Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders
Future of Recorded Music Business
Podcast Audio | Posted by Phil Leigh on September 29, 2008
If you would like to learn how the recorded music business will be generating revenue growth in the future, this interview is for you.
Our guest today is Greg Scholl who is the CEO of The Orchard which is a publicly-owned distributor of music for independent record labels, including one that it owns named TVT. The company also distributes over 3,000 hours of video and TV shows for clients who are the rights holders. Most of the files are distributed digitally to stores like iTunes, Amazon.com, and eMusic. The Orchard recently agreed to participate with the major record labels in an initiative from MySpace that will provide advertising-supported streams of music on-demand. The new music.myspace.com page will enable visitors to choose the songs they want and listen to them for free. The experience will be much like the subscriptions services of Rhapsody and Napster, except that there will be no charge for the MySpace variation when consumers are listening at their computers. Individuals wishing to buy any of the tracks (e.g. to put on their iPods) will be directed to online stores such as Amazon.com.
Gregg believes that such advertising-supported businesses will ultimately become the major source of revenues for the recorded music business. Recently the music publishers and the record labels came to an agreement that will enable such businesses to pay royalties as a percent of revenue generated as opposed requiring a fixed fee per stream.
In our analysis, advertising-supported websites may eventually replace radio as the primary means for popularizing new releases for two reasons. First, radio is losing audience to the Internet. Second, such websites can take advantage of the social media aspects of the Net that enable friends to share music thereby spreading the popularity to the tracks they choose to share.
Categories: Podcast Audio
Tags: Amazon.com, Apple, digital media, digital music, Internet video, iPod, iTunes, MySpace, record labels, Recorded Music, The Orchard
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