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So the MIDEM 2010 is closing today. I attended as a press photographer, mostly did concerts (some great stuff), but also a couple of press conferences. Anyway :

• the industry is definitely moving towards other non-repressive solutions and alternative models to keep the business afloat. To quote Ted Cohen : “We’re decisively moving from music as a product to music as a service … this isn’t my opinion, this is fact.”. Good for them. As a sign of this, two or three (not sure) Rock Band booths, plus many talks and deals with video games companies. Spotify and Deezer were also very present.
• Politicians however are still lagging behind, still stuck in the same way only beginning to look at the possibilities of legal offers as a way to effectively fight against illegal sharing. The press conference I attended on the matter was rather pathetic in its lack of vision. Only the SPEDIDAM (warning, annoying website with auto-maximize windows and Flash all over, yuck), french organisation of authors to collect royalties like the SACEM, has a refreshingly sane view on the matter.
• The music industry is Apple’s turf. iPhones and macbooks (unibodies) were outnumbering blackberries and PCs 5 to 1 (rough estimation). To give an idea : the MIDEM iPhone app was downloaded more than 4000 times. There were 7000 attendees at the MIDEM this year.
• The conference relied heavily on Twitter as a “life line” for news, buzz, and communication between attendees. In that regard Twitter really has become a de facto instant communication platform standard which events can very easily get working : just agree on a keyword to use (#midem in that case) and off you go.
• Videogames (Rock Band, Guitar Hero…) had quite a bit of presence. According to this blog post from Le Monde journalists (in French, sorry), listening sessions organised by videogame producers to look for music to go with their games had a lot of success

That’s all for now.

(edit Feb 12th : added bit about videogames)

With the flurry of ground-shaking news rocking that darn old music industry which we all love to hate, predictions of impending doom abound.

I beg to differ.

Not that I think that Radiohead’s last stunt won’t have lasting consequences, no doubt it will, even more now as it seems they won their bet. But two things come to mind :

First, where have I already heard this story about an age-old Big Bad Industry being destroyed by the Good Guys ? Mmmh, lemme’ think… Proprietary Software vs. Free/Open Source software ? Or was it Big Media vs. bloggers ? In both previous cases, initial enthusiasm (bordering zealotery) eventually settled into a less glamourous but more realistic outcome : a mix of the old establishment and the new stuff.

In both cases too, a few high-profile successes (Linux, Apache, the Rathergate) were seen as the general case while they were in fact the exception. The vast majority of free software projects are redundant or useless or both, and the vast majority of news-oriented blogs are, well, embarassments. Let’s hope the signal/noise ratio in the Musicians vs. Music Industry battle rates higher.

Second, as it’s currently turning out, the situation of each band having its own online music outlet isn’t at all appealing. As Michael Parekh notes, the last thing you want is having to go to a different site for every band which album you want to get (said site will of course be hammered down at each new release, if the band is successful enough). I believe that’s the reason why Radiohead’s last album was still “illegally” downloaded so much. Parekh’s other comments on the hassle of managing mp3 (raise your hands those who regularly do backups of their music library, and who know exactly what to do to keep it when they’ll upgrade their machine) and legal music downloads in general echo my doubts on whether the CD will actually ever disappear. Files are volatile, and music fans need to have a tangible object to link them to their favorite stars, something with a logo on, basically .

In any case, it sure will be interesting to follow, hard to predict which new business model will make a big enough dent in the current one (or may be displace it as the main one). A little surprise there, as it’s been reported that Universal Music is examining the possibility of an ISP file sharing tax. That would more or less be akin to the “licence globale” which unfortunately failed here in France, mainly thanks to the lobbying of… Universal.