Last week I spent two days at Marketing Week’s Interactive Summit in London. Part of the reason for attending is that New Media Age and Marketing Week have kindly asked to be programme director at this years Online Marketing Show, and I wanted to check out some potential speakers.

As with most conferences I seem to attend these days, the event was the usual mix of folk who totally missed the point, folk who couldn’t be bothered to follow the brief they’d been given because the had their own agenda (usually a sales pitch!), mixed in with a few excellent presentations from folk with something really interesting to say and/or some real insight.

For example, Dennis Woodside, the new(ish) MD of Google in the UK claimed that with digital storage space doubling at an increasingly scary pace (not Moore’s Law but something similar), we’ll be able to get an iPod/Phone that can store every piece of music ever recorded by 2015! WOW. However, it makes you think who really needs an 80GB player full of music (it would take over 5 weeks of continuous listening to listen to every track), never mind a player with literally a lifetime’s worth of music on it? However this got me thinking…

Pete Jenner, ex-manager of the Pink Floyd and secretary-general of the International Music Managers’ Forum, recently announced at the Beyond the Soundbyte
conference a proposal to replace existing consumer payment mechanisms
for music rights with a mandatory, Europe-wide tax modelled on the UK’s
TV licensing fee and to be paid by anyone with a broadband connection
or mobile phone.

If this model was adopted it would have a far reaching effect on the music download space. The revenues would likely shift away from the physical act of selling a download (as the music itself would be ‘free’) to other business models. While the serious competition would most likely come from a number of players already active in this marketplace - ISP’s and Mobile networks,  MP3 player and mobile phone handset manufacturers - the relative importance of recommendation services such as last.fm and mog would grow dramatically. If you have millions of tracks to listen to, all for free, how would you decide what to listen to? The music recommender’s could yet own a big chunk of the music space in the future.

Three of the potential key players in this new music economy presented at the event. Sadly Stefan Glaenzer, Executive Chairman of Last.fm was the only one of the three to give any real insight to the music space. The site now has 20 million unique users per month, a 65 million track catalogue, covering 4bn+ music taste items and over 350,000 major tags.

Meanwhile, Stephen Huddleston from BT gave me an idea for a new business venture but I’m not sure if I could find a VC to fund it (a hit squad to eradicate FD’s!). David Exion, Vodafone’s Director of Global Brand Strategy and Manifestation (and founder of Hyper Island), had some interesting things to say about engagement in the digital age. He showed some great examples from their work in the Second Life community, which included a ‘virtual’ yet ‘real’ mobile phone that lets you call users outside of the ‘game’, as well allowing people from outside to call you while in the ‘game’ (a lot of your tea/dinner is ready/burnt type calls from parents/partners can be expected no doubt!).

Nick Watt - Citizen Sound