Jan 13th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
According to a piece at Wired, now that digital-rights management seems to be going the way of the dodo, some labels are thinking about watermarking as a replacement. The piece contains this not-totally-comforting comment about the current watermarking process:
“At its most precise, a watermark could encode a unique serial number that a music company could match to the original purchaser. So far, though, labels say they won’t do that… Sony’s and Universal’s DRM-free lineups contain ‘anonymous’ watermarks that won’t trace to an individual.”
So, there you have it. The industry could trace specific tracks to you, but they promise they won’t do that. Reassuring, isn’t it? I’m sure at one point Sony would have promised that it would never install a Trojan virus or back-door rootkit on your computer when you bought one of the company’s CDs too, and we know how that turned out.
I’m trying to imagine a world in which every piece of content was watermarked in some way. What would happen to mashups? How would it affect the principle of fair use? Would Internet service providers start to block specific activity on the Web based on whether a watermark was detected? And would the DMCA-driven “take it down first and ask questions later” policy extend to virtually every kind of content?
Just this afternoon I was listening to The Ongoing History of New Music on 102.1, and host Alan Cross was talking about the “Amen break” — a legendary drum riff that appeared in a song by The Winstons in 1969 and then started showing up in rap and hip-hop samples in the 1980s, and has since appeared in dozens of popular hits.
What would have happened if GC Coleman (the drummer) or Richard Spencer — the composer who holds the rights to the song, and is now a high-school social studies teacher — had a watermark on that sample? Would they have become rich, or would hip-hop have come up with a different sound? Would all the bands that used part of the track have been sued? Would anyone care? I wonder.
Dec 4th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
According to a piece in the New York Times today, MySpace is launching a service called Transmissions, which is aimed at bands and artists who want to use the social network to enlarge their fan base. The site says that it is offering them the opportunity to name a studio of their choice and then record whatever they want — at which point MySpace will stream the content and give users the opportunity to buy copies of the song or the video or both. The company said it sees the feature as being like MTV Live, but with more real-time delivery.
Nov 23rd, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
(This is cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)
More than a month after Radiohead allowed users to download its latest album and pay whatever amount they wanted for it, debate continues about whether the move was just a stunt — one that only an established band with a dedicated fan base could pull off — or whether it was a viable alternative to the traditional record-label model.
The band has yet to say how many people have downloaded the album or what they paid, but that hasn’t stopped others from experimenting with similar moves. Suburban Home Records, an independent label based in Colorado, recently announced that fans can download a free sampler collection of songs from all the bands represented and distributed by the label — and they can share those songs with whoever they wish.
Meanwhile, a new music site known as RCRD LBL launched this week, founded by Engadget editor Peter Rojas and Josh Deutsch of Downtown Records. The site features songs by a variety of up-and-coming artists, which are provided for free download (without any digital-rights-management restrictions), along with widgets that can be embedded in various blogs and other sites that stream RCRD LBL artists. The venture is completely ad-supported.
Another artist inspired by Radiohead (in addition to The Charlatans, another UK band who released their album for download not long after Radiohead did) was Trent Reznor of the Nine Inch Nails, who recently dumped his record label. Reznor has made a number of comments both at public events and on the band’s website about how he was looking forward to developing a “direct relationship” with his fans, and was also instrumental in getting a record by Saul Williams — a record Reznor produced — released online as a free download.
One of the NIN frontman’s attempts to interact more directly with his fans has been stymied, however — at least for now — by the lawsuits between his former label (Universal Music) and YouTube. As Reznor describes in a recent note on the NIN website, fans have been remixing and reworking his songs for the past couple of years, creating interesting works of their own, and the artist wanted to recognize these efforts by setting up a dedicated site at NIN.com for them to upload their files. Then he got a call from Universal.
The label, which owns the rights to Reznor’s previous works, wouldn’t let him go forward with the project because they are afraid it might jeopardize their lawsuit against YouTube and MySpace. The label is arguing that the two sites don’t have protection under the “safe harbour” clause of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and according to Reznor “Universal feels that if they host our remix site, they will be opening themselves up to the accusation that they are sponsoring the same technical violation of copyright they are suing these companies for.”
Nov 5th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
In one of the first comprehensive looks at who paid what for Radiohead’s recent In Rainbows launch, comScore says that more than 1.2 million people used the download site in the month of October, and only 38 per cent of them paid anything for the music. In the United States, according to the traffic measuring company, about 40 per cent of the people who downloaded the album paid for it, and they paid an average of $8 (on a global basis, the average was $4).
There are a couple of ways to look at this. One is skeptically — after all, there were reports that Radiohead had 1.2 million downloads in the first two days, so it’s hard to imagine that it didn’t get substantially more in the next 20 days. As with most traffic-measuring firms, comScore also has a certain methodology that may or may be entirely accurate. It’s not clear what the survey was based on or how the firm got the numbers it is using.
Another way to look at it, however, is that almost 40 per cent of people paid for something they could have had for nothing — and in the U.S., they paid the same amount as it would have cost to buy the album the regular way. That may not be great, but it’s not bad. On an unrelated note, the comScore press release contains a quote from a somewhat unusual music expert: Union Square VC and music fan Fred Wilson.
Oct 8th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Thanks to Mike Arrington of TechCrunch for pointing me to a post by Yahoo vice-president of product development Ian Rogers. In the post — entitled “Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses” — Rogers recaps a recent presentation he made about the business of digital music, and as Mike notes it is well worth reading.
The Yahoo VP — who used to run the pioneering music company Winamp, after dropping out of university for a year in 1995 to tour with the Beastie Boys — describes the early days of the digital music game, and his surprise at the combination of fear, ignorance and loathing with which the music industry greeted the arrival of mp3s and services such as Napster:
“We were naive to be sure, but we were genuinely surprised by the approach. Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.”
Fast-forward to today, and Rogers talks about how Amazon has finally created a music-download service that is actually as easy to use as a p2p network — in fact, easier. Unfortunately, he says, it has taken eight years of wasted effort and millions of dollars in legal fees:
“8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years? How much naivety and hubris did we have when we said, “if we build it they will come”? What did we spend? And what did we gain? We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet.”
As Rogers puts it — before describing the ridiculously convoluted process you have to go through to buy a track and download it through Yahoo Music — “Inconvenience doesn’t scale.” If there is one lesson the music business needs to learn, it is that. It’s true that Apple’s iTunes service has grown to a phenomenal size despite the use of proprietary DRM controls, but think of how much larger the audience for that music could be. As Rogers puts it:
“Platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web are the only way to compete with the control you’ve lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music industry. If your consultants are telling you anything else, they are wrong.”
