O2 want "content producers" to pay for access

Music and movie companies ought to pay internet network operators to deliver stuff to customers who are already paying to receive it, reckons O2 chief executive Ronan Dunne:

"Isn’t it fair to ask those big companies that are fuelling the data surge to help make a contribution to the infrastructure? If consumers alone are paying for the data there is no incentive on content providers to use networks efficiently," he said.

"So we think that part of the solution may come in moving away from the old one-size-fits-all model," said Dunne. "The alternative – that we all continue to pay for unlimited access – would simply end up pricing out the vast majority of our customers, who will continue to have a relatively modest but growing use of data in order to pay for the small proportion of very high users."

Actually, given that most telecoms companies have spent the last decade rolling about in massive vats of profit instead of making their networks keep up with demand, most content producers do their best to make efficient use of networks, as they're aware that there are lots of web users who are sat trying to access their sites via Edge, or contended-to-trickle ADSL.

Paying at the postbox, and paying at the letter box? Even the Post Office hasn't tried to pull that one.

Maybe the MPAA and RIAA shouldn't have been so quick to try and stop individuals redistributing their stuff over torrents - if you're going to be charged at point of upload, a business model where the uploading was spread across millions might have been quite a money saver...

So how is that Michael Jackson super-priority ticket sale going?

Let's ask Twitterfall, shall we?

tbush: Bugger! Frantically trying to get Michael Jackson tickets via the O2 customer site and the site is down. Not cool!

tkei: Wife is trying to buy tickets to see Michael Jackson in concert and the servers have crashed. No surprises there really.

Boborato: Here we go once again for Michael Jackson's tickets... stucked on "Your wait time is approximately 15 minutes or more"...

patrick: Wow after 30 minutes in line for Michael Jackson, the website updated.... now approx 14 minutes wait time :)

monodot: Dumped out of the queue for Michael Jackson tickets after half an hour with a "could not complete your request" msg. Try again....

Of course, it's not all doom and gloom:

DanAYC: has bagged 4 tickets for Michael Jackson at the o2 arena, cant get back to sleep! WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWHHHHHHHHHHHHHHOOOOOOOO HHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOO

Well, if you can count 'getting tickets to see a shambling legend effectively reduced to busking' as some sort of win.

Of course, Twitter is a self-selecting sample, but it seems for every happy customer, there's eight or nine people suffering from Ticketmaster's inability to manage, seemingly, any large scale demand for tickets. Which you might have thought would be their key business.

The following complaint about sponsorship is brought to you by MoanAtSponsors.com

Given that the Millennium Dome is now styled as the O2 Arena, it might seem a little late to complain about the creep of sponsorship across the venue, but this does seem a step too far:

Coca-Cola has signed a sponsorship deal with O2 arena-owners AEG Europe to become “official pouring rights partner” at the London venue.

What, exactly, is a "pouring rights partner", official or otherwise?

The Academy Is now renamed

Not that anyone with any sense ever called the Academy chain venues The Carling Academy chain anyway, but in a spot of horse-trading, the places are all now to be sponsored by O2 instead.

Rather less thrillingly, apparently part of the deal is that O2 customers get "priority" for tickets at the venues. That's exactly what bands need in their audience - a crowd who are there on the basis of what phone network they're with rather than the love of their music.

O2 hangs up on Leeds Festival

Live Nation have decided to can the Leeds O2 Festival after two years of underperformance. The official spin is that they can't do the festival and a series of mini, indoor events as a warm-up for the London Wireless event:

"O2 and Live Nation are determined to bring the flavour of the O2 Wireless Festival to as wide an audience as possible, by arranging a series of pre-festival gigs around the UK during May/June 2008.

"Under the banner of O2 Wireless Weekenders, a number of confirmed artists appearing at the O2 Wireless Festival in Hyde Park, London, will take to the stage in local clubs, giving music fans a unique opportunity to enjoy their respective music.

"Due to this new initiative, we will no longer stage the O2 Wireless Festival in Leeds."

Managers at Harewood House, which has hosted the festival, were downbeat:

"Obviously I'm disappointed that the O2 Festival is not going to have a northern presence this year. It was a popular event and, I believe, was an established date in the festival calendar."

To be honest, we'd completely forgotten it existed, which makes claims of having been established seem a little weak - and since it was at the same venue as the Leeds leg of the Reading Festival, it was totally overshadowed. We're not expecting much mourning.

Hung up on the Spice Girls

It was only a matter of time before the "mobile phone company customers get tickets first" marketing campaigns ran into some backlash grief, and it's arrived this morning as many of the million who registered for, but didn't get, Spice Girls tickets discover that O2 customers were able to pick up half-a-dozen without having to register. Many of which have found their way on to eBay.

The Spice Girls people are rushing to try and move themselves away from the gathering smell of a PR dungheap:

A source close to the Spice Girls camp said that the girls had not been aware of the 02 deal.

The source said: "We had no idea the system could be bypassed in this way and fans who had registered let down."

Oh, really? Now, while we can well believe that Victoria and Geri have no intimate details of the ticket allocation mechanism, but are we really supposed to believe that nobody in the Spice's team had any idea that they'd done a deal which allowed O2 customers to get access to tickets?

Either they're telling the truth - which would suggest that Fuller's management of the comeback is in total disarray, which seems unlikely - or they're, you know, doing that thing where you say something that isn't actually true.

Urge to merge

It seems like just minutes since we were detailing the last iPod/iTunes killer service, and yet here we are with another one. Or, rather, three failed services hoping to pool their - uh - expertise to beat the heck out of iTunes and iPod. Unless it's already been defeated by GBox, in which case, they'll take on that and Zune.

The three partners are MTV and Real, who are merging MTV's unloved Urge and Real's solid-but-sidelined Rhapsody in a deal Verizon Wireless. VW is co-owned by Vodaphone, whose expensive Vodaphone Live content delivery flopped like a sky-diving whale back before we even knew there was an iPod to kill.

The hope is that heavy promotion by MTV will drive take-up, but why MTV's muscle should be able to drive sales to this new venture when it couldn't persuade people to feel the Urge isn't clear. Although since MTV doesn't actually carry much music, it's probably not the best platform to try and connect with music lovers on. If they were selling drawings of dwarves setting fire to themselves, they'd be counting the bucks.

Meanwhile, UK mobile phone companies will be casting a nervous eye at the FT's reports of a deal to bring the iPhone to Europe. In the UK, it's definitely going to be on the O2 network.