It’s fatal attraction time again. This week’s news that Facebook and Warner Music are playing cute with one another over a new yoke called Facebook Slideshow is a sign that the record industry is always up for a bit of action with wealthy benefactors. You’d have thought past experiences would have soured many on the music side from running into the arms of a suitor from the tech world, but not at all.
The difference now, of course, is that it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s world and the record labels, like so many others eager for some love and traction, want to live in it. The lure of the social network’s 1.65 billion users worldwide and the possibilities of making cash from them is enough to turn anyone’s head. Look at how the media embraced Facebook’s algorithm with Instant Articles, for instance.
In the case of Slideshow, the record industry is required to provide music to soundtrack video or photo slideshows put together by Facebook users.
“To date, we’ve been using Facebook-owned music to accompany these slideshows”, said a Facebook spokesperson. “We will now be testing the use of a limited amount of music from Warner Music Group as soundtrack options.”
Music business guns
Timing is everything and the fact that Facebook has now come knocking on the industry’s door is fortuitous for all concerned. Leaving aside the never-ending ground war that many are fighting with Spotify (an entity which people always seem to overlook is part-owned by the labels themselves), the music business guns are firmly trained on YouTube at the moment over the issue of payments. There’s no better way to get an enemy to take notice of you than to start making nice with their enemy.
You have to hope this time label executives won’t forget that they hold all the aces. It was something that the record business overlooked when they jumped into bed with Steve Jobs and Apple back in the day.
When those negotiations began, Jobs made huge promises about what his company could do for the industry with the iTunes store and paid downloads. Jobs delivered, but the real winner was naturally Apple who flogged millions of devices and billions of downloads on the back of that permission slip.
It also created a template which the company used to great effect when smartphones and apps came along.
Royalty rates
The music side did, in fairness, make out well from the transaction, but not as well as the other side.
A lot of the current unease, grumpiness, unhappiness and anger over royalty rates and payments for streams on services such as YouTube and Spotify can be traced back to the fallout from that original Apple deal.
The players may have changed in the meantime – it’s Zuckerberg who is now the main man on the block by virtue of Facebook’s huge audience – but the importance of music for tech players has, if anything, got even stronger in the intervening years.
It’s not just the various music streaming services either. Google with YouTube, Amazon with Prime Video Service and the likes of Snapchat, Instragram and media favourite Twitter: all these services know that music is a serious way to leverage more users.
They recognise the power of music, the fact that music is something which people are often willing to go out on a limb for and even pay for on occasion.
You just have to hope that the record labels realise they hold all the trump cards here and don’t make a hames of the latest round of negotiations with the tech side.
