MUMBAI: Perhaps, the way Australians will hear music will change from now on.
After the doom in the record sales industry, labels have been brainstroming to lure music lovers to ‘buy’ music digitally.
Just as people subscribe to pay TV, this would be “pay music”, with Australia’s major music labels including Sony Music, Universal Music, EMI and Warner Music banding together to create a subscription service.
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Sony Music will operate the $9.99-a-month subscription site on www.bandit.fm on behalf of the four major labels, which means customers will have access to potentially hundreds of thousands of tunes. Instead of paying for a single song or downloading an album, consumers will have legal access to a full database of songs – for one monthly payment.
The pay-off for record companies will be the number of people who sign up. The sydney morning herald quoted Sony Music’s Digital & Brand Development Manager saying, “Music is slowly moving into the loungeroom, where people are plugging their iPods into their stereo systems and we’re getting wi-fi televisions soon.”
Experts of the music the industry were quoted as saying, “It’s important not to make it over-complicated. It would have to be fair to the artists, but obviously record companies are there to make money.
They need to think of new models, because the internet ran away from them.” Meanwhile, there are strong chances that Apple may soon start a subscription based service for i-tunes users.
The rise of the subscription model and its viability in the Australian in market will be discussed at the Australasian Music Business Conference, which begins in Sydney this week.
Will the new model work?
As music industry experiments with various models to monetize music, ironically, a research carried out by the University of Hertfordshire on behalf of the music body suggested, ‘despite the recent popularity of music-streaming sites such as Spotify, 78 percent said they wouldn’t pay for a music-streaming service.’ The report also mentioned that nearly two thirds of 14- to 24-year-olds illegally download music over peer-to-peer (p2p) networks. While, 75 percent of teens admitted to sending digital music files by e-mail, Bluetooth, Skype, or MSN to friends and family, and having copied CDs for friends. On an average, there are approximately 8000 tracks on a teenager’s computer.
However, the research highlighted that 85 percent of those surveyed think a music download service that allows unlimited tracks to be obtained for a fixed price is a good idea, while 57 per cent said it would stop them from illegally file-sharing. Just over half also said that artists should charge device manufacturers a fee to enable their tracks to be copied.
