Online music services square up

MUSIC DISTRIBUTOR Apple is in negotiations to launch a music service that will let its content be accessed across a range of different devices.

A report at Bloomberg says that the cappuccino company is already in talks with record companies with the aim of providing a service that makes cross device access easy, and will in essence provide users with a portable, pick up anywhere playlist of purchased material that is backed up somewhere in an Apple Itunes cloud.

So far progressed are talks, apparently, that a service that offers content from music firms including Vivendi, Universal, EMI and Warner could launch by the middle of this year and bring the vision of cloud based music content closer to reality. That is, if reality only comes into being once Apple sayeth it is so.

Here, as it has with tablets, smartphones, application stores, and digital downloads, the fruit themed firm may be able to make a success of a business model that others have struggled with, or it could find itself in a market where people who want that sort of thing are doing very well without it already, thank you very much.

Virgin Media is looking to cancel its own unlimited download plans and swap them for a streaming service with Spotify, while that company, along with Last.fm and Pandora in the US, have made faithful users of their own services.

Nokia, which, let's face it, can't do anything right at the moment, has also withdrawn a painful looking toe from the music downloads market when earlier this year cancelled its own services in the UK.

"The markets clearly want a DRM-free music service," said a Nokia spokesman, who we think has the sort of clear insights that the Finnish phone firm desperately needs, but apparently doesn't have, in its executive suite.

Apple's promise to just make it easier for its users to access something that they already own on something that they already own sounds particularly uninspiring.

But, Apple's plans will pour into music executives' ears like a long lost Beatles or Elvis studio master tape, as they will be keen to avoid such bottom line smacking plans as unlimited downloads for fixed prices.

Any analyst will tell you that the single download for a fee business model is more appealing than a thousand downloads for a single fee, an idea that accountants, label heads, pushermen, and assorted moguls, artists and svengalis would find appalling, but who needs analysts? For an industry used to wringing out its artists and their fans for all they could take, the idea of a fan-friendly table turning is surely one to be avoided.

The same firms as those interested in the Apple deal had also aligned themselves with the Nokia proposal, which suggests that they'll do anything to get their content on royalty providing services.

How the music industry has changed. Just thirty years ago it would have been all about ogling starlets, replacing drummers and inventing new font sizes for use in contract clauses, but now it must divide its time between hiring lawyers to fight legal battles over its cash and content and shaking hands on deals for its cash and content.

Like Punk, Rock and Roll, Hip Hop and Johnny Ramone, the old money making record labels model is dead and one day they will wake up and realise that the way in which they have been marketing and selling music is not what consumers are looking for. µ