Jazz Odyssey

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The New York Times reports on a major policy shift for Universal who will begin charging fees to cable TV and Internet services that provide video on demand. Universal becomes the first of the majors to take this anticipated step, but expect the other majors to take similar action and avoid the "MTV mistake" (a term used by many to describe the decision many years ago to provide music videos to MTV at no charge).

This is a huge development that will drastically change the nature of the relationship between labels and media providers. There is very big money at stake here, with a variety of economic models that can be applied to how the pie gets sliced up….will there be a flat fee per music video? Will labels look for a portion of ad revenue from these sites? What impact will this have on pricing decisions regarding the sale of downloadable music videos?

Stay tuned for a lot more on this, but in the meantime, read the article….