Mini Liveblog: McNicholas and Mulligan on copyright

Today are doing the Pirate Bay case with Mark Mulligan of Forrester Research and Conor McNicholas, still editor of the NME. Interestingly, nobody from a record company, or the BPI, or PRS, then.

Mulligan cautions that there's a danger in mixing lawyers and copyright - "results are unpredictable and inconvenient", effectively suggesting the best the RIAA can hope for is a useless Pyrrhic victory.

Conor keeps insisting the Pirate Bay case is like "putting your finger in a dam" - it was always a dyke when I was a kid, but I think, on balance, Conor's imagery of trying to hold back a mighty river rather than plug a gentle polder might be more apt in this case.

He suggests that internally, record companies are accepting they need new ways of handling copyright - and then runs out a brief, polished run through of why recorded music copyright is a twentieth century anomaly and doomed to vanish. Interestingly, this hasn't actually made an NME cover story, has it? I wonder if that's because it might be hard persuading record companies to take advertising around an obituary.

Mulligan then suggests that Spotify is the opposite of the Pirate Bay case, although that would imply that it's also an initiative taken by the record companies rather than just something they responded to differently.

Conor didn't have very much to do.

Straight after this feature, the business news did a piece on Record Store Day.

Spotify shape-shifts into download store

Now, there's some words which might cause Apple a slight alarm - the words "iTunes killer" get flung about with gay abandon, and this ain't one, either; but Spotify have done a deal with 7Digital to allow selected European users to buy a download of selected tracks they might be listening to.

Not an iTunes killer, but - alongside Apple's enforced abandonment of one-price-fits-all, and Amazon's mp3 store - enough to give indigestion to iTunes.

Experts - or, at least, "experts" - see evidence of panic in the move, on Spotify's behalf:

However, said Mark Mulligan, analyst at Forrester Research, Spotify has found that far fewer users then expected are handing over the cash for a monthly subscription.

"The deal is happening now rather than at launch because Spotify is going through the process of re-learning its business," he said.

"It went into this thinking it was going to be a premium subscription business," he said. "The problem is what's proven to be the successful part is the free bit."

I'm sure Mulligan has good reason for believing what he believes, but I'd bet a signed Elastica seven inch that the reason why Spotify are adding this now, rather than at launch, was to avoid having their product clouded when it first went live. If there had been a chance to buy as well as subscribe, half the attention would have been on the download side and made Spotify sound like just another online shop.

And, again, Mulligan might have his reasons for believing that Spotify are "relearning" their business, but it would stretch credibility that they could have launched when they did assuming that more people would pay than listen through the ad-funded service. Perhaps they might have overestimated how much advertising would be around, but not that people would flock to free?