BT is looking into launching a non-for-profit music download service in a bid to beat online piracy and file sharing networks a leaked paper has suggested.
In what has been a difficult week for the music industry where statistics have shown that the music sales fell by 15% from last year. BT are looking to the future and are trying to sign a deal with the four major record labels, who dominate the music industry, to try and shift consumers from illegal channels of distribution to legitimate ways for consumers to consume music.
In a document that has been seen by the Guardian the internet service provider plans to roll out the service to its 5.5 million customers "in the near future".
Apparently BT is considering to run service on a free-to-access, not-for-profit basis for the first six to nine months, to gain as much traction as possible, after which it will introduce some form of subscription model.
Importantly, they need to have a proper plan of action as quite a few of the big players including Google and Sky have failed to woo the majors with their ideas of a future of music streaming, rather than downloading.
It has proved notoriously difficult to get users to open their wallets for a web-based music service, but we would expect the service to bundled with customers current monthly fee for broadband, similar to Sky Songs, which of course flopped and has since closed.
It’s is believed that BT might try and do a deal with Spotify rather than going toe-to-toe with already established service, quite how this will work is unclear, but it wouldn’t be a sensible move to pit themselves against the market leader.
Last week, it emerged that rights holders and UK ISPs were preparing a voluntary agreement to create a ‘blacklist’ of sites that would be blocked for allegedly facilitating illegal downloading.
It would seem that their is real desire from the music industry to embrace new models of music distribution, as and soon as we start seeing some join-up thinking the music industry might begin to grow again and stop blaming pirates.
Let’s hope that 2011 is the year of streaming. A system fair for all. After all the good old days of an artist living off royalties from physical sales from years ago is long gone, and soon as they can come to terms with this the better it will be for the labels, consumers and musicians. Only time will tell.
Let us know how you consume your music. Do you download illegally? Stream? Buy CD’s? Or just listen to the radio?