#MIDEM Digital Music Future Panel – Going Cloud Or Getting Cloudy

Steve Mayall, the Managing Director, Music Ally moderated a MidemNet Saturday panel. The participants included: Thomas Hesse of Sony Music Entertainment, Christoph Lange, of German music streamer Simfy, Harry Maloney of Catch Media and Daren Tsui, the CEO & Co-Founder of mSpot. But will 2011 be remembered as the year of cloud music?

The panelists all say yes, but of course these gentleman are all based in the cloud music space.  They point to smartphones and an often superior user experience.  Tsui argued that the best services will merge the music the consumer already owns with a cloud based music. Maloney disagreed, berating Tsui's mSpot for not pre-licensing music from rightsholders (mSpot is talking to labels now) and Sony's Hesse agreed.

The controlled but heated exchange mirrors the greater industry debate on why ITunes and Google have not launched their proposed cloud music locker services.

Legal or not, none of the current streaming music services, including Spotify and his own Simfy have not done a good job of enabling music discovery, stated Lange.  "I have 8 million tracks available and I listen to a coupke of hundred.