Orange’s Head Of Music Offers In Europe Joins Top Industry Panel At Filesharing Summit

• Philippe Steinmetz, Head Of Music Offers For Orange Across Europe
Joins Panel At First Event In MusicTank Filesharing Series
• Also Announced: Ben Drury, CEO Of 7digital

Today MusicTank unveiled the final panellists for the first think tank in
its much anticipated ‘Lets Sell Recorded Music’ series. Joining an already
formidable panel looking into the file sharing debate will be Philippe
Steinmetz, Head of Music Offers Europe, France Telecom Group (Musique Max),
and Ben Drury, CEO of 7digital.

Steinmetz has been working at France Telecom Group since 1996. He is now in
charge of music marketing offers across the Orange footprint, including
eight countries in Europe. Ben Drury co-founded 7digital in 2004 with the
vision of creating a digital media marketplace. In September this year
7digital.com was the first company in Europe to launch DRM-free MP3
downloads with all four major record labels. He is also the Deputy Chairman
and Director of the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) and a board
director the Official UK Charts Company.

The first four panellists announced last week were Feargal Sharkey, CEO of
UK Music, who will deliver the keynote address; Paul Hitchman, MD of digital
music service PlayLouder; journalist Andrew Orlowski of The Register; and
Keith Jopling, former Director of Strategic Research at IFPI.

With the ‘Lets Sell Recorded Music’ programme, MusicTank will be looking at
ways of developing legal services in the wake of the groundbreaking
agreement signed between the BPI and the UK’s six largest ISPs on 24th July.

The first of four think tanks, entitled ‘Here We Are Now, Entertain Us’
takes place on the 21st of October and looks at exactly what music consumers
actually want and how this tallies with the services they’re currently
getting. What new services are being proposed, how will they work and what
will they look like? How do the ISPs fit in with all this and what will
become of those companies who have spent several years and fortunes building
up legal download services? How can they adapt to a world where music is
bundled to the consumer in a feels-like-free way?

Date: 21.10.08 – Think Tank 1 – Here We Are Now, Entertain Us
Time: 18.30 – 21.00

Venue: The Basement, MCPS-PRS Alliance
Location: 29-33 Berners Street, London, W1T 3AB.
Nearest Tube: Goodge St. (Northern Line)
Price:
Individual Think Tank – £30 / Trade Body Member* £25 / MusicTank Member £20
All 4 Think Tanks – £100 / Trade Body Member * £85 / MusicTank Member £70

*AIM, BACS, BPI, MMF, MPG, MPA, MU, MCPS-PRS Alliance, PPL, ISPA and LINX.

All places MUST be booked and paid for in advance via www.musictank.co.uk
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Full Think Tank Programme

Let’s Sell Recorded Music!
Illegally downloaded any music recently? Given that nearly two thirds of all
internet traffic is made up of P2P activity these days, if you haven’t, then
most young people you know are. Since Napster first reared its head in the
late nineties, the recorded music business has tried in vain to put the
genie back in the bottle; the result some pr blunders and an estimated 20:1
illegal download rate.

For music fans it’s been a golden age where hard to find and out of print
releases have been readily available alongside the latest hits of the day,
but with no way of monetising these streams the record labels have been
forced to watch their profits dwindle while the world’s been moving online.

The government has taken notice and is overseeing a three-pronged initiative
aimed at educating and developing awareness, dealing with the most serious
infringers and facilitating legitimate offerings.

This series will focus on that third prong: effective legitimate
alternatives. Over the course of the four events we will review what people
want, where technology is heading, what the most plausible new models are
and how they might be licensed.

Think Tank 1 – Here We Are Now, Entertain Us
Tues 21st Oct

Kicking off the series, we take a long hard look at what music consumers
actually want and how this tallies with the status quo and raft of new
services in various stages of development or launch. Will we see monolithic
music portals dispensing entertainment with all the charm of a Wal-Mart, or
will they incorporate some of the sharing and word-of-mouth qualities that
the internet does so well? Will each ISP run its own service or will there
be several operations each serving their own niche communities? Which models
are likely to be most compelling and hence fly with music fans? And finally
what of the companies who have spent several years and fortunes building up
legal download services, how can they adapt to a world where music is
bundled to the consumer in a feels-like-free way?

Think Tank 2 – We Have The Technology, What’s The Solution?
Tues 4th Nov

How can technology enable licensed services to develop some of the
functionality of existing unlicensed sites? How reliably can we sample and
identify internet traffic for managing tracking and payments? Is this only
possible within a walled-garden system, or is the technology available to
monitor all traffic for accounting purposes? How might this sit with the
notoriously privacy minded torrent communities? What are the benefits and
pitfalls of using deep packet inspection and can this work for encrypted
content? Is copyright filtering on a network level desirable or possible?

Are there more creative, compelling or enduring models out there? What can
we learn from some of the more advanced licensed P2P platforms such as
Korea’s Soribada? What about licensing the end user or the access point, a
la Noank, rather than the delivery platform? Might this enable music fans
to continue to with their consumption habits and trusted filters in a way
that better utilises the internet’s potential?

How does the blue-sky models square with the needs of ISPs and device
manufacturers? What kind of ISP might be interested in developing content
services anyway? And would they look to do so themselves or rather to
provide a platform for third parties?

And how many kids are right now in their bedrooms cooking up new ideas that
will do to P2P what Napster did to the traditional business? Can we develop
more futureproofed solutions or are we forever doomed to play catch up?

Think Tank 3 – Coalition of the Billing
Tues 18th Nov

What’s the best way to license these new services?

Labels are now ready to license as widely and flexibly as possible yet
understandably wish to control the value they place over their rights,
especially when ISP music services may one day provide their major income
stream for recorded music.

Might collective licensing through a mandated body enable the widest range
of music to be legally available, from finished studio recordings to live
bootlegs, radio sessions and mash-ups? Or is that incompatible with the
business needs of rightsholders, leaving such content doomed to continue to
exist unlicensed?

How will future licensing vary between streams, on-demand streams and
downloads when technology is increasingly causing the three to converge?

How can we streamline and simplify the process for licensees, is it
desirable or possible to create one-stop joint ‘master and composition’
licenses to make everything easier?

Will labels increasingly extend vertically into the businesses they are
licensing, such as MySpace, and how will monies track back to artists?

Think Tank 4 – Squaring The Circle
Tues 2nd Dec

The final think tank will look to pull together the conclusions from the
series.

How can the different stakeholders better understand each others’ needs in
order to develop the most effective and compelling new services? Is further
consumer research necessary? What can be modeled and test-marketed? How
might UK platforms be affected by developments in other territories? And how
could the film, TV and software industries plug into these new models?

In scoping areas for further development, MusicTank will facilitate
consultation, analysis and research required to better inform the
conversations that will deliver real innovations and help square the circle.