tunesBag enables you to access your own music anywhere and anytime. Stream to your workplace, mobile or HDTV.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Future of Online Music - Industry Players Discuss

A few days ago, an interesting posting about the future of Online Music was published on ReadWriteWeb. Dalton Caldwell (Imeem), Lucas Gonze (WebJay/Yahoo) and Rob Williams (RealNetworks) were discussing about the Business Models, Developer Platforms, DRM and the ongoing battles with the labels.

The major points / conclusions raised in the discussion from my perspective
  • Online music can't live without social/community features
  • The user experience is not as good as it should be
  • API/Developer platforms are keys to success
  • Ad supported business models are the future but still seen with a lot of skepticism in the industry
    360° deals are the future for artists (monetize the music in a lot of ways, e.g. live shows, TV, film music, advertisments, ...)
  • DRM is dead (although still seen on some services)

5 comments:

Andreas said...

and i have another idea

"simple payment systems young people can use are still missing"

Hansjoerg @ tunesBag said...

those micropayment-things are always nasty, I'm not sure if there is a good solution at all ...

Lacy Kemp said...

What about something like PayPal? Would that be easier?

Andreas said...

for young people - lets say 15 years - paypal aint the simpliest thing to use - and i am not talking about the usage of credit cards

mobile payment would be the solution - but this will never happen - prepaid micropayment via facebook or google or whoever (maybe even paypal) maybe the solution

Hansjoerg @ tunesBag said...

paypal could do that but what I've heard they really put all their efforts in keeping the current status and they will not invent new features in the near future.

mobile payment would be nice but with all these micropayment systems the high transaction administration costs are real show-stoppers. With very small amounts, these costs can go up to 40%!

I agree to Andreas that Google / FB might introduce an interesting product in the future.