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Its been a busy few days for the music industry and the underlying cause for all the “noise” can be summed up in one word; “Digital”.
EMI reported its half year results last week with a 6.5% drop in revenues - blamed on the ever diminishing CD market - however - Digital revenues (although still less than 10% of the business) saw a 68% increase. EMI chairman Eric Nicoli didn’t seem too worried by the overall picture, commenting that currently less than 30% of “customers” have a digital music player…which does suggest a huge growth opportunity.
Backing that statement up came Microsoft as it launched its new digital music player, Zune, in 30,000 retail outlets last week. Add to that the proliferation of online music destinations and the sheer volume of Internet traffic that is concerned with music. China’s number 1 most visited website, baidu.com, gets over 15% of its entire traffic through its music portal mp3.baidu.com
But the biggest news of last week was Universal’s lawsuit against MySpace.com for copyright infringement, asking for $150,000 per infringement, which at our conservative estimate puts the claim at around 30 TRILLION dollars!!!!!
What does all this mean? Well, for an artist like Kelli that is not tied into a label, major or minor, that distributes music in MP3 form, without Digital Rights Management (DRM) and who combines a touring strategy with an exciting and dynamic website; it means the future looks pretty bright indeed.
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