S P E C I A L  M U S I C   R E P O R T

MSN goes fast foward and shows us the future of music, and its just what we needed.

º It's official, MSN.co.uk has launched its Music Club. The media portal ranked as one of the most visited sites in the UK has taken the unprecedented step of offering music downloads from its website based on a subscription business model.

MSN teamed up with the online music platform technology provider OD2 earlier this year in a bid to roll-out one of the first major non peer-to-peer music services available in the UK. And its not a minute too soon.\

Whenever someone discusses music online, it is inevitable that Napster will be mentioned - (ah, done it again!) but MSN may just make Napster a long lost memory in the capricious world of online music fan sites. Beyond that, with MSN we are actually seeing something new. Music file sharing has become commonplace with millions of users familiar, in principle at least, with what peer-to-peer is all about. But these new skills are not required when you join the MSN service.

Instead of searching a network of other users' computers and downloading music directly from their hard drives, MSN ensures quality of product by having all their music stored on the OD2 platform where it has been professionally and legitimately encoded with the permission of the appropriate labels and artists.

This is not to say that Napster played no part at all in proving the market in the first place, but the business development team at MSN are going to take us the next step of the way with 'Subscription'. Have we ever seen anything like this before? Yes. In the Music industry? No.

In its simplest form, Music Subscription is music rental. We have rented movies on video cassettes and DVDs now for longer than many of us can remember but no one has ever offered music to rent (apart from the local library) on a large scale. So, in effect, MSN could be taking a fairly big risk in backing the subscription horse simply because it has never been broken in over such new ground before. Music consumers have longed followed a consumer pattern based on ownership. 'Owning' or buying or buying music we enjoy is ingrained from the first record bought from the local record shop. Having the ability to play our favourite music at our leisure is something we are used to. Yet statisticians claim that once we have purchased music we are unlikely to play it more often than 10 times before filing it with the rest of the music collection. Coupled with the rising costs of CDs often consisting of 50%-75% 'filler' tracks, it would be fair to say that consumers are ready for something new.

If this is to be believed, smart money says music subscription is going to be successful. More and more of us listen to music on our PC's than ever before, after all, it is likely we now spend more time at our PC's surfing the net, working or playing games than we do perhaps listening to the radio.

Radio plays a vital role in marketing music and will continue to do so in the form of traditional and digital radio formats. The Internet is also providing radio stations with a new community of listeners worldwide by stream casting their broadcasts. This has grown to become a cost effective solution for broadcasts yet to be syndicated. Moreover, the web offers music on-demand as opposed to usual tune-in broadcasting. This could be its defining feature as this is not too dissimilar to music ownership, that is to say, hearing the music you want to hear when you want to hear it.

Specialists in online marketing, CCN is showing music companies how to use the web as a cost effective means of marketing and selling artist releases and repertoire. Read C3 (CCN's marketing team) on Online Marketing to learn more... >>