To be honest, in the short term, not much. Bands and artists with the major labels have contracts that pretty much let the publishers move into these new mediums and retain the existing fee structures. The Featured Artist's Coalition (FAC) is looking to set in place the idea that music is leased to publishers for a fixed term, and they have more artistic control over what happens to the music when new technology and markets appear.
The music industry is changing – to put it simply, you can always make money when a resource is in short supply. Selling little silver discs (or vinyl discs, or fragile shellac) is the perfect restricted market. Once people could start to create their own shiny discs, the market started to contract. Now, with the internet able to copy music perfectly from place to place, there is a glut. You can legalise some barriers in the short term, but the walls will come tumbling down soon.
That's why Nokia's Comes with Music is so disruptive. You have to assume that the legal limits of the current distribution licensing model have been reached, so whatever comes next is going to change the model of music – paying per track (or per album) is on the way out. The money is going to be in ancillary licensing, concert tickets and merchandising sales. In short, the sort of activities where having a strong recognition in the act is going to be paramount.
The oncoming storm of online legal music is not going to be about selling, it's going to be about promoting – and with the major labels now potentially in the pocket of every mobile device that ships with Comes with Music, that's a lot of eyeballs they'll be receiving at a much lower cost than traditional advertising. Without fanfare, the labels are moving to fight the next online music war, not repeat the last one.
-- Ewan Spence, Oct 2008