A past visitor to Ideacity, Ted Cohen, spoke with American Public Media’s Marketplace today about recent developments at Warner Music. Hit with a big revenue loss followed by a 3% decline in share price, Warner’s alluding to the fact that they may be overvalued. More importantly they’ve admitted they need to monetize their business model in a different way and have a plan to do so.

Warner plans to strike deals with artists going forward to share revenue across web, promotions, and merchandising channels as well as mass record sales and concert tours. Says Cohen:

…what Warner has announced is a good approach, because it’s going to put them into all those various revenue streams. And as people decide “I like this artist, I want to sign up to their website,” so the label probably has, you know, will have equity in the website. I want to buy a T-shirt, the label will, you know, some type of revenue share on that T-shirt. Now they’re on tour, I buy tickets, again, that’s another revenue stream. So these multiple revenue streams, at it’s most simplistic level, mitigates the risk.

If this sounds like the typical money grab from an insulated music exec, think again. Ted might have been a music suit at one time, but a pioneer within the system. Now he’s just a digital rockstar. For us, though we may sit back and shake our heads at the music-biz’s inflexible nature.. we have to ask ourselves “how different is our business outlook?” . Our wake up call is to look at long tail revenues, find creative ways to monetize in other/new mediums, and shake up our business mix. Else the vast media habits of our audiences are going to have us reeling for revenue opportunities. Or worse, leave us out of business in a few years.

Hope to see you next you next time your around Idea City for SXSW Ted. Til then keep up the good work.