Billboard Music – Dave Stewart keynote
October 5, 2010, Billboard Mobile Entertainment Live, Moscone West, San Francisco—Dave Stewart is a producer, solo artist, and mobile music consultant and evangelist. In his keynote talk, he discussed the intersection of music and technology. Apps are an entry point for increased interaction, and will lead to significant changes in the industry.
When Apple started iTunes, the industry in the music business saw this change as a competitor rather than the new channel. Now, we are seeing the intersection of the web and users with phones and apps are leading the way. The industry is trying to determine the impact of digital formats on production and distribution. People still want free content from the internet, so the music industry must reinvent itself to meet those expectations.
The content exists everywhere but there’s no context for fees. To provide seamless and easy access to content, the industry needs a robust, simple rights management engine. The people in the industry must continue the trend of understanding the future.
Pieces for a new transaction mode already exist. Existing payment networks handle over 80,000 transactions per second. The current financial arrangements for the artists, however, doesn’t give them the money for between 9 and 24 months after the money is initially collected. So, if the industry were to configure its transactions to be like those of online businesses, then money would flow instantly from consumer, to the labels, and to the artists.
In fact, by setting up instant transactions they can actually change the way people connect with music. For the first time, people can now get paid for tweets or other social media when they reference some artist’s content. In this new economy, the fans become sellers and artists are enabled to do other things than spending time trying to collect royalties.
The technology exists to embed code in various online vehicles which can interact with a micro-payment system. So if a user highlights some words that relate to some content, then later the transaction will pay the originator and all the others in the chain. So developers and the music industry will have to think differently about how they approach mobile development and to be successful, must draw on the creative underpinnings of both industries.
