Warm Music Puts Heat On Broken Radio Royalty Business Model
First of all thanks to Monty Munford for this article.
It was one minute past midnight on August 1st, 1981 when the first-ever music video was aired on MTV.
To emphasis this new channel's impending dominance of music-as-a-commodity, that video was Video Killed The Radio Star by UK band The Buggles; a self-fulfilling prophecy in every respect. Radio was dead, long live video... the king is dead, long live the king!
The song was a huge success, it topped the charts in the UK and more than ten countries; my girlfriend at the time even bought me a copy of the vinyl single for my birthday. Those were the days when music ruled the world, but everybody knew that change was a-coming.
While the song emphasised the likely death of radio by video, the former has lasted a lot longer than many people expected and still remains a hugely influential channel for artist success while MTV has long been superseded by YouTube and the internet.
What is less widely known, however, is the broken model of radio and how artists are losing out on royalties because of how these payments are measured and how it is begging for disruption.
In 2013, the UN General Assembly nominated February 13th as the annual date to celebrate World Radio Day, a time to recognise the reach and power of radio to the poorer and more accessible parts of the world.
As part of these celebrations, UNESCO commissioned a report that stated there are currently more than 51,000 global radio stations, but only a fraction of these stations are covered when it comes to evaluation royalties paid to artists.
According to tech disruptor Warm Music, existing monitors such as BMAT, Radio Monitor and Soundcharts only cover 3,500, 4,000 and 350 radio stations respectively. That means that thousands of stations could be playing music without paying the artist and without the artist gaining recognition for their work.
Warm Music wants to change this by taking the first step towards a more democratized music industry by delivering inexpensive data to anyone in the music industry, about how their music is performing on radio stations all over the world.
The company says that today's radio royalties are in many cases being distributed, based on minor data samples and the result is a very uncertain and unfair distribution of the money in the industry.
Warm Music says that its technology enables artists (and their representatives) to know when and where their song is being played on a radio somewhere in the world, on not only the large commercial radio stations currently monitored, but on as many radio stations as possible.
Warm says it is doing this by also including school, local, community and genre-specific radios and monitors 24,000 radio stations, a number that it want to increase to 45,000 stations 'the ones we think that would be relevant to be monitoring'. Consequently, by being able to track and monitor music on the radio on a true global scale, everyone in the music industry will be empowered.
Jesper Skibsby, CEO of the Copenhagen-based company is a vivid presence at the world's music and tech events, apparently being a collector of the kimonos he wears to such shows. However alternative his dress sense, he is focused on improving the efficacy of the radio business model.
"If there are 51,000 stations in the world and only 10% are used to measure success and playing time, then this needs to be improved. Musicians and songwriters have been hugely affected by changes in technology over the past two decades and we want our technology to acknowledge the importance of their work and creativity," he says.
Such recognition is crucial for any industry that by definition is always outside the mainstream. The long tail for artists that Warm is trying to fix is welcome. Video certainly didn't kill off the radio star, but hopefully the radio star can embrace a new model for everybody in the latest version of the music business.
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