Jazz Odyssey

There are two key themes that define this year’s Music 2.0 Conference:

1. Folks are bullish on the full track mobile music business, with a la carte and subscription business models under consideration.
2. DRM is being more loudly questioned and decried, most notably by Yahoo Music chief David Goldberg during his keynote speech this afternoon.

The speeches and panels given to a crowd filled with a lot of new faces at this conference were generally well done–a wide variety of music, technology and service companies were represented by informed panelists. Ted Casey who heads up the music division at Verizon Wireless delivered the opening keynote, presenting a vision of the mobile music experience that he described as being not only entertainment, but a vehicle for self-expression and as well as a platform to connect with others. After the keynote, I participated in the first panel, which discussed various business models for mobile music. This was followed by the obligatory file-sharing debate panel (which if you are a major label guy is sort of like being the mole in a game of Whack-a-Mole with both audience and panelists wielding the mallets). It was during this panel that Fred von Lohmann from the EFF called for an “experiment”–a major label(s) should release a project in MP3 format with no DRM restrictions whatsoever. That was certainly a crowd pleaser, but Goldberg’s call to set aside DRM met with enthusiastic applause, and set tongues wagging.

It’s trite and dishonest to dismiss these speeches as grandstanding…Fred and David may have stirred the pot which thrilled some and made others uneasy, but it catalyzed important conversations. Reality check #1: with the lack of interoperability holding this business back and a legacy business structure that makes a radical change nearly impossible, the labels are between a rock and a hard place. Reality check #2: the existing situation also feeds the P2P monster, while Steve Jobs laughs all the way to the bank.

Fred and David gave varying suggestions of an all-you-can-eat music subscription-type model where non-DRM’d music files in a variety of formats that are playable on a wide array of devices are allowed to circulate for a flat monthly fee, with usage monitored by rights collections societies to ensure that artists, labels and other rights-holders in the food chain are properly paid. They also suggested that experiments that test these ideas need to happen quickly.

Put aside for the moment that neither Fred or David assume any risk in an experiment of this model because while that is true on the surface, its relevance is questionable as there is nothing for either of them to gain by the failure of such an experiment, and there is upside for both of them if it succeeds. The crux of the issue is the music industry’s inability to suddenly and radically reinvent itself with a new set of business rules–a daunting if not impossible challenge for any industry.

Debate on changing the model will continue to rage. That said, regardless of the arguments as to how it should be done, I’m reasonably certain that most parties involved in this business would agree that the optimal situation is replication in the digital and mobile music spaces of the current music buying experience: you can buy any given CD from any given retailer and then play it on any given CD player. And the pressure to get to that point quickly in the digital and mobile music space is at an all-time high.