Warner Music Group chairman and CEO, Edgar Bronfman, said recently that the iTunes store is "digital music done right" and admitted that fighting consumer demand for digital music fueled illegal downloading. Great timing as I think this week's guest speaker is from Warner Music.
See the Wired article below:
http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/11/hell-freezes-ov.html
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It will be interesting to see how forthcoming Dan Pelson of WMG can be at Thursday's class. Edgar Bronfman seems to be enduring plenty of ridicule on blogs for his recent praise (aka - "about face") for Apple's brilliant understanding of what's best for the consumer and the legal download market; however his statements, although conciliatory, do not indicate whether WMG still plans to follow Universal Music and NOT renew its contract with Apple for the sale of music on iTunes.
Reports as recently as early October had Warner and Sony BMG joining UMG to launch a music subscription service -- TOTAL MUSIC -- to challenge Apple's dominance of the song download market as well as the portable player market. The new label run service was announced in July by UMG but it's not clear yet whether this plan will go through and whether the labels involved would stop offering their artists on iTunes altogether to coerce users into switching. Maybe we can get some inside scoop from Dan.
Read a fuller article on Bronfman's comments and it seems like his plans to leave iTunes are no longer in the cards.
"For years now, Warner Music has been offering a choice to consumers at Apple's iTunes store the option to purchase something more than just single tracks, which constitute the mainstay of that store's sales," [Edgar Bronfman] explained. "By packaging a full album into a bundle of music with ringtones, videos and other combinations and variation we found products that consumers demonstrably valued and were willing to purchase at premium prices. And guess what? We've sold tons of them. And with Apple's co-operation to make discovering, accessing and purchasing these products even more seamless and intuitive, we'll be offering many, many more of these products going forward."
So WMG isn't going to abandon iTunes but does that mean they're not going to launch a new subscription service with Universal and Sony? I'd love to hear the answer to that one.
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