Another view of the impact of ITs on the music industry

Records companies and other music industry actors have been quite vocal in complaining about the Internet (and particularly the pirating behaviors of certain Internet users…) ‘killing ‘ the industry.

Interestingly, positive effects are way less publicized….There are three reasons why this  has striked me lately.

1.  First, there is a big discussion in France right now regarding the adoption of the HADOPI bill to protect artists and copyrights.
2. Second, I assisted to a very nice presentation by NextMedia last monday where Ethan Kaplan (Vice President of Technology, Warner Bros.) and Robert H. Reynolds (Attorney, Callister & Reynolds and Manager Of Multi-Platinum, International Recording Artists The Killers) discussed how technologies and were impacting and transforming the business. We had a very nice talk from Adaline, a Vancouver Singer  who suddently became very popular thanks to …Twitter (!) and who now self-promotes and engages  her audience thanks to social technologies. 
3. The third reason is because a friend of mine introduced me to Spidart, a new venture (from Lyon, France!) with a very original and social-based business model….Basically, Spidart is a platform that gathers artists and music fans. On the one hand, artists present their music, band values and influences, and on the other hand, fans invest (I mean real dollars, or actually euros!) in their favorite artists, i.e., they become “producers”. When an artists reaches 50 000 euros of investment, there is an agreement with a records company, a CD is produced, and the fans(and I guess Spidart) get some royalties proportionate to the amount they invested in the artist.

So, what do you think about that model ? Pretty clever, right? I personally think that this seems like an efficient way to launch artists who already have an existing popularity base (indeed, they are less likely to fail). In addition, there is a somewhat different (fresher) investment /capitalism flavour than the usual one.