Venkatarangan TNC

Digital Hollywood - Day 2

Artistnation has been recently launched that brings in one umbrella the pandora of revenue sources for artists including Music Rights, Mobile Rights, Merchandising, Product branding, touring, etc. It has recently signed up with Madonna for 150 Million over 10 years. Artists are now realized as the center of universe and they never had the things of distribution going better for them. There was an other speaker who said who wants to dispel this vision of artist quitting their day job, over the weekend distribute music and make millions. Traditional there is an adversary relationship between label and artists - now they will move into more collaborative relationship just like artist and managers. Labels were controlling 90% of video distribution, now you have MSN, Google & Yahoo! doing it.

There was mentioned about Ruckus which is legal music free for college students.

Alby Galuten from Sony says it is a myth that labels makes artists. Music in their heydays were immersive in music when they buy a CD put up their headphone and hear it, do nothing. Now they do many things. It is going to be very difficult to get subscribers to keep paying $15 per month.

Jessica Stoner of Pandora (Radio) talked about how users will get more ways to get music easily - as easy as get getting terrestrial music, now they are getting broadband music in PC, later it is going to broadband in their cars. People want to discover/get introduced to music in their radio and then hear it to death from their iPod.

John Jones talked about how music will be mixed / consolidated in everything that MSN, Yahoo! does.

Charlie Moore of Ruckus feels that students feel comfortable paying money per semester terms, they are comfortable for charging through mobile/landline numbers than through credit cards. They will feel better to pay $50 per year one time, rather than $5 per month.

There was a question of where Microsoft is with Zune with all their monies and where is there $50 million campaign equivalent of iPods. Microsoft historically leads in 3rd round, they have patience and perseverance to lead. They did with software, now they are likely to get it in entertainment with XBOX leading.