Music for eyeball time
Universal Music are backing a new site which will allow users to download music for free after wading through some adverts. The move seems to me to be largely an admission of failure in the “war against downloading” that the labels have been running; if we can’t make you pay at least look at these ads. It’s unclear whether advertising support is a sustainable business model but with advertisers particularly keen to target the youth sector (who are the main consumers of online music) they’re in with a shot. It does strike me that Universal’s willingness to accept the likely drop in income gives lie to their claims that £12 was the absolute minimum they needed to put bread on the table.
Personally I think this is a pretty horrendous solution to the problem of getting money to artists. Outside of the pop conveyor belt there are still artists with some integrity who aren’t going to be comfortable being associated with certain companies. Just take a look at the horrors of commercial radio to see what happens when music gets too much in hock to advertisers. On the flip side of this, there’s plenty of music being used by advertisers at the minute and no-one seems to be particularly cut up by it. Indeed, it’s not too different to the financial support provided by wealthy patrons in previous centuries. So I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Napster and iTunes will certainly be watching closely.
Via FT.com.
August 30th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
I completely agree that advertisers have an influence over content - newspapers are another good example of this- but I still think this is a good move forward. It means that artists receive money for their music, something that doesnt happen when music is copied “illegally”. Also the internet is large enough to avoid the effects advertisers have over traditional radio, TV and news outlets.
September 5th, 2006 at 5:03 am
Actually, I think this isn’t going to be very good. Just heard the details on BBC news - forced to watch 90 second advert, Windows Media DRM, non-compatible with Ipods, can’t download to CD - this isn’t going to convince people to switch away from illegal downloads.
September 6th, 2006 at 9:49 am
Well it was always going to be DRM encumbered really. You can’t build a business model around advertising if your downloaders then go and give the music to their friends without trying to sell them something.