Let's force people to take our music
It's hard to know where to start with Universal's rumoured TotalMusic plan, which Business Week has just written about (although as Techdirt points out, Digital Music News first had the story weeks ago). Apparently the idea is to get all the record labels together …
Context & Ripple Effects
Universal's rumored TotalMusic plan — first reported by Digital Music News weeks ago and now picked up by Business Week — would have all the major labels pool their catalogs into a subscription-style service that gets bundled into other companies' products rather than sold track by track. It lands two months after UMG began ramping up DRM-free testing, part of the same push to loosen the per-track economics that iTunes entrenched.
The pickup has been broad for a rumor: Techdirt frames it as a revival of the failed PressPlay/MusicNow subscription era, Ars Technica calls it potentially revolutionary, and Silicon Alley Insider asks whether it is already too little, too late. The skeptic thread across coverage is that consumers end up paying for music whether they want it or not — hence the 'force people to take our music' framing.
First-order effects
- Universal needs the other major labels to sign onto a shared bundle for TotalMusic to work at all, making catalog-wide cooperation — historically elusive among rivals — the immediate gating factor.
- Apple's iTunes store, which Universal has been edging away from via its DRM-free experiments, faces a coalition of labels actively building an alternative distribution channel outside per-track sales.
Second-order effects
- Device makers, ISPs, and carriers become the new gatekeepers: whoever embeds the music fee into hardware or broadband packages captures the customer relationship, shifting pricing power from the point of sale to the point of bundling.
- Labels that stay out of the coalition risk being locked out of the bundled channel while their rivals collect the embedded fees, forcing a join-or-lose-coverage decision across the industry.
Third-order effects
- If the bundle model holds, recorded music's revenue base migrates from units sold to access fees hidden inside other products — a structure where the labels' leverage depends on acting collectively, which invites both coordination problems and potential regulatory scrutiny of a label-wide cartel.
- The consumer backlash visible in the coverage — paying for music you didn't ask for — points toward the same tension that keeps resurfacing in industry proposals to tax devices or connections in exchange for legal access.
The trend: Recorded music is drifting from per-track retail toward bundled access fees embedded in devices and services, with the labels' willingness to act as a bloc setting the pace.