A warning from Warner

As traditional music retail continues to collapse--this week alone, Billboard reports album sales are down 16.8 percent from the same week in 2006--Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr. is willing to admit mistakes were made. Speaking at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, Bronfman confessed the music industry deserves its share of the blame for the growth of P2P file sharing: "We inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find--and as a result, of course, consumers won." Bronfman warned mobile operators to avoid making the same mistakes, noting that fewer than 10 percent of consumers presently purchase music via mobile handset--and when they do, it's almost always ringtones. "The sad truth is that most of what consumers are being offered today on the mobile platform is boring, banal and basic," he said. "People want a more interesting form of mobile music content."

According to Bronfman, the answer lies in bundled content, a vision WMG has championed as far back as this summer's BREW 2007 conference. "For years now, Warner Music has been offering consumers at Apple's iTunes store the option to purchase something more than just single tracks, which constitute the mainstay of that store's sales," Bronfman explained. "By packaging a full album into a bundle of music with ringtones, videos and other combinations and variations, we found products that consumers demonstrably valued and were willing to purchase at premium prices. And guess what? We've sold tons of them."

Jay-Z is not a Warner artist, but he shares Bronfman's commitment to selling consumers complete albums. The rapper and Def Jam CEO declined to license his latest opus American Gangster to iTunes because he refused to allow consumers to cherry pick individual tracks for downloading, insisting listeners experience the album as a whole. "No one can dictate to an artist, any artist, how they should express themselves," Jay-Z said in an interview with the New York Post. "Let me make it clear--I don't have a problem with iTunes. It's just our interests were not in line." American Gangster nevertheless debuted atop the charts this week, selling 425,000 copies in the U.S. according to Nielsen SoundScan.

The problem is that Jay-Z is the exception, not the rule--increasingly few contemporary artists conceive their music in terms of album-length experiences, and fewer still have the talent to pull it off. Singles are as dominant now as they were in the pre-Beatles era, which is a huge reason why the iTunes model is so successful: Consumers have been burned too many times to continue wasting money on albums made up of one or two irresistible radio hits padded out with tiresome filler, remixes and skits. You can bundle all the bells and whistles you want--the simple truth is that most consumers aren't going to begin purchasing and downloading complete albums to their mobile handsets until the music itself justifies the investment. Bronfman can complain all he likes about the "boring, banal and basic" mobile music experience, but as long as the major labels continue cranking out pap, he has no one to blame but himself. - Jason