Warner Chapel won't play ball

After jumping through hoops the company still won't grant a licence to Iwtms.

Iwtms (Interactive When The Music Stops) has decided to specialise in sending out music clips which are then accompanied by a request for the next few lines of the lyrics.

Players then compete for prizes - such as free concert tickets - by sending back the answer to the puzzle via text messaging. Iwtms' software checks the answer against the official lyrics provided by the composer.

In the complex world of music IPR, Iwtms needs to obtain the rights to republish lyrics from the original owners. That's in order to protect its clients - such as an MTV- which has music rights but not lyrics rights.

According to Eugene Sutton, creative director with Iwtms, his company is up and ready to go and has negotiated proper rights with all the big music names - except Warner Chapel.

Warner told the content provider to go off and get various licences which it duly did. Having done so, Warner just turned around and told Iwtms to wait for another six months while it thought about it.

Sutton's point is that this is madness. There's the music giants seeing their revenues decline drastically under the digital music onslaught.

Yet when a company offers them a whole new revenue stream - from text messaging - they stick a proverbial head in the sand.

Why is an industry which is seriously considering removing digital rights software from recordings under pressure from Apple, unwilling to grant rights to a new sector which could potentially generate billions of dollars?

Greed or stupidity. You choose. µ