An online tune-up
Dot-com music biz cheered, deplored at confab
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But optimism about the major labels' debuts in cyberspace was tempered by concerns from execs from indie labels, stand-alone Netcos and pop star Alanis Morissette that the industry's dominance of the Net will stifle competition and shortchange consumers and independent artists.
America Online's resident music guru Kevin Conroy kicked off the two-day conference, hosted in Gotham by new-media research firm Jupiter Media Metrix, with an emphatic statement that AOL's music offerings will be characterized by more variety for consumers, not less.
"The challenge is being able to create scale; to create an environment that reaches lots of people and gives them lots of choices for content," Conroy said. "The same logic and sensibility that AOL has applied to (the Internet) overall, we want to apply to music."
Subscription service
AOL parent AOL Time Warner, along with Bertelsmann and EMI, is backing a subscription-based distribution service, MusicNet, set to bow by the end of summer. Vivendi Universal and Sony support a similar service called Pressplay.
But Morissette, who has been an advocate of artists' rights on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, fretted that the recent consolidation of the online music space will stifle competition and innovation, barring all but the most high-profile, mainstream artists from accessing a vast new music market.
The singer-songwriter called on Congress to intervene on behalf of less-empowered artists, crafting legislation to promote competition in the distribution of music online and ensure that the entrenched powers of the offline business don't corner the market.
"One role of government is to protect citizens from a one-sided result --artistic or otherwise -- of capitalism unchecked," said Morissette, whose work includes one of the biggest selling albums of the 1990s, "Jagged Little Pill."
Other players
On a panel convened to evaluate the labels' nascent efforts in online distribution, record label execs contended that the new services were by no means the only game in town, citing third-party efforts by such companies as FullAudio, RioPort and Liquid Audio, which launched its own secure distribution at the conference.
"We're not the be-all, end-all," said EMI new-media VP Ted Cohen. "MusicNet and Pressplay are good ideas, but they're not the only ones -- the only way we're going to find out what will really work is when it gets out to the music fan."
At stake is the potential to own a piece of a lucrative new market: according to Jupiter Media Metrix research released at Plug.In Monday, the market for music online will swell by 520% to $6.2 billion by 2006 --repping an annual growth rate of 43% for the next five years. Sales of digital music -- i.e. delivered directly to the consumer over the Net -- will reach $1.9 billion over the same period, the firm added.
