Questions, side blows, and a digital Robin Hood

„Music is in the toilet, isn’t it?“ – with tart remarks like this, moderator Steve Blame tried to provoke the participants of the C'n'B opening panels on the future of entertainment business, in this case Fred Casimir (BMG Music Publishing). The verbal fight between Content Allianz and Digitale Gesellschaft e.V. got quite intense yesterday noon...

There are enough open questions regarding the future of the culture and entertainment industry after the digital revolution – answers are rarely, if at all, available: the ideal prerequisite to discuss these issues on a convention such as the C’n’B, the Creativity & Business Convention in Cologne.

Robin Hood of the web?

In the panel „Next Generation of Media Entertainment Business”, the speakers to be quizzed by ex-MTV host Steve Blame were Christian Hasselbring (stern.de), Michael Heise (RTL interactive), Fred Casimir (BMG Rights Management), Peter Kerckhoff (Deutsche Telekom), and publisher Konstantin Neven DuMont, While Hasselbring, Heise, and Kerckhoff couldn’t announce any too exciting entrepreneurial innovations, DuMont explained his plans for a new journalistic web portal which is scheduled to offer a mixture of free and fee content and to be financed by Crowdfunding. That caused Blame to ask polemically: „DuMont, a Robin Hood of the web?“

In the afternoon, the representative of the Content Allianz, Dieter Gorny met Andreas Gebhard, co-founder of the association Digitale Gesellschaft e.V. The discussion quickly heated up – a demonstration of the fact that both have a different opinion about the interpretation of such issues as copyright and „user demands“. This meeting will certainly be just the beginning of a long-term discussion – and it was interesting to see the very start of it.
 

photos: 2010lab.tv