A sour note on Sony BMG's digital future

The crowded digital music marketplace grew still more claustrophobic this week when Sony BMG Music Entertainment announced it's planning a new digital subscription service, promising consumers unlimited access to the label's catalog across a wide variety of portable media devices, including Apple's iPod. In an interview with German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sony BMG Music CEO Rolf Schmidt-Holtz declined to speculate on when the service might launch, but said the label is currently mulling pricing schemes and leaning towards a flat-rate subscription offer that would charge consumers around $9 to $12 per month in exchange for unlimited access to its complete music archive. Schmidt-Holtz said it is "even possible that clients could keep some songs indefinitely--that they would own them even after the subscription expired." He added Sony BMG is in talks with other major labels as well as mobile operators, but declined to divulge specifics.

In light of how little concrete information Schmidt-Holtz actually gives up to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, it's impossible to guess whether Sony BMG would continue its existing licensing relationships with digital music service providers like Apple and Amazon, or if it would instead restrict distribution of its catalog to its own branded site. And while Schmidt-Holtz may be in talks with the other majors, it seems highly unlikely a rival label is going to license its catalog for sale on a Sony BMG-owned retail storefront, effectively limiting the site's available catalog to Sony BMG acts--a roster that includes artists including bestsellers ranging from Elvis Presley to Simon & Garfunkel to Celine Dion, of course, but that's nevertheless missing countless superstars from the EMI Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group holdings.    

To get a rough sense of what a Sony BMG-branded mobile service might offer in terms of content availability, I checked out the website of its nearest antecedent: The BMG Music Service, the mail-order subscription service that supplanted the venerable Columbia House Music Club in mid-2005. Following a series of searches for some perennial favorites, it appears BMG Music Service offers only one CD by Bob Dylan (a recent hits compilation), four CDs by the Rolling Stones (albeit their best albums, like Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers), just two CDs by Bruce Springsteen (a hits collection and the lackluster Magic) and five CDs by Miles Davis (including the landmark Birth of the Cool, but not Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain or Bitches Brew). It's a spotty inventory at best, especially considering BMG Music Service faces no real competition from other traditional record subscription services. Compare it to iTunes, which boasts virtually complete back catalogs from all four above-mentioned artists--there's really no contest.

But the biggest argument against a branded Sony BMG digital service is that consumers don't purchase music the way they do automobiles or soda--except for diehard fans that collect everything a small independent puts out, labels don't engender brand loyalty, or even brand awareness. Most listeners don't know and don't care which label signed their favorite new artist--they just want the music, and with so many popular acts of the past and present nowhere to be found in the Sony BMG catalog, customer dissatisfaction would run rampant. Sony BMG may wish to assert control over its own digital destiny, but like the Stones once sang, "You can't always get what you want"--and until that song and the rest of the band's recorded output is in the label's content portfolio, Sony BMG has no business taking on Apple, Amazon or anyone else. - Jason

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