MusicTank

You have come to this page in order to take advantage of the discounted multiple ticket offer.  Purchasing this ticket will give you discounted access to this series of four seminars.  Please note that only one e-mail confirmation is issued for this four-date booking.  The dates are:

21 Oct - Here We Are Now, Entertain Us | 4 Nov - We Have The Technology, What's The Solution? |18 Nov - Coalition Of The Billing | 2 Dec - Squaring The Circle

TOPIC:

Illegally downloaded any music recently?  Given that nearly two thirds of all internet traffic is made up of P2P activity these days, if you haven't, then most young people you know are.  Since Napster first reared its head in the late nineties, the recorded music business has tried in vain to put the genie back in the bottle.  The result - some pr blunders and an estimated 20:1 illegal/legal download rate.

For music fans it’s been a golden age where hard to find and out of print releases have been readily available alongside the latest hits of the day, but with no way of monetising these streams the record labels have been forced to watch their profits dwindle while the world’s been moving online.

The UK government has taken notice and is overseeing a three-pronged initiative aimed at educating and developing awareness, dealing with the most serious infringers and facilitating legitimate offerings. 

This series will focus on that third prong: effective legitimate alternatives.  Over the course of the four events we will review what people want, where technology is heading, what the most plausible new models are and how they might be licensed.

PROGRAMME

Speakers for these sessions to be announced shortly...

Think Tank 1 – Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

Tue 21 Oct

Kicking off the series, we take a long hard look at what music consumers actually want and how this tallies with the status quo and raft of new services in various stages of development or launch.  Will we see monolithic music portals dispensing entertainment with all the charm of a Wal-Mart, or will they incorporate some of the sharing and word-of-mouth qualities that the internet does so well?  Will each ISP run its own service or will there be several operations each serving their own niche communities?  Which models are likely to be most compelling and hence fly with music fans?  And finally, what of the companies who have spent several years and fortunes building up legal download services - how can they adapt to a world where music is bundled to the consumer in a feels-like-free way? 

Think Tank 2 – We Have The Technology, What’s The Solution?

Tue 4 Nov

How can technology enable licensed services to develop some of the functionality of existing unlicensed sites? How reliably can we sample and identify internet traffic for managing tracking and payments?  Is this only possible within a walled-garden system, or is the technology available to monitor all traffic for accounting purposes? How might this sit with the notoriously privacy minded torrent communities? What are the benefits and pitfalls of using deep packet inspection and can this work for encrypted content? Is copyright filtering on a network level desirable or possible?

Are there more creative, compelling or enduring models out there? What can we learn from some of the more advanced licensed P2P platforms such as Korea’s Soribada?  What about licensing the end user or the access point, à la Noank, rather than the delivery platform?  Might this enable music fans to continue to with their consumption habits and trusted filters in a way that better utilises the internet’s potential? 

How does the blue-sky models square with the needs of ISPs and device manufacturers?  What kind of ISP might be interested in developing content services anyway? And would they look to do so themselves or rather to provide a platform for third parties?  And how many kids are right now in their bedrooms cooking up new ideas that will do to P2P what Napster did to the traditional business? Can we develop more futureproofed solutions or are we forever doomed to play catch up?

Think Tank 3 – Coalition of the Billing

Tue 18 Nov

What’s the best way to license these new services?  Labels are now ready to license as widely and flexibly as possible yet understandably wish to control the value they place over their rights, especially when ISP music services may one day provide their major income stream for recorded music.  Might collective licensing through a mandated body enable the widest range of music to be legally available, from finished studio recordings to live bootlegs, radio sessions and mash-ups?  Or is that incompatible with the business needs of rightsholders, leaving such content doomed to continue to exist unlicensed?

How will future licensing vary between streams, on-demand streams and downloads when technology is increasingly causing the three to converge?  How can we streamline and simplify the process for licensees, is it desirable or possible to create one-stop joint ‘master and composition’ licenses to make everything easier?  Will labels increasingly extend vertically into the businesses they are licensing, such as MySpace, and how will monies track back to artists? 

Think Tank 4 – Squaring The Circle

Tue 2 Dec

The final think tank will look to pull together the conclusions from the series.

How can the different stakeholders better understand each others’ needs in order to develop the most effective and compelling new services? Is further consumer research necessary? What can be modeled and test-marketed? How might UK platforms be affected by developments in other territories? And how could the film, TV and software industries plug into these new models?

In scoping areas for further development, MusicTank will facilitate consultation, analysis and research required to better inform the conversations that will deliver real innovations and help square the circle.