We7 boss praises Apple for iTunes

Jonny Evans, MacWorld, Friday, 22 August 2008

Apple's success with iTunes showed the labels what could be done

The music industry has a huge debt to Apple and the company's efforts have shown labels that online services can be succesful, We7 boss, Steve Purdham, said this week.

We7 is a service which offers users free access to music so long as they are prepared to be exposed to advertising. Users can choose the music they want to play, stream or download tracks, share them with others through their sites and so on, and can also buy the music, if they like.

"We7 is a bridge between the paid-for music world and the world of music piracy, by providing a legal alternative to stealing," Purdham told Distorted Loop. Purdham was a founder investor in the service with Apple Master, Peter Gabriel.

He slams music labels for demonising file-sharing "it's just a technology, like electric light," he said. File-sharing became a major industry problem because the industry itself failed to quickly embrace digital processes in order to provide an alternative.

Apple came up with a strong alternative, he opines. Calling the company a "friend" of the industry, he says, "they made it happen without them the 4 billion tracks that have been bought would have still been downloaded in some matter, so they showed what could be done."

The We7 boss - also an award-winning technology entrepreneur, has a stark warning for label bosses now: "As a technologist I keep putting up the warning that the difference between streaming and downloading will be undetectable within the next iteration of technological change, yet the music industry is hell bent on producing models based on these fading technological differences. That will cause another crisis," he said.