 2004, even though he is on sick leave. CMU report | CNN report
And that’s your lot. Until the CMU Weekly Podcast this afternoon.
Chris Cooke
Business Editor, CMU
