2 new videos on The Future of Music

Italy's new media mastermind and leading digital marketing guru Robin Good has just published two nice videos with some interesting footage of a conversation with me, during our recent meeting in Rome (June 2009). Some high-lights:

"How can music be like water? Providers will be offering music as a small portion of payments you already make. It may be your hosting provider fee, your e-mail account, or even part of your telephone subscription, but you will have access to an unlimited quantity of music without even noticing.

"There should be a provision for me to pay along with the DSL or the mobile phone subscription. [...] In most contexts, this would be paid for by advertising so [music] would be subsidized [...] like we have now for BlackBerry."

Allowing people to have an "unfettered, unrestricted and unlimited" access to music on the web, may also lead music piracy slow down. Copying and sharing music illegally no longer makes sense when you listen to as much music as you like, without paying for any single song.  Basically it is a model that says that music should be included in the network access, just like music is now included in radio. We do not pay for music when we listen to radio and, of course, television. Similar to that, music should be included when I go on the web. There should be a provision for me to pay along with the DSL or the mobile phone subscription. I would say in most cases, in most contexts, this would be paid for by advertising, so it would be subsidized or by bundled subscriptions, like we have now for BlackBerry. We can see the first couple of models about online music evolving already in:

• Canada: the Canadian songwriters are making proposals for flat rate for ISPs to essentially pay for the music, both by advertising as well as by making my own payments.
• It is already happening with Google in China: Google is paying for the music, and all Chinese that use the Google search engine get free music downloads and streams for free.

These models make a lot of sense, because the future of music, in my view, is basically an unfettered, unlimited, unrestricted access on a revenue-sharing basis, so that we go away from the climate of having a certain file format or a certain price or a certain way of delivery and we can open up the ecosystem. I think that is true, in general for all future of media: we are moving to an open platform, a connective platform, a revenue-sharing platform. Basically an ecosystem of how the money flows rather than monopolies of how the money flows, which is what we had so far..."