APRS NEWS BACKGROUND

MUSIC ON THE INTERNET

If online music is a development of concern to you, a recent survey reported in Music & Copyright puts some flesh on the bones of this spectre. A 1997 Consumer Profile in the USA has estimated that a very unfrightening 0.3% of all music purchases were made online. This equates to around $37million - small potatoes compared to the $40billion worth of traditional pre-recorded soundcarriers sold annually in the US market.

BUT [yes, its a big But] these are early days, and current reports suggest that the general trend to purchasing over the Internet in this country as well as in the USA is rising rapidly. That must spell potential trouble for the traditional retailing structure, in the music business as much as any other, where the product for sale can be expressed as digital information.

Downloading music online is not yet an activity with much appeal to most music lovers, although the technology to enable it has existed for several years. But the concept has already generated much discussion and agitation about the protection of copyright and payment of royalties. British Music Rights, the lobbying group which promotes the interests of the creators of music, is calling for international copyright protection to be imposed on telecoms companies and Internet suppliers which
current EC copyright directives do not yet touch.

The APRS supports these and other [educational] objectives, and recently, represented by Sir George Martin and Mark Broad, joined with British Music Rights at the press conference at which it launched its manifesto for this campaign.

These twin issues, the sale of music online and the preservation of rights in the music, are comprehensively explored in a new report Music on the Internet, just published by FT Media & Telecoms [price �250, more details from 020 7896 2256].