Moderator: Tim Bradshaw, digital media correspondent, Financial Times.
Atan Burrows – mflow, Marie-Alicia Chang – MusicMetric, Clive Gardiner – We7, Steve Jelley – Videojuicer and Plushmusic.tv, Simon Scott – Push Entertainment Ltd.
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Tim – “Are there untapped ways to make money from your audience?”
Steve J – “Our audience wants to pay for the best live performances that they can’t attend. Classical is a niche audience, but it is a passionate audience.”
Atan B - “The new benchmark is that anyone can listen to anything for free. The value they really place on music is sharing it with other people, and discovering from other people.”
Clive G – “As we have gone further into the mainstream market we have been surprised just how much help people need. Too much choice can overwhelm. The music industry is pushing hard towards subscriptions but there is a disconnect between what the industry is allowing and what people are prepared to pay for. Our average listener listens to 20 tracks per month.”
Tim – “The music industry giving away videos was perhaps the biggest mistake it ever made”.
Marie-Alicia – “The video enhances profile, but does little for revenue. Artists like Lady GaGa have got large followings on twitter and facebook, but they are not so large on services like Last.Fm. Young people like to connect and share the passion about an artist, and indeed connect with the artist themselves. It is difficult to determine how this effects revenue – but it can only have a positive influence on sales.”
Alan B – “A lot of things are broken. I hear a great new record. I look it up, but I can’t find it, so I listen to it on youtube and rip it from a blog”
Simon S – “You can’t release at that point. If you are a fan, you do get high conversion rates – this is fundamental.”
Clive G – “A year ago we were able to play a new Rihanna single at exactly the same time as its 1st play on Radio 1. We thought radio windows would disappear. But no it was a one-off. In the digital age windows are redundant. If you don’t give it to them legally, any computer literate person can find what they want and rip it or go to P2P.”
Marie-Alicia – “More people are interested in real-time entertainment and purchasing there and then”.
Steve J – “Tip jar might work, but it only works in the context of merchandise.”
Tim – “What is the average spend of a fan?”
Simon S - “120/130 pounds per fan per year through albums, tickets and merchandise. 1000 will get you going. 10,000 – you have a sustainable business model.”
Simon S – “The industry is not an environment where you ask ‘who bought our album, let’s make them buy again’. It’s all about hype marketing.”
Tim – “You (We7) potentially know a lot about what users are doing.”
Clive G – “We actively share data with rights holder to help them understand our customer behaviour. We are the only ad-funded service to send data daily to the Official Chart Company (OCC). Not enough analysis is being done of this data by labels who still focus too much on potential cannibalization of sales. Our Real data shows an album can be streamed ahead of release and not impact week 1 sales. Another can be held back from streaming and still flop. If streaming is today’s radio and radio exposure leads to sales, why do majors treat streaming differently to radio?”