Warner Music made some headlines this week with the news that it was taking its Korean unit and setting it up in a joint venture with SK Telecom and a record label the operator owns. Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman has talked about how “advanced and progressive” the Korean mobile music market is, and that the new venture will give Warner “the ability to experiment”. I find that pretty hard to believe, for a couple of reasons.
First is Bronfman’s historical resistance to digital media, and acceptance of it only when it can be stringently and strictly controlled — and what better environment to control media than a carrier’s closed content system and platform? Second, and even bigger, is Warner and other label’s chronic lack of innovation. These are companies that prefer to rely on restrictive DRM and copy-protection and lobbying governments to crack down on “piracy” than to actually come up with new services.
That DRM is the innovation in the mobile space, as far as these companies are concerned, because it forces consumers to pay again and again for the same content. Bought a download of a song you like on your PC? Pay again for the ringtone, the video ringtone, the full video, and so on. Bronfman recently bragged that his company managed to release 100 different versions of the music on a recent rap album, in downloads and ringtones and so forth. That’s not innovation — that’s simply squeezing as much out of your customers as quickly as possible.
I think expecting any innovation in mobile music to come from record labels is absolutely unrealistic. Their interest in mobile isn’t because of the vast opportunities connected mobile devices present to music, but rather because they see it as an environment in which they can exert total control over their content. Their dependece on essentially fleecing customers won’t last long, either, as recent signs of consumer dissatisfaction with less-than-scrupulous ringtone vendors signal the beginning of a greed-induced implosion of the market.
So, in the current environment, is there much mobile music innovation possible? I’m not talking about devices that can play MP3s, or operators that think they’re innovating by offering full-track downloads; I’m talking about cool services that take advantage of the mobile platform. I hope so — there’s too much potential here to let it go to waste.
[tags]mobile, mobile music, warner music[/tags]
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