The music biz has decided to implement a new, global system for licensing digital music.
The industry has long known that the fragmented, country-based system of licensing has made it very difficult for startup music services. Each service has to agree a separate licence for each territory — a process costly and complex enough to inhibit the growth of the market. Amazon, for instance, only sells in a handful of countries, three years after it launched.
The industry’s main players — the major record companies, rights bodies and existing digital music retailers, notably Apple — have commissioned Deloitte to setup setup a Global Repertoire Database (GRD).
Deloitte hopes to have the GRD fully functional within 18 months to two years.
However change has only come after the European Commission threatened to take action over EU-wide licensing.
“As an industry there have been many false dawns over the years but at last we seem to have woken up to the fact that we have to change,” Neil Gaffney, executive vice president at EMI Music Publishing UK told Reuters.
The decision to build the GRD shows that the industry is beginning to realise that illicit downloading cannot alone be blamed for the decline in music sales. The industry also has structural and cultural baggage that it needs to ditch. Just last week two major record companies, Universal and Sony, announced that they would no longer be releasing singles to radio weeks before they go on sale. Instead, new records will be “on air, on sale” simultaneously.
“Wait is not a word in the vocabulary of the current generation. It’s out of date to think that you can build up demand for a song by playing it for several weeks on radio in advance,” said David Joseph, the chief executive of Universal Music.
“What we were finding under the old system was the searches for songs on Google or iTunes were peaking two weeks before they actually became available to buy, meaning that the public was bored of — or had already pirated — new singles.”
There is no word on whether either change will bring down the price of downloads, which still compare unfavourably with physical media.
