Talking of which, HMV have presented details of their new digital download platform, due to launch on 5 Sep, to representatives from a load of independent labels at an AIM organised bash in lovely London.
Most of what they are proposing seems pretty standard (a pay-as-you-go and a subscription service, bespoke player, regular artist promotions, genre specific content) or predictable (lots and lots of promotion instore), but the main thing HMV bosses seemed to want to communicate was that they want to work very much with the labels and distributors in shaping their service, rather than inflicting a ready-to-go-can't-change-it-now system on the industry.
That is obviously a reference to iTunes who are still being criticised for their lack of understanding of the European music business, and their insistence that the industry falls in line with their way of doing things. HMV say that, while they hope to build an online customer base through their existing relationship with consumers on the high street, they hope to utilise their existing relationships within the industry to build a download platform that helps label's achieve their online goals. Presumably the business plan runs thus - "get the labels onside, and we'll get the premium content before our competitors".
Therefore the key words of the day were 'flexibility' and 'support'. HMV say they will let labels and distributors set their own prices, plus they told independent labels that if they didn't have a distributor that they could get in touch direct and if they still had music un-encoded, their back-end supplier MusicNet would encode tracks for free.