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Business News Deals Digital Labels & Publishers
Boinc reportedly signs up Sony and Warner
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 20 October 2011
The previously reported Beyond Oblivion music service, now called Boinc, has deals in place with both Sony and Warner, according to Music Week. Talks are progressing with Universal and EMI and, for the UK, with PRS For Music on the publishing side.
With plans for the new service to go into beta by the start of 2012, it’s also becoming clearer how Boinc will actually work – the whole thing originally sounding rather confusing when founder Adam Kidron arrived on the scene in spring 2010 with millions in start-up capital.
In essence Boinc is a rework of Nokia’s Comes With Music venture that went so horribly wrong, though with many of the Nokia service’s shortcomings addressed. The idea is that mobiles, tablets and PCs come with Boinc pre-installed. Through the Boinc player, users can download any song from the service’s catalogue for free and listen to it as many times as they like.
There will also be a scan-and-match function, so users can automatically populate their Boinc library with any other music currently stored on their device (assuming it’s in the Boinc catalogue) at the click of a button. The service will also alert users to other songs in the Boinc catalogue that relate to tracks they have already downloaded, based on artist, genre and recommendations made by other users, and there will also be a Pandora-style personalised radio option that utilises such information.
Like Comes With Music this will all be paid for by the device manufacturer, who will bundle a Boinc licence fee into the price of their phones, tablets or PCs. Also like Comes With Music, downloads into the Boinc player will be DRMed, so that they only play on the device that came with the software.
However, unlike the Nokia service, all sorts of devices will carry the Boinc application, and when any Bonic-powered device is synced with a user’s account it will be updated with information about what tracks have been previously downloaded, plus other playlist information. There are also plans to sell the Boinc software direct to consumers as an app, so users can make their existing devices work with the new service. All of which makes Boinc much more compelling than ComesWithMusic.
The biggest challenge for Team Boinc though is getting the licences in place and persuading phone and PC manufacturers to pay to install the software. Content owners are paid on a per-play basis, though the amount they receive per play will vary slightly, because the amount of money handed to the music industry from each device is fixed, so the unit price per play presumably varies depending on how much any one user uses the service, all of which makes for a data mindfuck.
But Boinc seems confident its technology will report track plays and royalties due effectively, and argues that the overall revenue potential of any system that could become standard on mobile phones around the world – especially in the Asian market – is so big, it is worth accommodating a slightly different way of billing and reporting for digital music usage.
Although the Sony and Warner deals have not been officially confirmed, we expect a series of announcements about licensing arrangements and technology partners in the coming months.
