During an hour-long panel at the CES Mobile Entertainment event today, a host of executives from places ranging from Pandora to SanDisk and Motorola to Sony Ericsson talked about the mobile music industry with a couple of topics standing out: the news yesterday that iTunes will allow full-track music downloads over-the-air for the same price, and the question of whether negotiations with music labels, which can always be tricky, are finally starting to loosen up.
The backdrop can be put into context with some numbers Atlantic Records shared earlier in the day. Livia Tortella, GM/ESVP of marketing for Atlantic Records, said that Atlantic was one of the first to achieve a 50-50 split between physical and digital music sales, and of the 50 percent going towards digital, she said the mix breaks down to 69 percent from downloads,18 percent from subscription, and about 13 percent from mobile.
On music-label negotiations “being like a colonoscopy”: David Thompson, head of content acquisition for Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson: “The labels are realizing that digital is what matters, and since online is saturated, the only new money is in mobile.
The labels are much more willing to come to the table and negotiate.” Following the panel, I asked Thompson to explain: “It [mobile] is the new hot spot for them…” Full details on our sister site mocoNews.net...
By Tricia Duryee of Paid Content, reprinted under Creative Commons.
