Business News Digital Industry People Labels & Publishers

Universal UK chief: Streaming is the future

By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 15 February 2011

Universal Music UK’s top dude, that’s David Joseph for those not paying attention, says he remains optimistic about the future of the music business, and that it will be the musical stream from the cloud in the sky that will turn things round. Man.

Joseph was talking to The Guardian about the state of the music industry ahead of tonight’s big BRITs bash over there under the Greenwich dome. As previously reported, the Universal UK chief is now heading up the BRITs committee, and has played a key role in the relaunch of the awards show and its move east to The O2 complex.

Noting that Joseph had recently admitted that the UK record industry had not been as successful as it would like in breaking new acts in 2010, the paper asked the Universal chief whether there was reason to be upbeat about the future of his industry.

Joseph: “It’s a fall we expected since the retail market was seriously in decline. I think a streaming and subscription model is going to be our future. Streams of music are eclipsing everything. It’s a different digital currency to downloading. You’re dealing there with 175 million single tracks bought a year compared to seven billion streams of music. The revenues are significantly growing and I fundamentally believe that streaming and subscription models with unlimited access on all devices are the future of our business. But will people still listen to albums, or just single tracks, or send playlists to their friends? Answer: all of the above”.

Of course, Joseph’s words echo those of Edgar Bronfman Jr, top man at Warner Music, who last week told his investors something similar. Though, as we know, while streaming music may be the future, that part of the digital music market is still far from stable. Asked about what the closure last week of one such streaming service – the short lived Sky Songs platform from BSkyB – meant for his theory, Joseph added that digital music offers needed to engage music fans to be successful. He continued: “For music services to succeed they have to understand the fan and how artists work, and they need to be well marketed with, in the case of this model, integrated billing”.

And perhaps most interestingly, while Sky had presumably failed to “understand how the fan and the artist worked”, Joseph had some good things to say about their main competitors, Virgin Media. We know Virgin have been trying to get a game changing digital music service off the ground for some time now, with Universal working hand in hand with the internet company. Though their proposals to date have not gone down so well with the other record companies.

But Virgin could still shake things up, Joseph says. He told The Guardian: “We have concluded a deal with Virgin on a thought-leading new service. It’s an exciting proposition and I understand they are currently seeking agreement from the other labels. [Virgin Media CEO] Neil Berkett has led the ISPs in this area”.