The first panel had some ominous warnings for the format players…the interoperability problem has to be solved now, or it might kill the nascent legitimate music market. John Rose of EMI Music said: I am worried about that guy who bought $30,000 worth of singles from Apple and then falls in love with some other MP3 music player…what will happen to him if he wants to transfer it.
Now to the panel coverage:
John Rose, EMI Music US: Availability of catalog: At this point 99 plus percent is available to the music services…the problem we are facing is how to make our catalog available across all channels, such as say TrueTones…but master recording right are available for anything…
Oliver Sichel, Wanadoo France: we just launched a service where people can download a song and get it billed on their Wanadoo bill.
Sean Ryan, RealNetworks: we have a seen a tripling of subscribers in the last 6 months…what’s fuelling this: it is somewhat about crackdown on piracy, some of it is the awareness, and then the trends like broadband…
Kent Thexton, mmO2, UK: The great thing about mobile is that they pay for everything… we are expanding that product line, in terms of true tones and ringback tones (soon). Once the technology is there, the demand for downloadable music on mobiles is three times more that a camera phone, according to our research…
John: Digital music right now is like early days of TV: it was radio with pictures…
Charles Grimsdale, OD2: The European market is complicated: two key problems: first is people’s ability to pay…we support 13 different payment methods…if you want to et Danish consumers, you have to support DanCourt…in Belgium we support Belgcom, the telecom there…massively complicated landscape.
Second barrier: it is incredibly complicated to manage cross-territory label dates: people want to preserve the release horizons…in reality, we don’t have one catalog…we have seven different catalogs…maybe all of that will change, I hope it does. Top 100 downloads account for 10 percent of the overall volume
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