“I think the idea of intellectual property will naturally have to be modified to accommodate the way people exchange ideas and music and information. “The old copyright model has expired. It can no longer exclusively control music.”

Source: Steve Albini: The music industry is a parasite… and copyright is dead – Music Business Worldwide

The Man Who Broke the Music Business

The dawn of online piracy.

By Stephen Witt

via The Man Who Broke the Music Business – The New Yorker.

Then there are the quieter exclusives; already-released music that appears on one service but not another because of the vagaries of record-label licensing. I had considered switching to Tidal permanently after signing up last week, because the interface is nearly identical to Spotify (what’s missing are social-listening capabilities and a desktop app, though it’s possible both features are on their way), and because I like many of the artists who co-own the platform. But I keep running into gaps in its library; Grimes’s excellent 2012 album Visions, for example, and the well-reviewed new release from Jlin, are on Spotify but not Tidal. So what am I supposed to do? Pay for two services? Make up the important gaps by buying albums on iTunes, even though it’s not clear which gaps will be permanent? These aren’t the most pressing problems in the world, but they are, at least, more pronounced inconveniences than the ones streaming consumers have faced in the past few years.

When the new Beats arrives, this state of affairs may get more hectic. In an interview with Billboard, Jay Z made clear that Jimmy Iovine, the legendary record executive who now works with Apple, had been competing with Tidal for celebrity-musician endorsements. This might explain why big names like Taylor Swift and Drake didn’t join their friends Nicki Minaj and Madonna at last week’s press conference; it’s possible they’re aligned with Beats instead. Apple’s huge market reach and deep pockets also means that record companies have another party to negotiate distribution rights with, which gives labels power to ask for more favorable deals. It seems likely that this will lead to the various services’ catalogues becoming patchier, perhaps fluctuating over time à la Netflix’s Friends-one-month-then-gone-the-next offerings. (Probably not as dramatically, though; it’s in labels’ interest, generally, to have their music as widely available as possible.)

via With Tidal, Beyonce and Rihanna Prove That the Golden Age of Streaming Is Over — The Atlantic.

New record company figures out of France suggest that artists receive just 68 cents from every €9.99 monthly music streaming subscription – as major labels keep hold of 73% of payouts from the likes of Spotify.

French recorded music trade body SNEP, whose members include Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music,  ran a recent study with Ernst & Young to discover where money paid by a subscriber to the likes of Spotify or Deezer ultimately ends up.

As you can see below, in terms of the turnover that these platforms generate, the major labels (‘producteurs’) take home the lion’s share, pulling in an average of €4.56-per-subscriber every month after tax.

In terms of the total subscription payment, that’s a 46% share of the spoils.

However, further analysis from MBW gives a more interesting split: who takes home what from the revenues paid out by streaming companies to music rights-holders.

If SNEP’s figures are correct, €6.24 of every €9.99 subscription is paid to music rights-holders – that’s what’s left after tax and the digital platforms’ fee.

That would means the labels keep 73% of payouts from Spotify/Deezer etc.

They’re followed by writers/publishers with a 16% share, and then artists – mostly paid by their labels – who get 11%.

Here’s how that €9.99 turnover payout share looks when you divide it up by percentage – both in terms of total revenue, and the recipients of the €6.24 payout by Spotify/Deezer etc.

How can the majors justify taking home such a huge chunk? Well, SNEP and E&Y’s research doesn’t stop there: they also estimate how much each party brings home in net pre-tax profit.

That means scoping how much major labels, publishers and digital platforms spend on costs – including marketing, making and/or distributing the music in the first place.

Here things get debatable: the net income of labels and digital platforms is, in SNEP/E&Y’s eyes, estimated at just 5% of total revenue.

That, in itself, will be a highly contested figure; many managers would argue that a 95% margin of cost doesn’t ring true on digital platforms devoid of packaging, breakages and returns.

Applying the 5% profit margin to SNEP’s figures changes the percentages of ‘take home’ money quite dramatically, as you can see below.

SNEP and E&Y calculate that labels earn €0.26 net profit for each subscription, while digital platforms earn just €0.10 per €9.99.

These tiny profit margins – if at all accurate – go some way to explaining why even the biggest streaming services find turning a profit no easy task.

It’s also the exact reason why managers want more streaming cash for their artists… and why major labels say they can’t pay it.

 

Major labels keep 73% of Spotify premium payouts – report – Music Business Worldwide.

And if CDs are truly dead, then digital music sales are lying in the adjacent grave. Both categories are down double-digits in the last year, with iTunes sales diving at least 13 percent.

via Digital music sales on iTunes and beyond are now fading as fast as CDs. – The Atlantic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Universal Music claims that a private company providing commissary services to prisons across the US is selling inmates pirated music in the form of mixtapes, and it wants the courts to stop it.

via Pirated music infiltrating US prisons, record label says | Ars Technica.

Pep Vallbe and I presented our study on Alternative compensation systems at the Copyright 4 Innovation conference in the Hague.
More below the fold.
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This paper discusses whether a compensation system (CS) for recorded music – endowing private Internet subscribers with the right to download and use works in return for a fee – would be welfare increasing under current market conditions. It reports the results of a discrete choice experiment conducted with a representative sample of the Dutch population consisting of 4,986 participants. The Internet penetration rate in the Netherlands is 95%, one of the highest worldwide (Eurostat 2014). The Netherlands also entertain a system of levies on copying technology, so that basic elements of a CS should be familiar to many residence.

We find that applied only to recorded music, a mandatory CS could increase the welfare of rights holders and users in the Netherlands by over €600 million per year (over €35 per capita). This far exceeds the current sales value of recorded music of ca. €144 million. Even if a CS were to substitute all of the current sales of recorded music and provided no cost savings, it could simultaneously increase user welfare and rights holder revenues at a price that constitutes a reasonable surplus split. According to our results, this is achieved over a broad range of CS user fees, for example between ca. €1.74 and €9.25 for a CS that is mandatory for all households with Internet subscription.

Read the rest of this entry »

In The Netherlands, people spend about half as much on recorded music as they did in 2003. They spend about twice as much on live music as on CDs, downloads, and streaming.

Other countries have shown this shift from recorded to live revenue, including the UK, but nowhere as dramatically as in The Netherlands. However, consumer spending on music bounced back in 2013, arguably due to increased contributions from streaming services like Spotify:

via Adventures in the Lowlands: Spotify, Social Media and Music Festivals | Spotify Insights.

 

The failure of the Fire Phone has been widely cited as the reason for Amazon’s disastrous quarter, but a darker cloud has settled over the world’s biggest online retailer. The core of Amazon’s business—its original reason for being: selling books and other media—has grown wobbly. The problem: many people no longer want to buy stuff. They’d rather rent.

via Apple and Amazon Have a Problem: People Don’t Want to Buy Stuff Anymore | WIRED.

Why should I even bother to back up my existing data? If I lose it, I’ll just get what I want from the cloud hereafter — I’m 100 percent positive I wouldn’t bother to re-rip all my CDs for the third time. Sure, the cloud is the physical embodiment of the surveillance state. But its siren song works too well to turn it off.

via Big Brother is in your Spotify: How music became the surveillance state’s Trojan horse – Salon.com.

there’s never been an album quite like what Wu-Tang Clan is cooking up. In addition to releasing a 20th anniversary album this summer called A Better Tomorrow, the hip-hop collective also recorded a double album in secret over the last two years — and is only releasing one single copy of it.

via Wu-Tang Clan will sell only a single copy of their new album | The Verge.

Recording industry earns more from fan videos than from official music videosYouTube generates more money for record labels through fan-made videos than official music videos, a global recording industry report says.

via Recording industry earns more from fan videos than from official music videos | Toronto Star.

How to make money from Spotify by streaming silence | Culture | The Guardian.

Their new album Sleepify consists of 10 songs of absolute silence, each clocking in at either 31 or 32 seconds long (tracks need to be listened to for 30 seconds to register as having been played). All they ask is that their fans stream it overnight on repeat while they sleep, in order to produce enough royalties for the band to go on tour.

A second important type of evidence to which the antitrust authorities look in order to gain insight into how the merger will affect future conduct in the sector is to examine past behavior, particularly “industry participants’ behavior in tracking and responding to price changed by some or all rivals”DOJ/FTC, 2010:11.  Here the record is particularly troubling.  The leading firms in the sector have engaged in a repeated pattern of anti-consumer and anticompetitive behavior.  In the mid-1990s, the major record labels engaged in two practices that imposed severe harm on consumers and competition.  They eliminated the sale of singles, even though the CD was well-suited for the sale of singles.  They adopted a price fixing scheme to keep album prices high, even though the new compact disc CD format dramatically lowered their costs and discounters had lowered prices.  In short, they restricted output and raised prices, forcing consumers to unnecessarily purchase hundreds of millions of overpriced CDs to get the music that they wanted.  An antitrust consent decree ended price fixing FTC: 2000 and digital distribution made the sale of singles a compelling alternative. Nestor, 2012  1.  

via The Role of Antitrust in Protecting Competition, Innovation, and Consumers as the Digital Revolution Matures: The Case against the Universal-EMI Merger and E-Book Price Fixing | Public Knowledge.

Excellent study on the Dutch file-sharing scene.

highlights:
About one in five people who download from illegal sources had in the past year bought a CD or LP that they had previously downloaded from an illegal source. The same was found for DVDs, Blurays and for printed books. The opposite – downloading a book from an illegal source that had been previously purchased in print – is also very common. This shows that for a substantial group of
consumers printed books and e-books are complementary.

People who download from an illegal source are more frequently also consumers from legal sources, and they are more likely go to concerts and the cinema and to purchase derived products Respondents who had downloaded music, films, series, games and books from illegal sources in the past year were more likely to use legal channels as well. Only in the case of music purchased on CDs or LPs, however, no difference is observed between those who had on occasion downloaded from an illegal source in the past year and people who had never done so. The differences are particularly marked in the case of paid-for downloading and streaming from a legal source: respondents who have never downloaded from an illegal source are also little inclined to pay for online content. The survey also showed that people who had, on occasion, downloaded from an illegal source in the past year bought more music and film merchandise and went to concerts or the cinema more often.

The survey shows that roughly one third to half of the respondents would not be interested in the latest download from an illegal source if it would not be available for free. The rest have an average maximum willingness to pay that is close to the normal selling price. Similarly, about one third of all book readers are interested in and willing to pay to borrow e-books from a library or bookshop, there being a slight preference for libraries and for a flat rate per year rather than a price per title borrowed.

http://www.ivir.nl/publications/poort/Filesharing_2012.pdf’

Excellent study on the Dutch file-sharing scene.

highlights:
About one in five people who download from illegal sources had in the past year bought a CD or LP that they had previously downloaded from an illegal source. The same was found for DVDs, Blurays and for printed books. The opposite – downloading a book from an illegal source that had been previously purchased in print – is also very common. This shows that for a substantial group of
consumers printed books and e-books are complementary.

People who download from an illegal source are more frequently also consumers from legal sources, and they are more likely go to concerts and the cinema and to purchase derived products Respondents who had downloaded music, films, series, games and books from illegal sources in the past year were more likely to use legal channels as well. Only in the case of music purchased on CDs or LPs, however, no difference is observed between those who had on occasion downloaded from an illegal source in the past year and people who had never done so. The differences are particularly marked in the case of paid-for downloading and streaming from a legal source: respondents who have never downloaded from an illegal source are also little inclined to pay for online content. The survey also showed that people who had, on occasion, downloaded from an illegal source in the past year bought more music and film merchandise and went to concerts or the cinema more often.

The survey shows that roughly one third to half of the respondents would not be interested in the latest download from an illegal source if it would not be available for free. The rest have an average maximum willingness to pay that is close to the normal selling price. Similarly, about one third of all book readers are interested in and willing to pay to borrow e-books from a library or bookshop, there being a slight preference for libraries and for a flat rate per year rather than a price per title borrowed.

http://www.ivir.nl/publications/poort/Filesharing_2012.pdf’

Average revenue streams

For the major record labels the above pie chart would look quite different, as they mostly rely on revenue from music sales. This also explains their strong views against unauthorized file-sharing.

via Music Sales Are Just 6% of Average Musician’s Income | TorrentFreak.Average revenue streams

For the major record labels the above pie chart would look quite different, as they mostly rely on revenue from music sales. This also explains their strong views against unauthorized file-sharing.

via Music Sales Are Just 6% of Average Musician’s Income | TorrentFreak.

Though his recent statements are unlikely to shock the many young music fans who grew up downloading albums and songs illegally, many were surprised when Neil Young said he didnt really mind piracy.”It doesnt affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio,” Young said in January. “I look at the radio as gone … Piracy is the new radio. Thats how music gets around … Thats the radio. If you really want to hear it, lets make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.”

via Neil Young: Piracy Is The New Radio, Way To Get Your Music Heard.Though his recent statements are unlikely to shock the many young music fans who grew up downloading albums and songs illegally, many were surprised when Neil Young said he didnt really mind piracy.”It doesnt affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio,” Young said in January. “I look at the radio as gone … Piracy is the new radio. Thats how music gets around … Thats the radio. If you really want to hear it, lets make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.”

via Neil Young: Piracy Is The New Radio, Way To Get Your Music Heard.

A leaked presentation from the RIAA shows that online file-sharing isn’t the biggest source of illegal music acquisition in the U.S. The confidential data reveals that 65% of all music files are “unpaid” but the vast majority of these are obtained through offline swapping. The report further shows that cyberlockers such as Megaupload are only a marginal source of pirated music.

In April, one of the RIAA’s key employees informed a group of music industry insiders about the upcoming six-strikes anti-piracy scheme in the U.S. TorrentFreak received a copy of the presentation sheets which include a rather interesting chart on where people get their music files from.

The data presented by the RIAA comes from NPD’s Digital Music Study but has never been published in public in its current form. While NPD’s press release mentioned a decline in music acquisition through P2P file-sharing and hard drive trading, these numbers were not placed in a larger context.

A strange decision, because the chart below is of critical importance for the debate on music piracy.

As it turns out, two thirds of all music acquired in the U.S. is unpaid. However, offline trading is a much bigger source of unpaid music than online piracy. Of all “unpaid” music less than 30 percent comes from P2P file-sharing or cyberlockers.

Music sources

In total, 15 percent of all acquired music (paid + unpaid) comes from P2P file-sharing and just 4 percent from cyberlockers. Offline swapping in the form of hard drive trading and burning/ripping from others is much more prevalent with 19 and 27 percent respectively.

This leads to the, for us, surprising conclusion that more than 70% of all unpaid music comes from offline swapping.

The chart is marked “confidential” which suggests that the RIAA doesn’t want this data to be out in the open. This is perhaps understandable since the figures don’t really help their crusade against online piracy.

The RIAA is lobbying hard for legislation and voluntary agreements to deal with the online piracy problem, an issue that might seem less severe in the chart above.

While not insignificant, the fact that less than one in five music acquisitions can be traced back to online file-sharing isn’t really that convincing – especially when one takes into account that only a tiny fraction represent a lost sale.

Even if all online music piracy disappeared tomorrow, more than half of all music acquisitions would be unpaid.

But maybe the RIAA will go after these offline swappers next. The TSA could perform piracy scans of travelers’ computer equipment, for example. Or perhaps schools could search MP3 players, phones and computers of their students for unpaid music?

Just a thought.

More revealing findings from the RIAA will be published soon.

via RIAA: Online Music Piracy Pales In Comparison to Offline Swapping | TorrentFreak.A leaked presentation from the RIAA shows that online file-sharing isn’t the biggest source of illegal music acquisition in the U.S. The confidential data reveals that 65% of all music files are “unpaid” but the vast majority of these are obtained through offline swapping. The report further shows that cyberlockers such as Megaupload are only a marginal source of pirated music.

In April, one of the RIAA’s key employees informed a group of music industry insiders about the upcoming six-strikes anti-piracy scheme in the U.S. TorrentFreak received a copy of the presentation sheets which include a rather interesting chart on where people get their music files from.

The data presented by the RIAA comes from NPD’s Digital Music Study but has never been published in public in its current form. While NPD’s press release mentioned a decline in music acquisition through P2P file-sharing and hard drive trading, these numbers were not placed in a larger context.

A strange decision, because the chart below is of critical importance for the debate on music piracy.

As it turns out, two thirds of all music acquired in the U.S. is unpaid. However, offline trading is a much bigger source of unpaid music than online piracy. Of all “unpaid” music less than 30 percent comes from P2P file-sharing or cyberlockers.

Music sources

In total, 15 percent of all acquired music (paid + unpaid) comes from P2P file-sharing and just 4 percent from cyberlockers. Offline swapping in the form of hard drive trading and burning/ripping from others is much more prevalent with 19 and 27 percent respectively.

This leads to the, for us, surprising conclusion that more than 70% of all unpaid music comes from offline swapping.

The chart is marked “confidential” which suggests that the RIAA doesn’t want this data to be out in the open. This is perhaps understandable since the figures don’t really help their crusade against online piracy.

The RIAA is lobbying hard for legislation and voluntary agreements to deal with the online piracy problem, an issue that might seem less severe in the chart above.

While not insignificant, the fact that less than one in five music acquisitions can be traced back to online file-sharing isn’t really that convincing – especially when one takes into account that only a tiny fraction represent a lost sale.

Even if all online music piracy disappeared tomorrow, more than half of all music acquisitions would be unpaid.

But maybe the RIAA will go after these offline swappers next. The TSA could perform piracy scans of travelers’ computer equipment, for example. Or perhaps schools could search MP3 players, phones and computers of their students for unpaid music?

Just a thought.

More revealing findings from the RIAA will be published soon.

via RIAA: Online Music Piracy Pales In Comparison to Offline Swapping | TorrentFreak.

“IFPI has inadvertently made available its own confidential internal report, penned by none other than IFPIs chief anti-piracy officer, which details its strategy against online piracy for major recording labels across the globe. The document, 30-pages long, talks about file sharing sites, torrents, cyberlockers, phishing attacks, expectations from Internet service providers, mp3 sites and a lot more. The document is a global view representation of IFPIs problems, current and future threats, and the industrys responses to them.”A few tactics: shutting down music services, requiring file lockers filter uploads or be shut down interesting, since the DMCAs one good provision is the safe harbor, and proactive filtering could mean losing that protection, lobbying for DNS blocking legislation, pressuring ISPs into extra-legally enforcing their will, disrupting payment processing for pirate sites through blacklists, and providing “training built around real world experiences and challenges rather than focusing on theory” on copyright law to judges and legal bodies.

via Leaked IFPI Report Details Anti-Piracy Strategy – Slashdot.“IFPI has inadvertently made available its own confidential internal report, penned by none other than IFPIs chief anti-piracy officer, which details its strategy against online piracy for major recording labels across the globe. The document, 30-pages long, talks about file sharing sites, torrents, cyberlockers, phishing attacks, expectations from Internet service providers, mp3 sites and a lot more. The document is a global view representation of IFPIs problems, current and future threats, and the industrys responses to them.”A few tactics: shutting down music services, requiring file lockers filter uploads or be shut down interesting, since the DMCAs one good provision is the safe harbor, and proactive filtering could mean losing that protection, lobbying for DNS blocking legislation, pressuring ISPs into extra-legally enforcing their will, disrupting payment processing for pirate sites through blacklists, and providing “training built around real world experiences and challenges rather than focusing on theory” on copyright law to judges and legal bodies.

via Leaked IFPI Report Details Anti-Piracy Strategy – Slashdot.

I never went through the transition from physical to digital. Im almost 21, and since I first began to love music Ive been spoiled by the Internet.I am an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. Ive only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.I wish I could say I miss album packaging and liner notes and rue the decline in album sales the digital world has caused. But the truth is, Ive never supported physical music as a consumer. As monumental a role as musicians and albums have played in my life, Ive never invested money in them aside from concert tickets and T-shirts.

via I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With : All Songs Considered Blog : NPR.I never went through the transition from physical to digital. Im almost 21, and since I first began to love music Ive been spoiled by the Internet.I am an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. Ive only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.I wish I could say I miss album packaging and liner notes and rue the decline in album sales the digital world has caused. But the truth is, Ive never supported physical music as a consumer. As monumental a role as musicians and albums have played in my life, Ive never invested money in them aside from concert tickets and T-shirts.

via I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With : All Songs Considered Blog : NPR.

We recently posted an interesting study talking about how greater file sharing of leaked albums had a specific (if small) causal impact that resulted in higher sales. I thought it was an interesting area of research, though one where a lot more work needs to be done. Following that, however, there was an interesting exchange on Twitter, mainly by former Warner Music exec Ethan Kaplan, who didn’t seem to think the concept was controversial at all — and instead that it was obvious.

via Former Record Label Exec Ethan Kaplan: Duh, Of Course More File Sharing Leads To More Sales | Techdirt.We recently posted an interesting study talking about how greater file sharing of leaked albums had a specific (if small) causal impact that resulted in higher sales. I thought it was an interesting area of research, though one where a lot more work needs to be done. Following that, however, there was an interesting exchange on Twitter, mainly by former Warner Music exec Ethan Kaplan, who didn’t seem to think the concept was controversial at all — and instead that it was obvious.

via Former Record Label Exec Ethan Kaplan: Duh, Of Course More File Sharing Leads To More Sales | Techdirt.

“Just 30 minutes after Whitney Houston died, Sony Music raised the price of Houston’s greatest hits album, ‘Ultimate Collection,’ on iTunes and Amazon. Many technologists, including chairman of the NY Tech Meetup Andrew Rasiej, suggests that Sony should be boycotted for the move. In a tweet, Rasiej wrote, ‘Geez Sony raised price on Whitney Houston’s music 30 min after death was announced. #FAIL…We should boycott Sony.'”

via Sony Raises Price of Whitney Houston’s Music 30 Minutes After Death – Slashdot.“Just 30 minutes after Whitney Houston died, Sony Music raised the price of Houston’s greatest hits album, ‘Ultimate Collection,’ on iTunes and Amazon. Many technologists, including chairman of the NY Tech Meetup Andrew Rasiej, suggests that Sony should be boycotted for the move. In a tweet, Rasiej wrote, ‘Geez Sony raised price on Whitney Houston’s music 30 min after death was announced. #FAIL…We should boycott Sony.'”

via Sony Raises Price of Whitney Houston’s Music 30 Minutes After Death – Slashdot.

A short piece on transborder ethnic piratical networks on mindennapi.hu
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ReDigi bills itself as “The World’s First Online Marketplace For Used Digital Music,” but the RIAA is not impressed. Categorically rejecting the “first sale” doctrine as a safe harbor, the Recording Industry Association of America has sent the ReDigi digital music resale site a letter (PDF, hat tip: Cnet) that effectively demands that the company abandon its business and open its sales records to RIAA’s lawyers. Cease and desist your “infringing activities,” the missive warns. But that’s the least of it.

via RIAA wants ReDigi out of the business of selling “used” iTunes tracks.

In 2011, art and culture exist as DIGITAL MEDIA, and it is naive to think it will not be leaked or downloaded or shared or “stolen” repeatedly. It is just a fact of life. People need to decide for themselves if they want to steal or not. And if they DO then they can decide if and how to follow up with support. If you download leaked music, and you enjoy it, why not go buy an official copy? It seems fair. You are not obligated to do this, it is just a choice. Do you enjoy the artist? IF YOU ENJOY, THEN SUPPORT. If not, then simply carry on. It takes a LOT of time and energy for artists to create their craft, and even more time and energy for them to prepare a release, and to distribute it. You can support what you love in many ways, and in a sense you vote with your dollar.

via Dubstep Producer Bassnectar Talks Piracy, Leaks And Making It Easy For Your Fans To Support You | Techdirt.

Book chapter on the reason d’etre of cultural black markets.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Myself and a few friends were very angry that certain people only seem to want to profit from recordings like the Toy album, so when we saw the eBay auction and heard of someone else selling discs for $55, I decide to upload it and give it away,” Brigstow told TorrentFreak.

via Unreleased Bowie on BitTorrent: Pirate Sabotage Turned Cultural Blessing | TorrentFreak.

The injunction was the result of a lengthy and ongoing litigation process which dates back to 2006, and soon after it was awarded the record labels filed a claim to recoup damages said to have been caused by LimeWire. The labels calculated that the company behind the popular file-sharing client owes them up to a billion dollars.

The case dragged on and in recent weeks dozens of documents were submitted to the court in a noteworthy side-battle. To get to the bottom of how the music industry sets up licensing deals with other Internet companies, LimeWire subpoenaed internal emails from Apple, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, MySpace and others.

Thus far a quarter million pages of emails have been collected, leading LimeWire to draw some interesting conclusions. Among other things, they found that unauthorized downloads actually boosted the revenue of music labels, and that their income took a dive when LimeWire shut down.

via LimeWire Settles With Record Labels, Still Faces $1 Billion Claim | TorrentFreak.

http://www.itworld.com/%5Bprimary-term%5D/138187/music-execs-stressed-over-free-streaming

Free streaming services are replacing piracy as the chief culprit of music industry revenue loss in the minds of fiscally frustrated executives, if a number of panel discussions at a New York digital music conference are any indication.

People are listening to more music than ever before, but they are paying less for it, noted Russ Crupnick, a president at the analyst firm NPD Group, speaking at the Digital Music Forum East conference, held Thursday in New York.

Crupnick noted that the average consumer listened to music 19.7 hours a week in 2010, up from 18.5 hours per week in 2009. But at the same time, consumers have been buying less music. In 2010, only 50 percent of consumers purchased music, by either buying a CD or paying for a downloadable music track, down from 70 percent in 2006.

“We have lost 20 million buyers in just five years,” Crupnick said. Moreover, only about 14 percent of buyers account for 56 percent of revenue for the recording industry.

“Consumers have flipped us the bird,” Crupnick concluded, adding that the lost sales has thus far not been made up yet by other forms of revenue, such as concerts or merchandise sales.

The music industry has long expected that sales of music CDs would decline, as consumers move their libraries to computers and portable listening devices. Digital sales, however, have not made up for the shortfall on CD sales over the past decade. Last year, digital sales accounted for about 23 percent of all music sales, which is up only modestly from 14 percent in 2006, Crupnick said.

“We never really made the digital transformation,” he said.

The reasons behind this sales decline have been routinely debated at this conference over the past decade, the panelists noted. In years past, music executives put the blame on digital music piracy — the easy and free sharing of music with Internet software like BitTorrent — for eroding sales of recorded music.

At this year's conference, however, concern centered on the growing influence of free streaming Internet services, such as Pandora, MySpace, Spotify and even YouTube. Music listeners deploy YouTube as a streaming service, picking the songs they want to hear and minimizing the browser window, noted Eric Garland, who is the CEO and founder of BigChampagne, a media tracking company.

via Music execs stressed over free streaming | ITworld.

Slashdot

“The Guardian reports that Britain’s two biggest record labels, Sony and Universal, plan to beat music piracy by making new singles available for sale on the day they first hit the airwaves hoping the effort will encourage young people to buy songs they can listen to immediately rather than copying from radio broadcasts online. Songs used to receive up to six weeks radio airplay before they were released for sale, a practice known as ‘setting up’ a record. ‘What we were finding under the old system was the searches for songs on Google or iTunes were peaking two weeks before they actually became available to buy, meaning that the public was bored of — or had already pirated — new singles,’ says David Joseph. Sony, which will start the ‘on air, on sale’ policy simultaneously with Universal next month, agreed that the old approach was no longer relevant in an age where, according to a spokesman for the music major, ‘people want instant gratification.'”

WSJ.com

“We don’t have to rush out records that don’t work for the sake of making money,”

[origo]

 

– Becslése szerint mekkora bevételtől eshet el az illegális letöltések miatt?

– A  Fehér Sólyom nevű kiadóm csak a saját kiadványaimat jelenteti meg, ennél kisebb, egyszerűbb vállalkozás aligha létezik. Négy év munkája van A katona imája című új albumban, sok érzelmi és anyagi ráfordítás: vonóskari felvételek, nagy stúdió, rengeteg munka, aki akarja, csaknem kétórányi werkfilmben ellenőrizheti le a videómegosztókon vagy a CD-hez adott ajándék DVD-n. Ha a saját munkát nem számolom, a konkrét anyagi ráfordítás valahol hatezer példánynál térülne meg. Viszonylag egyszerű belátni, hogy nem ez a világ legnagyobb biznisze. Nem lehet megmondani, hányan töltik le hobbiból, esetleg kifejezetten károkozási szándékkal az anyagot. Mindenesetre biztos, hogy potenciális vásárlók is töltenek: nem lehet nem észrevenni, hogy milyen észvesztő mértékben zsugorodik évről-évre a lemezpiac. Ebben a torrentezés szerepe letagadhatatlan, baromi nagy kárt okoz, elsősorban olyan kis országok zenészeinek, előadóinak, mint Magyarország. Pásztor László, a Neoton gitárosa és az mTon kiadó vezetője ezt úgy fogalmazta meg, hogy a torrentezés elvégezte itthon azt a piszkos munkát, amit a kilencvenes évek kazetta- és CD-hamisítóinak nem sikerült.

– Ön követi az új technológiákat, Blu-ray-en is jelent meg koncertfelvétele, zenéi elérhetők a Songo.hu online zeneáruházban is. A hagyományos lemezekhez képest milyen eladásokat hoz a legális online zenebolt? Milyen ütemezés szerint kerülnek fel a zenéi a szájtra, ahol ez az új album még nem elérhető?

– Valóban mi adtuk ki az első magyar zenei Blu-ray-t, de részemről nem lesz folytatás, mert rengeteg pénzt költöttünk rá, és egyszerűen nem érte meg: nagyon nem! A legális zeneboltokból elenyésző, szinte mikroszkopikus a bevétel, mert esélyük sincs versenyezni a torrentezéssel. Ha ötszáz forint lenne egy album, a letöltő akkor se venné meg, mert az pont ötszázzal drágább, mint a torrent.

– A ProArt az ön albumát jelölte meg tömeges szerzőijog-sértést elkövető magyar torrentoldalak ellen tett feljelentésében. Egyes szájtokon a lefoglalások hatására olyan belső szabályzatot hoztak, hogy tilos magyar zenéket megosztani, a külföldi kiadványok terjesztése azonban továbbra is rendben van. Mit gondol, egy ilyen lépés segíthet valamelyest a hazai előadók helyzetén?

A fájlcserélők világával foglalkozó Asva.info blog a hétvégén számolt be arról, hogy pénteken lefoglalták két hazai, Bittorrent technológiát használó letöltőoldal, a Deathlord és a BitBarát szervereit. A ProArt szerzőijog-védő szervezet igazgatójától, Horváth Pétertől megtudtuk, hogy a múlt héten valóban feljelentést tettek három hazai Bittorrent-oldal, a fent említett két szájt, illetve egy BigTorrent nevű, péntek óta ugyancsak nem elérhető oldal ellen. Horváth Péter szerint a szövetség folyamatosan figyeli a magyar letöltőoldalakat, és jelzi ezek üzemeltetőinek a jogsértéseket. A múlt héten perbe fogott oldalakon hosszú ideje tapasztalják ezeket. Bár a feljelentésben Ákos múlt héten megjelent A katona imája című albumát hozták fel példaként, a ProArt igazgatója szerint ez csupán egy volt az oldalakon elérhető számtalan jogsértő tartalom közül. Miután az Asva.info még szombaton hírül adta, hogy valószínűleg az új Ákos-album miatt zajlott a szerverek lefoglalása, a hétvégén a warezoldalak fórumain sokan kígyót-békát kiáltottak az énekesre az állítólagosan tőle eredeztethető rendőrségi akció miatt: egyes torrentoldalakon “csak azért is” elkezdték terjeszteni Ákos új albumát. Érdekes módon másutt tiltólistára került a lemez digitális kópiája, bizonyos letöltőoldalakra pedig a hétvége óta nem szabad feltölteni magyar előadó zenéit.

– Azt beszélik, hogy a torrentoldalak, ha levelet kapnak egy magyar előadótól, akkor kérésre leveszi az anyagait. Ehhez persze állandóan ezeken az oldalakon kéne lógniuk a zenészeknek. Ehelyett a legtöbb magyar előadó a kicsiktől a nagyokig felhatalmazza a ProArtot, hogy ha a tartalmaikat megosztva látja a szervezet a torrentoldalakon, akkor azokat távolíttassa el azokról. Amikor megkérdeztem a szervezetet, hogy miért az én albumomra való hivatkozással koboztak el szervereket, azt a választ kaptam, hogy ezeket az oldalakat még augusztusban felszólítottákl a jogsértések megszüntetésére, azok pedig nagy ívben tettek az egészre. A feljelentést is úgy írták meg, hogy több zenei tartalom érhető el az oldalon az én albumomon kívül is. A ProArt is örül, ha megoszthatja a felelősséget és egy széles körben ismert előadó lemezére hivatkozhat egy feljelentésben. Az igazsághoz hozzátartozik, hogy egyes szájtokon valóban leállították a magyar zenék megosztását. Más szájtokon meg engem kiáltottak ki első számú közellenségnek, arra a népmesei egyszerűségű kitalációra hivatkozva, hogy én feljelentettem, elkoboztam a torrentoldalakat. Úgy tűnik, nem sok embert érdekel, hogy ez kamu, és hogy sem szándékom, sem hatalmam nincs ilyesmire – viszont újra lehet böködni az Ákos-alakú vudubabát. Ezeken a fájlmegosztókon dollármilliókért készült filmek Blu-ray-kiadásait tölthetik le az emberek ingyen. Éppen az én 3990 forintos CD-m miatt tiltottak le szervereket? Ez komoly? Aki ezt beveszi, az azt is elhiszi, hogy Gyurcsány Ferenc gyerekeket talál az utcán. Ami ezután következett, az a hazai torrentezésben egy egészen új, figyelemreméltó elem. Egy magyar produkcióval szemben szervezetten, direkt károkozási szándékkal lépett fel a torrentezők egy csoportja (akik a lefoglalásokat követően szándékosan kezdték terjeszteni Ákos új albumát – a szerk.): ezt egyértelműen megfogalmazták. Az csak ráadás, hogy hamis vád alapján tették-teszik mindezt. Ezzel sajnos vége az “ártatlan fájlmegoszás” imidzsének.

– Ön min hallgat zenét? Előfordult már, hogy egy számot, albumot nem tudott beszerezni semmilyen legális formában, ezért letöltötte mondjuk torrentről?

– Nincs különbség, csak jobban indokolható. Ódivatú srác vagyok, CD-n hallgatok zenét, ha mp3-at töltöttem le, akkor is CD-re írtam ki. Ritkaságokat régen a lemezboltból lehetett beszerezni: ma azért nem lehet, mert a lemezboltok bezártak és a nagyobb műszaki boltok lemezosztályai is egyre kisebbek. A minden képzeletet meghaladó fájlmegosztás miatt néha már az sem tud lemezt venni, aki szeretne, mert egyszerűen nincsen hol.

– Nem jogilag, erkölcsileg kérdezzük ezt is: elítélendőnek tartod, hogy ha megvannak az albumaid kazettán vagy cd-n, és letöltöm őket warezszájtról mp3-ban?

– Teljesen hipotetikus kérdés. Minek töltenéd le azt, ami már megvan? Aki ma letölt, az nem vásárol. Nem olyan bonyolult ez.

– Ön szerint megoldaná a hazai lemezipar problémáját, ha nem lehetne torrentezni?

– Ha nem lehetne ingyen letölteni azt, ami az alkotóknak pénzbe kerül, az elég sok mindent megoldana, igen.

 

Music Ally | Blog Archive

Brindley from Music Ally now (I feel like Paxman on University Challenge). He talks about where should the crackdown on piracy come – suing your own consumers hasn’t worked in markets like the US. “When you start taking action against them, that tends to lead to some pretty bad PR,” he says. And he points out that taking action against the file-sharing sites hasn’t worked well either. Yet pressuring the intermediary – ISPs – is dangerous. “When you start playing around with people’s connections… that’s a pretty severe intervention.” He thinks that actually cutting people off from accessing the internet in their own homes – “when that’s going to become just like electricity, water – a basic human right… I’m not sure it’s worth that battle

GIGAOM

There are still significant gaps in the catalog.
I still can’t merge things I own with things I just want to stream.
Ownership of music still provides a smoother listening experience.
I can only share music with fellow subscribers.
I can still hear things that I don’t already own without paying for them.

Google shuts down music blogs without warning | Music | guardian.co.uk

In what critics are calling “musicblogocide 2010”, Google has deleted at least six popular music blogs that it claims violated copyright law. These sites, hosted by Google’s Blogger and Blogspot services, received notices only after their sites – and years of archives – were wiped from the internet.

“We’d like to inform you that we’ve received another complaint regarding your blog,” begins the cheerful letter received by each of the owners of Pop Tarts, Masala, I Rock Cleveland, To Die By Your Side, It’s a Rap and Living Ears. All of these are music-blogs – sites that write about music and post MP3s of what they are discussing. “Upon review of your account, we’ve noted that your blog has repeatedly violated Blogger’s Terms of Service … [and] we’ve been forced to remove your blog. Thank you for your understanding.”

TorrentFreak

Lawyers have presented their final arguments in the trial of Alan Ellis. The prosecution slammed the ex-OiNK admin, saying that the site was set up with dishonest and profiteering intentions right from the start. The defense tore into IFPI and countered by calling Ellis an innovator with talents to be nurtured. Today the jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty, and Ellis walked free.

After a very long wait of more than two years, last week the OiNK trial got underway with the prosecution making their case against Alan Ellis. This week it was the turn of the defense and yesterday both sides had the opportunity to summarize their positions by submitting their closing arguments to the jury at Teesside Crown Court.

Peter Makepeace, prosecuting, naturally painted an extremely negative picture, labeling the Pink Palace as a place designed from the ground up as a personal money-making machine for Ellis.

“21 million downloads. 600,000-plus albums. £300,000. This was a cash cow, it was perfectly designed to profit him and it was as dishonest as the day is long,” said Makepeace.

It is common sense to come to the conclusion that Oink was dishonest, claimed the prosecution lawyer, adding that Ellis knows that it’s dishonest “to promote, encourage and facilitate criminal activity,” and accusing him of telling the jury “persistent, cunning, calculated lies.”

It would, of course, be dishonest to promote “criminal activity”, but Mr Makepeace should be very well aware that the activity engaged in by OiNK’s users is covered under civil law.

Switching momentarily from criticism to praise and then back again, Makepeace said that the OiNK website was a “wonderful machine” for sharing music but noted that while the site had a really good brand name, it was a brand synonymous with “ripping off music.”

University of London professor Birgitte Andersenok gave evidence earlier in the trial, stating that file-sharing didn’t hurt the music industry and led to more sales. Mr Makepeace trashed her evidence.

“It’s nonsense, it’s flannel, it’s verbiage, it’s garbage,” he told the Court.

For the defense, Alex Stein said that Ellis had never knowingly acted dishonestly and that in 2004 when OiNK was launched, it was a “brave new world” on the Internet.

“In many societies he’d be an innovator, a creator, a Richard Branson. His talent would be moulded, not crushed by some sort of media organization,” he said.

The media organization being referred to by Stein was the IFPI, who he said had never requested that OiNK be shut down, and had instead “sat and watched.”

Gazette Live reports that Stein went on to launch a scathing attack on the IFPI.

“They used this site. Their own members used this site to promote their own music and now they’re crushing him. Maybe he grew too big for them, maybe they’ve taken a different marketing approach. I don’t know. But it was decided that this site should be taken down.

“All of us here are being manipulated to some sort of marketing strategy by the IFPI. If anybody’s acting dishonestly it’s them,” he said.

At the end of the two week trial the jury returned a unanimous verdict (12 to 0). Alan Ellis is not guilty of Conspiracy to Defraud the music industry. He walked out of Teesside Crown Court a free man today, his name cleared.

The verdict cannot be appealed and Ellis can finally put the past behind him and move on.

ArsTechnica

Is Sweden, the only country to have sent a member of the Pirate Party
to the European Parliament, finally giving up its swashbuckling ways?

When Sweden’s IPRED anti-piracy law
went into effect earlier this year, Internet traffic across the country
plummeted overnight—a sign that P2P users, fearing exposure at last,
were abandoning their existing copyright infringement tools. The Pirate
Bay defendants were found guilty by a Swedish court earlier this year, and the site’s ISP are now under assault by the music and movie industries.

The music business insists that the measure are working. Music’s major
labels say that sales of digital downloads are up 18 percent in the
first nine months of 2009 in Sweden.

Ludvig Werner, head of the trade group IFPI Sweden, told the UK’s Guardian newspaper
that it didn’t matter if people still wanted to pirate; the point was,
they were doing less of it. “It’s like speeding, put up cameras and
people will start to ease off the gas pedal. Even if it doesn’t change
the attitudes, they find legal alternatives because they don’t want to
get caught,” said Werner.

Dueling explanations

As with most statistics in the Copyright Wars, these are hard to
evaluate. Digital music sales are up, but has copyright infringement
also dropped? IFPI doesn’t know.

In fact, there are reasons to suspect that legal actions like IPRED
aren’t the only drivers of Sweden’s uptick in music sales. As we reported yesterday,
UK-based music label EMI has reported a worldwide revenue increase of
4.6 percent in its recorded music business through 2009 to date; surely
this can’t just be chalked up to tougher antipiracy laws in small
countries like Sweden and South Korea?

And Swedish Internet traffic data bounced back soon after the IPRED law came into force and now exceeds the level from the beginning of 2009.

Credit also has to go the music industry for licensing its music far
more widely, often to innovative Scandinavian companies like Spotify
and Nokia, which is offering the Comes With Music plan on selected
phones.

But who knows? Perhaps IPRED and The Pirate Bay prosecution
were real drivers of the change in Sweden; we’ve certainly seen surveys
in the UK that suggest online infringers will alter their behavior once
the veil of anonymity is stripped away (which was the point of IPRED).

If true, the data could help prove a music industry mantra: tougher enforcement can yield results (i.e., battling the pirates is not a hopeless endeavor).

On the other hand, it seems to suggest that only minimal legal
tools are needed. IPRED made it possible for rightsholders to subpoena
ISPs and get subscriber names and information; The Pirate Bay case was
brought under copyright law. New Internet disconnection laws, ISP
filtering schemes, and similar invasive measures weren’t required.

 thestar.com

Chet Baker was a leading jazz musician in the 1950s, playing trumpet and providing vocals. Baker died in 1988, yet he is about to add a new claim to fame as the lead plaintiff in possibly the largest copyright infringement case in Canadian history. His estate, which still owns the copyright in more than 50 of his works, is part of a massive class-action lawsuit that has been underway for the past year.

The infringer has effectively already admitted owing at least $50 million and the full claim could exceed $60 billion. If the dollars don’t shock, the target of the lawsuit undoubtedly will: The defendants in the case are Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

The CRIA members were hit with the lawsuit in October 2008 after artists decided to turn to the courts following decades of frustration with the rampant infringement (I am adviser to the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, which is co-counsel, but have had no involvement in the case).

The claims arise from a longstanding practice of the recording industry in Canada, described in the lawsuit as “exploit now, pay later if at all.” It involves the use of works that are often included in compilation CDs (ie. the top dance tracks of 2009) or live recordings. The record labels create, press, distribute and sell the CDs, but do not obtain the necessary copyright licences.

Instead, the names of the songs on the CDs are placed on a “pending list,” which signifies that approval and payment is pending. The pending list dates back to the late 1980s, when Canada changed its copyright law by replacing a compulsory licence with the need for specific authorization for each use. It is perhaps better characterized as a copyright infringement admission list, however, since for each use of the work, the record label openly admits that it has not obtained copyright permission and not paid any royalty or fee.

Over the years, the size of the pending list has grown dramatically, now containing more than 300,000 songs.

From Beyonce to Bruce Springsteen, the artists waiting for payment are far from obscure, as thousands of Canadian and foreign artists have seen their copyrights used without permission and payment.

It is difficult to understand why the industry has been so reluctant to pay its bills. Some works may be in the public domain or belong to a copyright owner difficult to ascertain or locate, yet the likes of Sarah McLachlan, Bruce Cockburn, Sloan, or the Watchmen are not hidden from view.

The more likely reason is that the record labels have had little motivation to pay up. As the balance has grown, David Basskin, the president and CEO of the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency Ltd., notes in his affidavit that “the record labels have devoted insufficient resources for identifying and paying the owners of musical works on the pending lists.” The CRIA members now face the prospect of far greater liability.

The class action seeks the option of statutory damages for each infringement. At $20,000 per infringement, potential liability exceeds $60 billion.

These numbers may sound outrageous, yet they are based on the same rules that led the recording industry to claim a single file sharer is liable for millions in damages.

After years of claiming Canadian consumers disrespect copyright, the irony of having the recording industry face a massive lawsuit will not be lost on anyone, least of all the artists still waiting to be paid. Indeed, they are also seeking punitive damages, arguing “the conduct of the defendant record companies is aggravated by their strict and unremitting approach to the enforcement of their copyright interests against consumers.”

The Problem With Music

The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month. The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never “recouped,” the band will have no leverage, and will oblige. The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won’t have earned any royalties from their T-shirts yet. Maybe the T-shirt guys have figured out how to count money like record company guys. Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.

Steve Albini is an independent and corporate rock record producer most widely known for having produced Nirvana’s “In Utero”.

Major Labels – Gizmodo

Tim Quirk was the singer of punk-pop outfit Too Much Joy, signed by Warner Bros. in 1990. Now he’s an executive at an online music service, giving him insight on digital sales data and just how labels fudge their numbers.

I got something in the mail last week I’d been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included our digital earnings. Though our catalog has been out of print physically since the late-1990s, the three albums we released on Giant/WB have been available digitally for about five years. Yet the royalty statements I received every six months kept insisting we had zero income, and our unrecouped balance ($395,277.18!)* stubbornly remained the same.

Now, I don’t ever expect that unrecouped balance to turn into a positive number, but since the band had been seeing thousands of dollars in digital royalties each year from IODA for the four indie albums we control ourselves, I figured five years’ worth of digital income from our far more popular major label albums would at least make a small dent in the figure. Our IODA royalties during that time had totaled about $12,000 – not a princely sum, but enough to suggest that the total haul over the same period from our major label material should be at least that much, if not two to five times more. Even with the band receiving only a percentage of the major label take, getting our unrecouped balance below $375,000 seemed reasonable, and knocking it closer to -$350,000 wasn’t out of the question.

So I was naively excited when I opened the envelope. And my answer was right there on the first page. In five years, our three albums earned us a grand total of… $62.47.

What the fuck?

I mean, we all know that major labels are supposed to be venal masters of hiding money from artists, but they’re also supposed to be good at it, right? This figure wasn’t insulting because it was so small, it was insulting because it was so stupid.

Why It Was So Stupid

Here’s the thing: I work at Rhapsody. I know what we pay Warner Bros. for every stream and download, and I can look up exactly how many plays and downloads we’ve paid them for each TMJ tune that Warner controls. Moreover, Warner Bros. knows this, as my gig at Rhapsody is the only reason I was able to get them to add my digital royalties to my statement in the first place. For years I’d been pestering the label, but I hadn’t gotten anywhere till I was on a panel with a reasonably big wig in Warner Music Group’s business affairs team about a year ago

The panel took place at a legal conference, and focused on digital music and the crisis facing the record industry**. As you do at these things, the other panelists and I gathered for breakfast a couple hours before our session began, to discuss what topics we should address. Peter Jenner, who manages Billy Bragg and has been a needed gadfly for many years at events like these, wanted to discuss the little-understood fact that digital music services frequently pay labels advances in the tens of millions of dollars for access to their catalogs, and it’s unclear how (or if) that money is ever shared with artists.

I agreed that was a big issue, but said I had more immediate and mundane concerns, such as the fact that Warner wouldn’t even report my band’s iTunes sales to me.

The business affairs guy (who I am calling “the business affairs guy” rather than naming because he did me a favor by finally getting the digital royalties added to my statement, and I am grateful for that and don’t want this to sound like I’m attacking him personally, even though it’s about to seem like I am) said that it was complicated connecting Warner’s digital royalty payments to their existing accounting mechanisms, and that since my band was unrecouped they had “to take care of R.E.M. and the Red Hot Chili Peppers first.”

That kind of pissed me off. On the one hand, yeah, my band’s unrecouped and is unlikely ever to reach the point where Warner actually has to cut us a royalty check. On the other hand, though, they are contractually obligated to report what revenue they receive in our name, and, having helped build a database that tracks how much Rhapsody owes whom for what music gets played, I’m well aware of what is and isn’t complicated about doing so. It’s not something you have to build over and over again for each artist. It’s something you build once. It takes a while, and it can be expensive, and sometimes you make honest mistakes, but it’s not rocket science. Hell, it’s not even algebra! It’s just simple math.

I knew that each online service was reporting every download, and every play, for every track, to thousands of labels (more labels, I’m guessing, than Warner has artists to report to). And I also knew that IODA was able to tell me exactly how much money my band earned the previous month from Amazon ($11.05), Verizon (74 cents), Nokia (11 cents), MySpace (4 sad cents) and many more. I didn’t understand why Warner wasn’t reporting similar information back to my band – and if they weren’t doing it for Too Much Joy, I assumed they weren’t doing it for other artists.

To his credit, the business affairs guy told me he understood my point, and promised he’d pursue the matter internally on my behalf – which he did. It just took 13 months to get the results, which were (predictably, perhaps) ridiculous.

The sad thing is I don’t even think Warner is deliberately trying to screw TMJ and the hundreds of other also-rans and almost-weres they’ve signed over the years. The reality is more boring, but also more depressing. Like I said, they don’t actually owe us any money. But that’s what’s so weird about this, to me: they have the ability to tell the truth, and doing so won’t cost them anything.

They just can’t be bothered. They don’t care, because they don’t have to.

“$10,000 Is Nothing”

An interlude, here. Back in 1992, when TMJ was still a going concern and even the label thought maybe we’d join the hallowed company of recouped bands one day, Warner made a $10,000 accounting error on our statement (in their favor, naturally). When I caught this mistake, and brought it to the attention of someone with the power to correct it, he wasn’t just befuddled by my anger – he laughed at it. “$10,000 is nothing!” he chuckled.

If you’re like most people – especially people in unrecouped bands – “nothing” is not a word you ever use in conjunction with a figure like “$10,000,” but he seemed oblivious to that. “It’s a rounding error. It happens all the time. Why are you so worked up?”

These days I work for a reasonably large corporation myself, and, sadly, I understand exactly what the guy meant. When your revenues (and your expenses) are in the hundreds of millions of dollars, $10,000 mistakes are common, if undesirable.

I still think he was a jackass, though, and that sentence continues to haunt me. Because $10,000 might have been nothing to him, but it was clearly something to me. And his inability to take it seriously – to put himself in my place, just for the length of our phone call – suggested that people who care about $10,000 mistakes, and the principles of things, like, say, honoring contracts even when you don’t have to, are the real idiots.

As you may have divined by this point, I am conflicted about whether I am actually being a petty jerk by pursuing this, or whether labels just thrive on making fools like me feel like petty jerks. People in the record industry are very good at making bands believe they deserve the hundreds of thousands (or sometimes millions) of dollars labels advance the musicians when they’re first signed, and even better at convincing those same musicians it’s the bands’ fault when those advances aren’t recouped (the last thing $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man yelled at me before he hung up was, “Too Much Joy never earned us shit!”*** as though that fact somehow negated their obligation to account honestly).

I don’t want to live in $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man’s world. But I do. We all do. We have no choice.

The Boring Reality

Back to my ridiculous Warner Bros. statement. As I flipped through its ten pages (seriously, it took ten pages to detail the $62.47 of income), I realized that Warner wasn’t being evil, just careless and unconcerned – an impression I confirmed a few days later when I spoke to a guy in their Royalties and Licensing department I am going to call Danny.****

I asked Danny why there were no royalties at all listed from iTunes, and he said, “Huh. There are no domestic downloads on here at all. Only streams. And it has international downloads, but no international streams. I have no idea why.” I asked Danny why the statement only seemed to list tracks from two of the three albums Warner had released – an entire album was missing. He said they could only report back what the digital services had provided to them, and the services must not have reported any activity for those other songs. When I suggested that seemed unlikely – that having every track from two albums listed by over a dozen different services, but zero tracks from a third album listed by any seemed more like an error on Warner’s side, he said he’d look into it. As I asked more questions (Why do we get paid 50% of the income from all the tracks on one album, but only 35.7143% of the income from all the tracks on another? Why did 29 plays of a track on the late, lamented MusicMatch earn a total of 63 cents when 1,016 plays of the exact same track on MySpace earned only 23 cents?) he eventually got to the heart of the matter: “We don’t normally do this for unrecouped bands,” he said. “But, I was told you’d asked.”

It’s possible I’m projecting my own insecurities onto calm, patient Danny, but I’m pretty sure the subtext of that comment was the same thing I’d heard from $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man: all these figures were pointless, and I was kind of being a jerk by wasting their time asking about them. After all, they have the Red Hot Chili Peppers to deal with, and the label actually owes those guys money.

Danny may even be right. But there’s another possibility – one I don’t necessarily subscribe to, but one that could be avoided entirely by humoring pests like me. There’s a theory that labels and publishers deliberately avoid creating the transparent accounting systems today’s technology enables. Because accurately accounting to my silly little band would mean accurately accounting to the less silly bands that are recouped, and paying them more money as a result.

If that’s true (and I emphasize the if, because it’s equally possible that people everywhere, including major label accounting departments, are just dumb and lazy)*****, then there’s more than my pride and principles on the line when I ask Danny in Royalties and Licensing to answer my many questions. I don’t feel a burning need to make the Red Hot Chili Peppers any more money, but I wouldn’t mind doing my small part to get us all out of the sad world $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man inhabits.

So I will keep asking, even though I sometimes feel like a petty jerk for doing so.

---

* A word here about that unrecouped balance, for those uninitiated in the complex mechanics of major label accounting. While our royalty statement shows Too Much Joy in the red with Warner Bros. (now by only $395,214.71 after that $62.47 digital windfall), this doesn’t mean Warner “lost” nearly $400,000 on the band. That’s how much they spent on us, and we don’t see any royalty checks until it’s paid back, but it doesn’t get paid back out of the full price of every album sold. It gets paid back out of the band’s share of every album sold, which is roughly 10% of the retail price. So, using round numbers to make the math as easy as possible to understand, let’s say Warner Bros. spent something like $450,000 total on TMJ. If Warner sold 15,000 copies of each of the three TMJ records they released at a wholesale price of $10 each, they would have earned back the $450,000. But if those records were retailing for $15, TMJ would have only paid back $67,500, and our statement would show an unrecouped balance of $382,500.

I do not share this information out of a Steve Albini-esque desire to rail against the major label system (he already wrote the definitive rant, which you can find here if you want even more figures, and enjoy having those figures bracketed with cursing and insults). I’m simply explaining why I’m not embarrassed that I “owe” Warner Bros. almost $400,000. They didn’t make a lot of money off of Too Much Joy. But they didn’t lose any, either. So whenever you hear some label flak claiming 98% of the bands they sign lose money for the company, substitute the phrase “just don’t earn enough” for the word “lose.”

** The whole conference took place at a semi-swank hotel on the island of St. Thomas, which is a funny place to gather to talk about how to save the music business, but that would be a whole different diatribe.

*** This same dynamic works in reverse – I interviewed the Butthole Surfers for Raygun magazine back in the 1990s, and Gibby Haynes described the odd feeling of visiting Capitol records’ offices and hearing, “a bunch of people go, ‘Hey, man, be cool to these guys, they’re a recouped band.’ I heard that a bunch of times.”

**** Again, I am avoiding using his real name because he returned my call promptly, and patiently answered my many questions, which is behavior I want to encourage, so I have no desire to lambaste him publicly.

***** Of course, these two possibilities are not mutually exclusive – it is also possible that labels are evil and avaricious AND dumb and lazy, at the same time.

billboard

The great hope for digital music was that it would make the recording industry more egalitarian—that up-and-coming bands with pluck and a knack for promotion would be able to get their work to the masses without the backing of record labels. According to “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More”—a 2006 book by Wired magazine editor in chief Chris Anderson—hits dominated the market mostly because shelf space in stores was limited. Digital retail and online media would exponentially increase the choices available to consumers, who would then use online tools to discover products that appealed to them more than the biggest hits.Anderson’s “Long Tail” idea comes from a sales graph that looks like the letter “L” with a curve instead of a corner. On the left are the hits, the 5,000 best-selling titles that would typically be carried by a national chain; on the right, further down the curve, are less popular titles that sell fewer copies. In the physical world, few stores have space for these niche titles, which don’t sell well. But in the digital world, where space hardly matters, Anderson suggested, these titles would collectively account for a far greater percentage of music sales—and of movies, books and other consumer products. The ways we think about popular taste, he writes, “are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching—a market response to inefficient distribution.”

The Independent

People who illegally download music from the internet also spend more money on music than anyone else, according to a new study. The survey, published today, found that those who admit illegally downloading music spent an average of £77 a year on music – £33 more than those who claim that they never download music dishonestly.

The findings suggest that plans by the Secretary of State for Business, Peter Mandelson, to crack down on illegal downloaders by threatening to cut their internet connections with a “three strikes and you’re out” rule could harm the music industry by punishing its core customers.

An estimated seven million UK users download files illegally every year. The record industry’s trade association, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), believes this copyright infringement will cost the industry £200m this year.

The poll, which surveyed 1,000 16- to 50-year-olds with internet access, found that one in 10 people admit to downloading music illegally.

Billy Bragg | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

A better way to sink internet pirates

The only way to tackle illegal filesharing is not suppression, but to offer reliable, easy to use, fairly priced alternatives

Last week the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) convened a meeting of artists at Air Studios in London with the intention of seeking common ground on the issue of what to do about illegal filesharing before the end of the government’s consultation period, which has now closed.

The statement that we produced is the first real sign that artists are ready and willing to become involved in the debate about the shape of the new digital music industry. There were many views in the room, from those who wished to disconnect illegal downloaders, to those who believed that there was no technical solution to the loss of revenue that the recording industry is experiencing.

Despite our differences of opinion, we were able to agree on bandwidth restriction as final sanction for egregious offenders. We held back from suspension of internet accounts because we felt it was disproportionate and punitive, but most of all, we held back because we didn’t believe it was in the best interests of our profession.

The suppression of illegal filesharing is a long-term, highly expensive, technologically fraught strategy with serious implications for personal privacy. It is questionable whether any of the money saved will ever find its way to the artists who have suffered loss of income.

While the recording industry continues to make threatening noises towards kids who swap music files among themselves, our real enemies, the illegal download sites that make money giving our music away for free, are disappearing off the radar into darknets.

This is a war that no one can win.

As the pirates always manage to stay one step ahead of the latest clampdown, the recording industry will continue to ask legislators for ever tighter sanctions, leading ultimately to an internet controlled by and for big business, which can only be accessed by those willing to pay.

The loss to the creative community would be catastrophic. The internet has made it possible for individual artists to make, distribute and promote their own works with the active support of P2P networks. For new artists to flourish, it is vital that the internet remain free to all.

We believe that this sense of freedom is the key to constructing a viable digital business model for the recording industry. The successful music sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Spotify all offer free access. The next step is to create “feels like free” services. We need legal networks licenced by record companies that give users access to all the music they want for a subscription fee. We need P2P communities that spread the word for new artists while offering advertising platforms so that an artist whose work is downloaded can receive reciprocal payment from advertising revenue.

Artists must be prepared to work with the record industry and with legislators on a programme of education aimed at increasing awareness of the damaging aspects of illegal downloading on the livelihoods of the creative community and those who work with us to produce our work.

However, we will not be able to marginalise the pirates until we can offer accessible, easy to use, fairly priced alternative business models that people will actually want to buy their music from. While we may never be able to sink The Pirate Bay, the challenge we face is to make it look boring, shoddy and unreliable.

True To You

Morrissey would like it to be known that he has not been consulted by EMI/HMV/Parlophone with regards to two forthcoming boxed sets of Morrissey singles. Morrissey does not approve such releases and would ask people not to bother buying them. Morrissey receives no royalty payments from EMI for any back catalogue, and has not received a royalty from EMI since 1992. Morrissey also does not approve of, and was not consulted on, the Rhino box of Smiths CDs, or the Warner releases of Smiths LPs on 180 gramme vinyl. Morrissey last received a royalty payment from Warners ten years ago, and, once again, he would ask people not to bother buying the reissued LPs or CDs.

Op-Ed Columnist  – NYTimes.com

The problem is that if people can get the music they want for free, why would they ever buy it, or even steal it? They won’t. According to a March study by the NPD Group, a market research group for the entertainment industry, 13- to 17-year-olds “acquired 19 percent less music in 2008 than they did in 2007.” CD sales among these teenagers were down 26 percent and digital purchases were down 13 percent.

And a survey of British music fans, conducted by the Leading Question/Music Ally and released last month, found that the percentage of 14- to 18-year-olds who regularly share files dropped by nearly a third from December 2007 to January 2009. On the other hand, two-thirds of those teens now listen to streaming music “regularly” and nearly a third listen to it every day.

This is part of a much broader shift in media consumption by young people. They’re moving from an acquisition model to an access model.

Even if they choose to buy the music, the industry has handicapped its ability to capitalize on that purchase by allowing all songs to be bought individually, apart from their albums. This once seemed like a blessing. Now it looks more like a curse.

In previous forms, you had to take the bad with the good. You may have only wanted two or three songs, but you had to buy the whole 8-track, cassette or CD to get them. So in a sense, these bad songs help finance the good ones. The resulting revenue provided a cushion for the artists and record companies to take chances and make mistakes. Single song downloads helped to kill that.

A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.

So it was no surprise that The Financial Times reported on Monday that Apple is working with the four largest labels to seduce people into buying more digital albums. It’s too little too late.

YouTube Biz Blog

Last week the world watched in wonder as Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding party transformed a familiar and predictable tradition into something spontaneous and just flat-out fun. The video, set to R&B star Chris Brown’s hypnotic dance jam “Forever,” became an overnight sensation, accumulating more than 10 million views on YouTube in less than one week. But as with all great YouTube videos, there’s more to this story than simple view counts.

At YouTube, we have sophisticated content management tools in place to help rights holders control their content on our site. The rights holders for “Forever” used these tools to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes. As a result, the rights holders were able to capitalize on the massive wave of popularity generated by “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” — in the last week, searches for “Chris Brown Forever” on YouTube have skyrocketed, making it one of the most popular queries on the site:

This traffic is also very engaged — the click-through rate (CTR) on the “JK Wedding Entrance” video is 2x the average of other Click-to-Buy overlays on the site. And this newfound interest in downloading “Forever” goes beyond the viral video itself: “JK Wedding Entrance” also appears to have influenced the official “Forever” music video, which saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x in the last week.

So, what does all of this mean? Despite compelling data and studies around consumer purchasing habits, many still question the promotional and bottom-line business value sites like YouTube provide artists. But in the last week, over a year after its release, Chris Brown’s “Forever” has again rocketed up the charts, reaching as high as #4 on the iTunes singles chart and #3 on Amazon’s best selling MP3 list. We’ve seen similar successes in the past with partners like Monty Python.

One of our main goals at YouTube is to help content creators effectively make money from the distribution of their content online. That they can do so in a way that brings artists and our community together to create fun, spontaneous and inspiring works, is one of the best and most exciting things about YouTube.

Posted by Chris LaRosa, Technical Account Manager, and Ali Sandler, Music Partner Manager

Zeropaid

The music industry knows how to hang out itself, even if it lacks the correct length pf rope. EMI, certainly reeling from declining physical album sales like the other Big 4 record labels, is now apparently telling independent album retailers that it will no longer sell them CDs.

That’s right, EMI apparently told them over the phone a few weeks ago, an oddly perverse means of notification, that henceforth it will no longer sell them physical albums and that they must go to “one stops” like Wal-Mart or Best Buy to buy product like everybody else to then in turn sell.

“Several I have spoken with are so upset that they vow never to buy any EMI catalog again–or any new artist releases either,” says Wayne Rosso, former president of the P2P program Grokster, on his blog. “Only the certifiable hit product that they know will sell. They will no longer take chances on new EMI artists.”

It’s a odd turn of events for EMI, adding another blow to its physical CD sales while inversely arguing that illegal file-sharing is the real culprit behind declining revenues. If its concerned with losses then why get rid of customers? It just doesn’t make any sense.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that one stops don’t have nearly the selection needed to maintain an indie retailers bottom line, nor could they ever hope to have a price point necessary to make a living.

In short, the loss of EMI’s catalog means the job of indie record stores to stay in business just got even tougher.

Nice job EMI.

Beyond Binary – CNET News

Of all the losses suffered by the music industry, one of the biggest may be the fact that nearly all of the investors that once were building digital music services have moved on.

“There are not a lot of entrepreneurs involved in this space,” said David Pakman, a music industry veteran and now venture capitalist at Venrock Associates.

By Pakman’s count, there have been 109 venture-backed digital music start-ups. Fewer than five, though, produced a substantial return, he said.

“Investors lost a lot of money in this space,” he said, speaking on a breakfast panel at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech conference here. The loss for the industry, he said is that entrepreneurs have moved on to areas like Twitter and Facebook.

FT.com / Technology –

Apple is working with the four largest record labels to stimulate digital sales of albums by bundling a new interactive booklet, sleeve notes and other interactive features with music downloads, in a move it hopes will change buying trends on its online iTunes store.

The talks come as Apple is separately racing to offer a portable, full-featured, tablet-sized computer in time for the Christmas shopping season, in what the entertainment industry hopes will be a new revolution. The device could be launched alongside the new content deals, including those aimed at stimulating sales of CD-length music, according to people briefed on the project.

Physical album sales have fallen sharply as music retailing has evolved from CD album purchases in retail outlets to digital downloads of songs from online stores.

Although consumers continue to purchase large amounts of digital music, they are buying individual tracks rather than higher-margin albums.

Apple is working with EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music Group, on a project the company has codenamed “Cocktail”, according to four people familiar with the situation.

The labels and Apple are working towards a September launch date for the project, which aims to boost interest in albums by bundling liner notes and video clips with the music.

“It’s all about re-creating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork, while you listened to the music,” said one executive familiar with the plans.

Apple wants to make bigger purchases more compelling by creating a new type of interactive album material, including photos, lyric sheets and liner notes that allow users to click through to items that they find most interesting. Consumers would be able to play songs directly from the interactive book without clicking back into Apple’s iTunes software, executives said.

“It’s not just a bunch of PDFs,” said one executive. “There’s real engagement with the ancillary stuff.”

The music companies declined to comment.

Album sales in the US fell 14 per cent in 2008 to 428.4m units, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks retail sales data.

The new touch-sensitive device Apple is working on will have a screen that may be up to 10 inches diagonally.

It will connect to the internet like the iPod Touch – probably without phone capability but with access to Apple’s online stores .

Apple is gambling that it can succeed where everyone else has flopped, including Microsoft, which tirelessly pushed a tablet-ready version of its Windows operating system as a personal favourite of founder Bill Gates.

The entertainment industry is hoping that Apple, which revolutionised the markets for music players and phones, can do it again with the new device.

“It’s going to be fabulous for watching movies,” said one entertainment executive.

Book publishers have been in talks with Apple and are optimistic about their services being offered with the new computer, which could provide an alternative to Amazon’s Kindle.

mediabistro.com: FishbowlLA

But Chris Anderson Said The Future Of Music Is Free…

Comprehensive Management of Music Rights for Songwriters and Performing Artists – BMG RM.

Bertelsmann AG and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.P. (“KKR”), announced today that they have agreed to create a joint venture to develop a global music rights management business to which Bertelsmann AG will contribute its BMG Rights Management music rights unit. Upon funding of the transaction, Bertelsmann will own 49 percent in the joint venture and KKR will own 51 percent. Bertelsmann AG’s Hartwig Masuch, currently CEO of BMG Rights Management, will continue as CEO of the new company.

The new company will benefit from BMG Rights Management’s know-how in licensing and administrating music rights, its large number of music catalogues and artists, the established BMG brand and its experienced management team. KKR will significantly enhance BMG Right Management’s financial position and create new growth potential by providing access to its global network. The partners envisage building a major music rights management business over the medium term through organic growth and acquisitions. KKR expects to contribute to BMG’s development by providing substantial equity investments through its European private equity funds.

“KKR shares our views on future business models for the music industry. I am excited to work with such a partner. With many high-visibility contracts and the foundation of an international organization in six European countries, it has taken BMG Rights Management only nine months to position itself successfully in the market. Songwriters and performers respond very well to our service oriented approach,” said Hartwig Masuch, CEO of BMG Rights Management and CEO of the joint venture. When BMG Rights Management started its business in October 2008, its rights catalogue consisted of about 200 artists; since then, another 100 contracts with songwriters and other rights owners have been signed.

“With access to meaningful investment capital, we expect the partnership with KKR to contribute significantly to accelerating the development of the business. We complement each other perfectly for this venture. We both want to broaden BMG’s global reach faster than originally anticipated. In this way we will be able to actively participate in the expected market consolidation,” said Thomas Rabe, Bertelsmann CFO and Chairman of the joint venture. With the music industry at an important turning point, the market for licensing and administration of music rights presents attractive growth opportunities. Among other things, it is driven by the increasing importance of music in the licensing of other areas beyond the recording business, such as broadcast and live performances as well as the synchronization of broadcasting, commercial and movie productions.

“The music rights sector offers opportunities for significant growth across the globe. BMG has proven leadership and a strong track record of organic growth. Our financial strength combined with BMG’s sector expertise will create a unique platform for building up a global music rights management business,” said Johannes Huth, European Head of KKR. In the context of this transaction, BMG Rights Management will be integrated into the equity fund Bertelsmann set up two years ago. The company will be developed from this platform. KKR’s funds will invest into a new holding company of BMG Rights Management. The foundation of the new joint venture is subject to approval under applicable competition laws. The parties expect to complete the transaction within a few months.

CNET News

The suit appears to have been initiated by Music Copyright Solutions (MCS), which claims to administer copyrights for more than 45,000 compositions. MCS is named as the lead plaintiff, along with a number of songwriters including Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad fame. These folks allege that Microsoft, Yahoo, and RealNetworks improperly licensed the rights to more than 200 compositions that they offered as on-demand streams or limited downloads via the Zune Marketplace, Yahoo Music, and Rhapsody.

Surely these companies paid somebody for the rights to offer these songs. But there’s a catch, which TechDirt pointed out earlier Tuesday: these companies may have licensed the rights to the recordings, but that doesn’t mean they licensed the rights to the compositions (also known as publishing rights). As section 23 of the legal filing puts it:

In order to transmit, perform, reproduce and deliver any sound recording of any musical work via ‘On-Demand Streams’ or ‘Limited Downloads,’ Defendants must first obtain not only the rights for the sound recording itself, but also the rights for the underlying musical composition that is embodied on said musical recording.

Maybe, maybe not–that’s up to the court to decide. But that’s not the insane part. The insane part is that the plaintiffs are alleging that each time one of the defendants made any recording of a covered song available, that’s a copyright violation, and they’re seeking damages of $150,000 per violation (or the amount the defendants earned from streaming those songs, whichever is more). So, for example, the lawsuit claims that Yahoo Music offered Conway Twitty’s recording of “Fifteen Years Ago” on six different greatest hits albums. The plaintiffs allege that constitutes six copyright violations, which would mean damages of $900,000. Overall, the lawsuit names more than 200 songs, and a far greater number of recordings, meaning that the potential liability for each defendant would be tens of billions of dollars–that’s far greater than the total amount of revenues these companies ever earned from any of these services.

Umair Haque

“…Sales of his recordings through Sony’s music unit have generated more than $300 million in royalties for Mr. Jackson since the early 1980’s.”

Want to know why we have a zombieconomy? Because the beancounters killed the incentives to create real value.

Let’s use MJ’s tragic death as a mini case-study. $300 million over, for example, 25 years? That’s $12 million a year.

I’m deliberately leaving out ads, endorsements, concerts, etc., to focus on the the structural problems in one industry: music.

If the world’s biggest pop star only made $12 million a year from his recordings, why would anyone make serious music? Where did the rest of the money go? Why, straight into record labels’ pockets. Did they make better music with it? Nope — they made Britney and Lady GaGa. And that’s how they killed themselves: by underinvesting in quality, to rake in the take.

Wait a second — that sounds familiar. You can add back in the endorsements, etc. now — they only double the figure: to about $25 million.

If the world’s biggest pop star only made $25 million a year in total, something’s very, very wrong. Where’s the rest of the money? Why can’t a resource as scarce as the King of Pop capture more value?

After all, that’s not even mega-rich.

The world’s top hedge fund “managers” regularly pull in hundreds of millions. That’s an order of magnitude difference.

No wonder everyone wants to be a banker, investor, or [insert beancounter here]. There’s no money left in anything else.

That’s the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don’t reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets.

That ‘s not an economy: it’s just a game of musical chairs.

Hence, no new finance, healthcare, educational, auto, or, yes, music, industry — for decades.

“…Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y’alls neighborhood.”

Indeed. Everytime you look at today’s economic landscape — you should see the Thriller video playing in your head. Because what we’ve built is a zombieconomy, where little net value is created.

And MJ’s death-by-financial-desperation should be a case study in that zombieconomy if ever there was one. Yes, he spent money on absurdly ludicrous stuff. But if top hedge fund managers can do it — why couldn’t the world’s most famous singer?

PS — The ultimate irony? I can’t even link to the Thriller video. It’s unavailable on YouTube in the UK…”due to copyright restrictions”. Lulz.

Pandora Internet Radio –

Dear Pandora Visitor,

We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

BBC NEWS

Napster understood the internet’s potential for decentralised music distribution, and offered it to consumers in a way that was simple to understand and use.

Many critics have argued that the music industry could have avoided some of the problems it faces today if we had embraced Napster rather than fighting it.

That’s probably true, and I, for one, regret that we weren’t faster in figuring out how to create a sustainable model for music on the internet.
– Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI

Electronic Frontier Foundation

ASCAP (the same folks who went after Girl Scouts for singing around a campfire)
appears to believe that every time your musical ringtone rings in
public, you’re violating copyright law by “publicly performing” it
without a license. At least that’s the import of a brief [2.5mb PDF] it filed in ASCAP’s court battle with mobile phone giant AT&T.

This will doubtless come as a shock to the millions of Americans who
have legitimately purchased musical ringtones, contributing millions to
the music industry’s bottom line. Are we each liable for statutory damages (say, $80,000) if we forget to silence our phones in a restaurant?

Billboard.biz

What’s your reaction to the recent Pirate Bay verdict?
There is a sad irony there that they get a similar verdict and they’re similarly powerless to stop the piracy. For many years, I argued to deaf voices that the industry needed to do some public education campaign about music appreciation. That there wasn’t enough sense that music had value, that it mattered. The record companies themselves weren’t used to being companies that were answerable to the public. Chalk it up to the old flavor of rock and roll, which is “against the man.” Since artists were always against the man, and record labels always represented the man, it didn’t matter that they were giving the artist millions of dollars in advances, they were still the bad guy. Essentially, fans adopted that same anti-record company viewpoint and therefore ripping off the man created some extra joy, not just a convenience factor. All of the good things that the music industry has done over the years, and they have done many – I don’t think any industry has done as much to give back and work in communities and respond to crises – hasn’t really changed that old viewpoint. Now, the only and best the industry can do is focus much more aggressively on partnering with artists to derive revenue from the whole of a musical experience. Artists still need partners. There’s no reason record companies shouldn’t be those partners.

PC Magazine

British cable TV operator Virgin Media is to launch an unlimited music download subscription service through a partnership with the world’s largest music company, Universal.

The music industry has been desperate to boost digital sales in recent years to overcome online piracy, and the agreement comes a day before a British report sets out how the creative and telecoms industries should tackle the problem.

People familiar with the service said it would cost 10-15 pounds ($16.30-$24.50) per month, which could appeal to parents concerned by children accessing illegal sites.

The service, which both sides described as a world first, would allow Virgin Media broadband customers to both listen by streaming and download to keep as many music tracks and albums as they want from Universal’s catalog.

The music will be in the MP3 format, meaning it can be played on the vast majority of music devices, including the iPod and mobile phones.

The service, which would compete with Apple’s iTunes, is set to launch later this year.

Virgin said as part of its cooperation with the music industry it would also work to prevent piracy on its network by educating users and would, as a last resort for persistent offenders, suspend Internet access.

Virgin said no customers would be permanently disconnected.

guardian.co.uk

Dark Night of the Soul, the hotly anticipated new album by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, will be “released” as a blank recordable CD with a note encouraging fans to download it from an illegal filesharing network. Although the album can be heard through an authorised internet stream, it will not receive an official physical or digital release, the group have announced, due to an unspecified legal dispute with EMI.

As previously reported, Dark Night of the Soul is the second collaboration between producer Danger Mouse and singer-songwriter Sparklehorse. It features contributions from Iggy Pop, Suzanne Vega and members of Pixies, the Flaming Lips, the Strokes and the Shins.

Unable to purchase the music, fans are encouraged to buy the project’s accompanying book, with photographs by filmmaker David Lynch, which comes with a blank recordable CD-R. “All [CD-Rs] will be clearly labelled: ‘For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will,'” the website states. The limited-edition book and CD-R cost $50 (£33), or fans can buy a poster and CD-R for just $10 (£6.60).

The reason for the unconventional release is unclear. “Due to an ongoing dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse is unable to release the music for Dark Night of the Soul without fear of being sued by EMI,” the website reads. EMI have released several previous Sparklehorse albums, including the 2006 Danger Mouse collaboration.

For the moment, the only way to hear Dark Night of the Soul is to download it from an illegal filesharing network, or to stream it from the website of US public radio network NPR. While the NPR stream has been active since Friday, it’s unknown how long it will remain online. “We don’t have a definite take-down date,” producer Robin Hilton told Billboard. “It’s up in the air.”

And while it’s pretty clear what Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse intend for people to do with the CD-R – that is, download and burn the album – the artists are keeping coy. As the website states, “Danger Mouse … hopes that people lucky enough to hear the music, by whatever means, are as excited by it as he is.”

Slashdot

“The NYTimes reported in their June 13, 1897 edition that ‘Canadian pirates’ were flooding the country
with spurious editions of the latest copyrighted popular songs. ‘They
use the mails to reach purchasers, so members of the American Music
Publishers Association assert, and as a result the legitimate music
publishing business of the United States has fallen off 50 per cent in
the past twelve months’ while the pirates published 5,000,000 copies of
songs in just one month. The Times added that pirates were publishing
sheet music at 2 cents to 5 cents per copy although the original
compositions sold for 20 to 40 cents per copy. But ‘American publishers
had held a conference’ and a ‘committee had been appointed to fight the
pirates’ by getting the ‘Post Office authorities to stop such mail
matter because it infringes the copyright law.’ Interestingly enough
the pirates of 1897 worked in league with Canadian newspapers that
published lists of songs to be sold, with a post office box address
belonging to the newspaper itself. Half the money went to pay the
newspapers’ advertising while the other half went to the pirates who
sent the music by mail.”“The NYTimes reported in their June 13, 1897 edition that ‘Canadian pirates’ were flooding the country with spurious editions of the latest copyrighted popular songs. ‘They use the mails to reach purchasers, so members of the American Music Publishers Association assert, and as a result the legitimate music publishing business of the United States has fallen off 50 per cent in the past twelve months’ while the pirates published 5,000,000 copies of songs in just one month. The Times added that pirates were publishing sheet music at 2 cents to 5 cents per copy although the original compositions sold for 20 to 40 cents per copy. But ‘American publishers had held a conference’ and a ‘committee had been appointed to fight the pirates’ by getting the ‘Post Office authorities to stop such mail matter because it infringes the copyright law.’ Interestingly enough the pirates of 1897 worked in league with Canadian newspapers that published lists of songs to be sold, with a post office box address belonging to the newspaper itself. Half the money went to pay the newspapers’ advertising while the other half went to the pirates who sent the music by mail.”

Gizmodo

A study from the BI Norwegian School of Management has found that those who download free music from services like BitTorrent are also the biggest legitimate consumers of downloadable music.

In
fact, among all 1,901 Norway-based study participants (all of whom were
over the age of 15), it was found that those who downloaded “free”
music were 10x more likely to download pay music. In other words, music pirates are the music industry’s largest online consumers.

Note: “Free” music obviously implies pirated music, but it also encompasses legitimate free music download services.

The findings also included that, in the 15-20 age range, 50% of
participants had bought a CD in the last six months. So that trusty
format isn’t dead quite yet.

Since we relied on Google’s translation from the original Norwegian,
anyone who speaks the language is encouraged to glean for more
specifics and post them in the comments. [Survey and BMI Thanks Jon!]

wired

Google on Monday launched free downloads of licensed songs in China, while sharing advertising revenue with major music labels in a market rife with online piracy.

Lee Kai-Fu, president of Google in greater China, said one reason Google lagged in the mainland search market was because it did not offer music downloads, the missing piece to its strategy in a market where it trails leader Baidu.com.

CNN.com

Muziic, created by teen developer David Nelson, has built an iTunes-like interface on top of YouTube. The service enables users to stream YouTube’s music to their PCs without fiddling with videos. Users can build playlists and organize songs in a way similar to iTunes.

CNET blogger Matt Rosoff first wrote about the service and gave it a favorable review. “Any song that’s been uploaded to YouTube is available in Muziic,” Rosoff wrote. “This includes music unavailable on most commercial services, like the full Pink Floyd performance at Live 8 and Led Zeppelin’s one-off performance in 2007.”

TechCrunch

Earlier today we detailed the chaotic history and recent trouble at TotalMusic, an experimental music initiative created by Sony BMG and Universal Music Group designed to rethink the way music was streamed on the web. After a round of layoffs and the shutdown of Ruckus, a streaming music service acquired by TotalMusic last year, the company looked like it was in bad shape. In what will likely be the most official statement we’ll get, Jason Herskowitz, the company’s VP of Product Management, has confirmed in a blog post that the music labels have indeed pulled the plug on TotalMusic

NYTimes.com

After years of futile efforts to stop digital pirates from copying its music, the music business has started to copy the pirates.

An entrance on Sunday at the music industry’s conference in France, where Nokia said it was expanding Comes With Music.

Online and mobile services offering listeners unlimited “free” access to millions of songs are set to proliferate in the coming months, according to music industry executives.

Unlike illegal file-sharing services, which the music industry says are responsible for billions of dollars in lost sales, these new offerings are perfectly legal. The services are not really free, but payment is included in the cost of, say, a new cellphone or a broadband Internet access contract, so the cost to the consumer is disguised. And, unlike pirate sites, these services provide revenue to the music companies.

“Two thousand nine should be the year when the music industry stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb,” said Feargal Sharkey, a former punk rocker who now heads UK Music, a trade group for the British music industry.

TorrentFreak

Every year, RIAA’s global partner IFPI
publishes a digital music report, which can be best described as a one
sided view of the state of digital music consumption. For several years
in a row the report has shown that the sales figures of digital music
have gone up, but still, the industry continues to blame piracy for a
loss in overall revenue.

One of the key statistics that is hyped
every year, is the piracy ratio of downloaded music. Just as last year,
IFPI estimates that 95% of all downloads are illegal, without giving a
proper source for this figure. Interestingly, those who take a closer
look at the full report (pdf), will see that only 10% of the claimed illegal downloads are seen as a loss in sales.

Every year, RIAA’s global partner IFPI publishes a digital music report, which can be best described as a one sided view of the state of digital music consumption. For several years in a row the report has shown that the sales figures of digital music have gone up, but still, the industry continues to blame piracy for a loss in overall revenue.

One of the key statistics that is hyped every year, is the piracy ratio of downloaded music. Just as last year, IFPI estimates that 95% of all downloads are illegal, without giving a proper source for this figure. Interestingly, those who take a closer look at the full report (pdf), will see that only 10% of the claimed illegal downloads are seen as a loss in sales.

The Register

A new report suggests that Apple and Tesco, not P2P file sharers, should take the most blame for the woes of the British music industry.

The report, prepared privately by consultants Capgemini for the Value Recognition Strategy working group, set out to examine the “value gap”, the amount sound recordings revenue has fallen in the UK since 2004. The report remains confidential, but details are starting to emerge.

The consultants suggest that “format changes” and price pressure from discounted CDs on sale in supermarkets, are most to blame for this “value gap”.

However, the report gives lie [not “life”, as a typo suggested – ed.] to the idea that P2P file sharing stimulates demand for sales, or is even a neutral factor. This idea has given comfort to the powerful anti-copyright lobby, backed by internet users who want digital music for free – and find endless justifications to avoid paying for it.

Capgemini calculates that of £480m lost to the industry since 2004, £368m was the result of format changes: principally the unbundling of the CD into an “a la carte” selection of digital songs. Of the remainder, 18 per cent was lost to piracy.

Add this to the more recent news from p2pnet.net:

“It is a basic principle of economics that as price increases,
demand decreases. Customers who download music and movies for free
would not necessarily spend money to acquire the same product.”

p2pnet has been saying that for years,
pointing out RIAA and MPAA claims that files shared equal sales lost
are pure fiction dreamed up to enable corporate entertainment cartels
to attack their own customers in a bid to gain control of how, and by
whom, product is managed and distributed online.

Now, in a 16-page opinion, “District Judge James P. Jones, sitting
in the Western Disrict of Virginia, denied the RIAA’s request for
restitution, holding the RIAA’s reasoning to be unsound,” says Recording Industry vs The People.

David Barrett says on Pho

Mininova, founded in January 2005, soon became one of the most successful torrent sites. The site has grown steadily over recent months, and for a few weeks now the millions of daily users have been downloading well over 10 million torrents a day.

In 2008 the site passed several milestones, and in December Mininova broke a new record of 44.7 million unique visitors in one month. More users download more torrents, and just about every three to four months the site added another million torrent downloads to its counter. Today, just a few days into 2009, Mininova is close to recording the 7 billionth download, a double up compared to a year ago.

Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak that he expects this growth to continue in the new year. “Traffic is still growing according to Quantcast and Google Analytics. Unless something drastically changes, I see no reason why this will be different in 2009,” he commented. – Torrentfreak

In comparison, iTunes traffic:

• iTunes has now sold six billion songs (it crossed the 5 billion mark last June).
• Over 10 million different tracks are available on iTunes.
• Starting today, 8 million songs are DRM-free, and all 10 million will be DRM free by the end of March.
• There are now over 75 million accounts on iTunes linked to credit cards.
• In fiscal year 2008, Apple sold 9.7 million Macs
• Mac sales grew twice as fast as the overall PC market.

The last billion songs took about five and half months to sell, which was the same pace more or less that it took Apple to get to its fourth billion (January, 2008) and fifth billion songs (June, 2008). So iTunes sales are no longer accelerating, despite many more iPhones and iPods out there. It makes you wonder what the saturation point is for consumers buying songs from iTunes. One thing to cheer about, DRM is now officially dead (it looks like Apple traded variable pricing for getting rid of DRM), but I’m not sure that is going to spur sales much. – Techcrunch

FT.com / Companies

EMI, owned by Terra Firma, the private equity group, said full year digital revenues rose 29 per cent to £166m, while Universal, owned by Vivendi, reported 33 per cent growth in digital revenue for the first nine months of its financial year, saying in September it believed digital initiatives could soon return the music industry to growth.

Webisztán –

Első látásra a hazai Momu.hu (More Music) koncepciója nekem gyanús. Az oldalon regisztráció után egy mp3 adatbázisban keresgélve összeállíthatom a saját playlistemet (rejtélyes okból minimum öt számnak lennie kell benne), és hallgathatom. A készítők szerint ez azért legális, mert csak sorban hallgathatom meg a számokat, nem ugrálhatok köztük és nem tekerhetek bele a felvételekbe. Így az egész egy online rádióként működik, – legalábbis szerintük – jogszerűen. Persze a működés könnyen kicselezhető, elég csak összeválogatni tetszőleges négy számot, és mindig az utolsóként hozzáadni amit hallgatni akarunk, mivel azt játssza le elsőnek.

Hogy a Momu.hu mennyi jogdíjat fizet a rádióadásokért, azt nem tudom, de abból ítélve nem sokat, hogy az oldalon sehol nem érhető el adat az oldal működtetőjéről, adatfelhasználási elveiről, nincs kapcsolatfelvételi lehetőség, sőt ha már regisztráltunk, tagságunk törlésére sincs lehetőség.

Slyck News

If you could total the quantity of unlicensed tracks within the vastness of the P2P community, then apply a reasonable fee to those tracks, you would end up with a very large monetary number. $10 billion? $50 billion? Just how much untapped money, relevant to the music industry, is circulating in the P2P community? MultiMedia Intelligence, who recently stated P2P growth will top 400% in 5 years, has pegged a monetary number to unlicensed music. The number: $69 billion.

Music Ally

Warner Chappell will today reveal details of their view of the Radiohead licensing experiment at the “You Are in Control” conference in Iceland, including total sales figures of more than three million for ‘In Rainbows’.

The UK-based branch of the publishing company licensed all digital rights including master recording rights and image and likeness rights on behalf of the band in a groundbreaking move for them as well as the band.

Today Warner Chappell’s Head of Business Affairs Jane Dyball will reveal that the digital publishing income from the first licence (for the Radiohead pay what you want site) alone dwarfed all the band’s previous digital publishing income and made a “material difference” to Warner Chappell UK’s digital income.

The publisher will also confirm that Radiohead had made more money before ‘In Rainbows’ was physically released than they made in total on the previous album ‘Hail To the Thief’. It should be pointed out that Radiohead’s existing digital income was of course low, because they had withheld licensing the likes of iTunes.

The topline figure, though, is that there were three million purchases of In Rainbows, including physical CDs, box-sets, and all downloads – including those from the band’s own website and from other digital music stores.

NME.COM

Estelle has seen her latest album, ‘Shine’, and single ‘American Boy’, plummet in the US charts after they were removed from download site iTunes in the country.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Estelle’s record label, Warner, removed the releases from iTunes in an attempt to encourage fans to buy physical copies of them instead – which earn more money for the company.

‘American Boy’ had been sitting at number 11 in the US Billboard singles chart, but it fell to number 37 following its removal from iTunes.

‘Shine’ dropped to number 159 in the albums chart, after peaking at number 38.

A spokesperson for Warner said that the move was part of strategies “uniquely tailored to each artist and their fanbase in an effort to optimise revenues and promote long-term artist development”.

paidContent:UK

One of the UK’s top ISPs is preparing to launch an unlimited music service that would see it pay record labels for songs illegally downloaded by its customers, paidContent:UK can reveal.

Playlouder MSP (music service provider), which first tried the model for itself back in 2003, said it will facilitate the service for the broadband operator, starting early next year. Co-founder Paul Sanders would not name the ISP, but a source last month told paidContent:UK Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) was holding some kind of talks with the vendor.

For more on the digital music industry, attend our EconMusic conference on Sep. 23 at the Natural History Museum in London. Early bird ticket sales are now open…

More after the jump…

Now that the biggest six ISPs have pledged to reduce illegal downloading on their networks, they need commercial alternatives that will prove similarly enticing – and subscriptions offering tunes-on-tap are emerging as the front runner for consumers already plucking free music from the “celestial jukebox”.

Playlouder’s service lets users legitimately download from channels like Gnutella, BitTorrent and more – the list goes on – because the “deep packet inspection” technology, installed on the broadband infrastructure, recognises every song downloaded over the ISP network, no matter which protocol, and reimburses rightsholders accordingly. Subscribers to the music package will even be allowed to share tunes amongst themselves because every transfer is anonymously tracked using Audible (NSDQ: ADBL) Magic, but proliferation to non-subscribers will be blocked.

The effective legitimisation of P2P channels many consider “illegal” could be a watershed – but depends on whether the ISPs can convince customers to pay a monthly fee for unlimited access they’re already getting gratis. The thousands of warning letters they’ve pledged to send may help shepherd freeloaders away from free, creating new markets. Recent research showed 95 percent of UK consumers copy music and last week’s study showing the scale of Radiohead BitTorrents suggested many listeners are loathe to use official legal channels, so a framework that extracts money from P2P, without weening users off their favourite habit, could be a winner.

“We are confident that we will have something quite good to announce in the next couple of months,” Sanders said. “We’ve just done another round of (seed) finance from senior figures in the financial community and the music community, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that if we didn’t think there was good news coming down the pipe. We’re starting the process of principal finance, we’re looking for about £4 million; it takes us through to profitability because it will essentially finance this first large ISP deal.”

For Sanders, what is Playlouder’s first ever client in five whole years of operating comes better late than never. Formed out of the early music webzine of the same name, Playlouder in 2003 debuted MSP, its own attempt at an £18-a-month ISP service with bundled music package. Three years in, and squeezed out by the ISP big boys, however, the outfit had signed only a handful of subscribers and was mothballed to a mere R&D project while Playlouder switched to focus on selling the service to the bigger providers.

On both counts, the service was way ahead of its time, conceived when labels were still advocating DRM. Speaking to me in Playlouder’s reclaimed Hoxton warehouse that is every inch the 90s trendy dot.com HQ, a weary Sanders bares many battle scars from half a decade mediating between those in the often mutually incomprenhesible ISP and music worlds, all in pursuit of the subscription dream. It’s been an uphill struggle that has taken its toll financially, too – asked if the business is supporting itself, Sanders admitted: “No, we have almost no revenue.”

But now the industry’s growing interest in the subscription music model (Sky, Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Orange et al all launching one) could finally mean real business for Playlouder, and Sanders is in the unique position of having learned more than perhaps anyone in the UK about the emerging consumer model that promises to restore to the music business much of the revenue it’s lost to piracy.

“Patience is a virtue,” he said. “This is a very slow business, I can tell you. But I haven’t been working on this for five years to decide not to prove the model at the last minute – this is new territory for ISPs and the music industry.” Perhaps hinting at the upcoming ISP deal: “If some things that we know are happening come to fruition, then we should see a breakthrough early next year. It’s not rocket science – give ‘em what they want, ask them to pay for it.” Sanders said subscriptions would bring a “huge amount more” money to music because customers buy only 2.4 albums a year (approx (£24) but would pay £5 per month (£60 annually) for unlimited access.

Playlouder is licensed to use music from EMI, SonyBMG, several indies and one more big label is on the way, Sanders revealed. So confident is he in what could finally be the realisation of his original goal, however, Sanders has ruled out selling equity to any ISP – despite approaches from both broadband and music providers – hoping instead to sell the service to “as many of them as possible”. The Playlouder system will work on any ISP’s network, Sanders said.

Napi Online

Egyre nehezebb a zenei kiadók kereskedelmi tevékenysége, mert Magyarországon minden megvásárolt zenei cd-re legalább három-négy illegális másolat jut. Az átlagos forgalom kiadványonként mára egy-két ezer eladott példányra zsugorodott, és már ez is kifejezetten jó eladási eredménynek számít. Az eddigi adatok alapján 2008 talán nem hoz visszaesést a tavalyi évhez képest, miután az elmúlt tíz évben az eladások majdnem felükre estek vissza. Nagyon nehéz érvényt szerezni a szerzői jogoknak is, mert a közvélemény nem tekinti lopásnak a kalózkodást – mondta lapunknak Jeszenszky Zsolt, a Magyar Hanglemezkiadók Szövetsége (Mahasz) és a ProArt munkatársa.

Korábban az illegális másolatokkal szembeni küzdelem koordinálását a Mahasz nyomozócsoportja végezte, 2004 őszétől a ProArt – Szövetség a Szerzői Jogokért egyesület folytatja ezt a tevékenységet. A legnagyobb gondot a világhálón, a fájlcserélő oldalakon terjedő illegális – legtöbbször mp3 – formátumú zenei másolatok jelentik. Emiatt a ProArt folyamatosan figyeli az internetet. Ha ilyen jellegű anyagok nyomára bukkannak, a csoport tagjai megkeresik a szerverüzemeltetőket, megjelölik a kérdéses illegális fájlokat, majd kérik, hogy töröljék azokat vagy tegyék lehetetlenné a hozzáférést.

Szakmai vélemények szerint bár a vonatkozó törvények megfelelőek és a bűnüldöző szervek munkája kielégítő, a jogerős ítéleteknek nincs elrettentő ereje. A problémát csak erősíti, hogy a lemezeladás általában a karácsony előtti néhány hétben jár a csúcsra, míg a mélyrepülést a februártól áprilisig tartó időszak és a nyári hónapok jelentik. Mivel a zenefogyasztók pénztárcája általában nem engedi meg a rendszeres vásárlást, a kiadványok közül csak egyet-egyet vesznek meg. A válságra a cd-k prémium verzióinak kiadása sem jelent megoldást, hiszen ezek inkább a gyűjtők számára érdekesek. A fogyasztók java pedig a “casual buyer” kategóriába tartozik, akik gyakran hirtelen, impulzus alapján érdeklődnek egy-egy új előadó iránt és általában ugyanilyen gyorsan el is felejtik azt, tehát nem izgatja őket, hogy mit tartalmaz az extra változat – tette hozzá Jeszenszky.

A kiadók bruttó nyereségükből fedezik működésüket, ebből fizetik az alkalmazottaikat és a sikertelen kiadványokból származó veszteséget is. Ha folyamatos veszteséggel kell számolniuk az illegális letöltések miatt, kénytelenek csökkenteni kockázatukat és nem költenek például drága, igényes videoklipekre, nem kísérleteznek rétegzenékkel. Ehelyett inkább olyan lemezeket adnak ki, melyek közönsége nem másolja, hanem megvásárolja a zenét. Ezért élte virágkorát néhány évvel ezelőtt a mulatós zene, mert közönségének java nem fért hozzá az internethez, így ők inkább hajlottak a lemezvásárlásra, mint az urbanizáltabb fiatalok. A mulatós mára messze túl van a zenitjén, de a mostanság legsikeresebb kiadványok, a musicalalbumok is hasonló okból fogynak jobban az átlaghoz képest. Az erre fogékony középkorú vagy idősebb közönség ugyanis inkább lemezvásárlásra szocializálódott, mint a letöltésre.

USATODAY.com

The success of the video game Rock Band is drumming up revenue for the music industry.

Virtual rockers downloaded roughly 2.5 million songs in the eight weeks since the game launched on the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 systems.

Rock Band, developed by Harmonix, which also created Guitar Hero, comes with 58 playable songs including the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter and Metallica’s Enter Sandman. But many more tunes can be downloaded over the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live for prices varying from 99 cents to $2.99.

TorrentFreak

When BuckCherry found out that their latest single had leaked on BitTorrent, they didn’t try to cover this up, or take the file down. No, instead, they issued a press release (update: the press release has been removed, Google cache), where they stated: “Honestly, we hate it when this s*** happens, because we want our FANS to have any new songs first.”

This is strange to say the least. Not only because their label, Atlantic Records, is known to release (and spam) tracks for free on BitTorrent sites, but also because the press release was more about promoting the band than the actual leak. Without any hard evidence, we suggested that this leak may have been set up to get some free promotion and publicity, which BuckCherry seems to need.

Out of curiosity, we decided to follow this up, to see if this was indeed the case. With some help of a user in the community, we tracked down some of the initial seeders of the torrent. A BitTorrent site insider was kind enough to help us out, because BitTorrent is not supposed to be “abused” like this, and confirmed that the IP of one of the early seeders did indeed belong to the person who uploaded the torrent file.

It turns out that the uploader, a New York resident, had only uploaded one torrent, the BuckCherry track. When we entered the IP-address into the Wiki-scanner, we found out that the person in question had edited the BuckCherry wikipedia entry, and added the name of the band manager to another page.

This confirmed our suspicions, but it was not quite enough, since it could be an overly obsessed fan (if they have fans). So, we decided to send the band manager, Josh Klemme – who happens to live in New York – an email to ask for his opinion on our findings. Klemme, replied to our email within a few hours, and surprisingly enough his IP-address was the same as the uploader.

| Listening Post from Wired.com

Radiohead’s “pay what you want” distribution gamble paid-off despite — or perhaps because of — rampant file sharing, according to new analysis from Will Page, chief economist at the MCPS-PRS Alliance, a British rights organization, and Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne.

Radiohead’s notorious release strategy for In Rainbows, which allowed fans to download it for an optional price with a valid e-mail address, was considered to have been a failure by some because the album became wildly popular on file sharing networks almost immediately upon its release.

But Garland and Page’s, “In Rainbows, On Torrents” report, slated to be released on the MCPS-PRS website on Friday, indicates that Radiohead’s strategy was a success nonetheless, contributing to the album topping the charts in both the UK and United States and a wildly successful worldwide tour. When it comes to judging whether an album is a success these days, the old metrics just don’t cut it.

The report found that torrent users traded 400,000 copies of In Rainbows on its October 10 release date, and that it was shared a staggering 2.3 million times by November 3 (chart courtesy of BigChampagne). By comparison, albums by Gnarls Barkley, Panic at the Disco and Portishead released around the same time using conventional means were shared less, the most-frequently shared being Panic at the Disco’s album, which was downloaded 157,000 in a week — nearly three times lower than In Rainbows’ peak day of trading).

Many within the music industry (including U2 manager Paul McGuinness) will no doubt view these 2.3 million downloads as sales Radiohead lost by giving the album away in a readily-sharable format. And either way, they represent email addresses that Radiohead failed to add into its fan database.

Will_page_2 Garland and Page admit that server problems on Radiohead’s site almost certainly drove some users to torrent trackers, as did the fact that Radiohead had “signaled” to fans that the album was free. But their most interesting finding about why fans chose to download the album via torrent rather than from InRainbows.com is their hypothesis that users adhere to music acquisition venues regardless of other factors.

“The venue hypothesis suggests that even when the price approaches zero, all other things being equal, people are more likely to act habitually (say, using The Pirate Bay) than to break their habit (say, visiting www.InRainbows.com),” reads one section of the report. In other words, people tend to develop habits around the acquisition of music; once they find something that works, they tend to keep using it. As the paper mentions, “The Pirate Bay is a powerful brand with a sterling reputation in the minds of millions of young music fans.”

The hard lesson to the music business here is that it must license venues for music acquisition that fans prefer to file sharing networks or otherwise make the toleration of file sharing part of their business plans. If even Radiohead’s freely available album was torrented 2.3 million times in the first three and a half weeks, how can more traditional offerings successfully clamp-down on file sharing? They can’t, pure and simple.

In addition, official offerings like InRainbows.com need not be considered to be in competition with file sharing networks, as hard as that may be for longtime music insiders to comprehend.

“Frequently, music industry professionals suggest that an increase in legitimate sales must necessarily coincide with a commensurate reduction in piracy, as if this were a fact,” says the report. “Yet, the company BigChampagne has made no such consistent observation in nearly a decade of analyzing these data. Rather, it finds that piracy rates follow awareness and interest… The biggest selling albums and songs are nearly always the most widely pirated, regardless of all the ‘anti-piracy’ tactics employed by music companies. Or, to sum up by paraphrasing an earlier argument, ‘popular music is popular everywhere it’s popular.'”

Exactly. All of this torrenting of In Rainbows contributed to the album making such a big impression on a listening public that’s bombarded with an ever-increasing amount of information. Without its album being so widely traded, would Radiohead’s album have shot to the top of the charts? Would their worldwide tour be such a smashing success?

Eric_garland_2 Not necessarily, says the report, and we agree. Applying economic principles to digital music, Garland and Page found that “the challenge of achieving popularity (or attention) when the old rules of scarcity and excludability don’t apply (to information goods) the way they used to, changes the monetization game completely.” And Radiohead clearly won that game, regardless of how many times its album was traded online.

Garland and Page came to the undeniable conclusion that the music industry needs to stop thinking of shared files as lost sales, and start treating them as an aspect of reality upon which they can build part of their businesses.

As for Radiohead, they can rest easy knowing that while their strategy will now come under increased scrutiny by enemies of file sharing within the industry, that by “losing” the battle for the email addresses of those who downloaded their album via bit torrent, they actually won the overall war for the public’s attention — no easy feat, these days.

The report is now available here.

| Bit Player | Los Angeles Times

RealNetworks reported that subscribers to its paid music services (Rhapsody and Real’s premium Internet radio stations) dropped slighted in the final three months of 2007, from 1.925 million to 1.9 million in the previous quarter. Rival Napster on Wednesday reported a similar drop in the fourth quarter, from about 750,000 to 743,000.

ReadWriteWeb

When the Yahoo! Music Store closes its doors this fall, the company announced today, past customers dependent on their music “phoning home” to get license approval before playing are out of luck. They’ll be able to continue playing purchased tracks on a single computer, until they make any changes to their operating system.

Entertainment News, Music News, Media – Variety

Lewis’ “Bleeding Love” is the year’s biggest-selling track to date, having been downloaded 2.6 million times.

Sales of vinyl albums are up dramatically as well: 803,000 have been sold in 2008 vs. 454,000 in ’07.

Arstechnica

The European Union has proposed a plan to retroactively extend the copyright terms on musical recordings for another 45 years. Apparently, it’s unfair for performers who recorded tracks in their twenties not to keep receiving money for them in their seventies; under the current 50-year copyright term, “this means that income stops when performers are retired.” Funny—we thought that most retirees faced the same problem.

Intellectual Property Watch »

Broadcasters also argue that the current relationship between the performers and radio stations is a mutually beneficial one, in which the radio benefits from advertising revenue and artists get free air time, which boosts record sales. They cited Nielson Company data from companies that track the relationship between “spins” of songs on the radio and the resulting sales demonstrate that both artists and record labels reap big rewards for local radio time. Between 14 and 23 percent of industry sales of albums and digital tracks can be attributed to local radio, which provides artists with $1.5 billion to $2.4 billion annually, according to a new study promoted by NAB.

FT.com print article

Songwriters and publishers for the first time earned more from broadcasts and legal downloads of their music in 2007 than from the copyright from sales of CDs, new figures show.

Despite an 11 per cent fall in rights income from physical sales, reflecting the accelerating collapse of the CD market, the main body that collects rights on behalf of UK performers and publishers reported overall growth of 2.8 per cent last year.

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The figures show how such fees charged to broadcasters and online outlets for their use of music are becoming increasingly important to musicians and music companies.

They underscore a growing argument in the music industry that artists and record labels will have to adapt to the idea that recorded music sales – once the core of the business – will become just ancillary revenue streams.

The Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society and the Performing Rights Society, which together – as the MCPS-PRS Alliance – reap the rewards of musical creativity for UK artists, said income from broadcasting and online sources increased 7 per cent to £155.5m ($306.7m).

The money paid to copyright holders from CD sales, by contrast, fell 11 per cent from £170.7m to £151.8m. Overall income reported by the MCPS-PRS Alliance grew from £546.8m to £562.1m.

Licensing ‘not about fat cats’

The MCPS-PRS Alliance says its licensing of public music performances, from the 02 Arena to your local hairdressing salon, is “not about fat-cattery but doing something important for people who can’t do it themselves”, write Ben Fenton and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson.

The 2007 figures show that 95 per cent of the alliance’s 50,000 members earn less than £10,000 a year from copyright on their songs, while only 0.01 per cent, or about five superstars, earn over £1m.

Collecting societies have used such figures as ammunition in their lobbying for an extension to the length of copyright protection for sound recordings. MCPS-PRS and PPL, the other large UK collecting society, failed to persuade a Treasury review of intellectual property regulations to extend recorded music copyright in December 2006.

At the time, the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce praised Andrew Gowers, the review’s author, for resisting the “special pleading by a number of already wealthy pop stars”. In February, however, Charlie McCreevy, European commissioner, expressed sympathy with the collecting societies’ case, saying European performers should enjoy copyright protection for 95 years rather than the current 50 years.

In all, 78 per cent of the MCPS-PRS membership gets less than £1.50 a day from their creativity, with 37 per cent – 18,500 musicians – failing to register a single penny in rights payments. The bulk of the money collected goes to the big music publishing companies.

Steve Porter, chief executive, told the Financial Times: “Because we have also made our collection costs more efficient, then for the first time we have been able to distribute more than half a billion pounds to our 50,000 members.

“For us, the important thing is to be able to collect in new ways and new places to make up for the obvious decline in revenues from CD sales.”

The burgeoning live music market is also reflected in the new figures, showing a 20 per cent increase in rights collected from businesses staging live gigs and festivals. The sector now produces £17.5m in income. Money from pubs and clubs increased by 4.1 per cent to £40.4m and total public performance revenues were up almost 10 per cent at £133.6m.

Mr Porter said that despite the threat of illegal music downloading on the internet, which has had a savage impact on CD sales, there was still potential for greater growth in two areas: international usage and legal online music services such as Apple’s iTunes.

“We have had a 10 per cent increase in international collections and most of that is being generated in central and eastern Europe where collection mechanisms are getting more effective,” he said. “But of course people are banging on tables and saying we should be getting more money out of China and so on. But the fact is that if you don’t have a mature and established collecting-rights environment which says these rights have value, it’s really very difficult.

“There is no broadcast music right in China, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be one in the future,” Mr Porter said.

The alliance had set itself the challenge of finding new uses of music that had so far fallen outside the licensing net, he added, citing as examples “the birthday card that plays a song or the toothbrush that plays a jingle”.

Although online rights income increased by 54 per cent in 2007, it accounted for only £9.7m, a fraction of the value estimated to be lost by illegal downloading.

Broadcast revenues, especially in television, looked more healthy, with a 10.4 per cent increase to £89.9m. In radio, where rights are calculated as a proportion of advertising revenue, income was flat at £49.5m, but Mr Porter said he expected it to grow in 2008.

“This year we are looking for more of the same,” he added. Growth in broadcast and online is forecast to approach double-digits again while revenues from CDs is predicted to fall by 17 to 18 per cent on current trends.

PPL, the UK broadcast royalties collection society, said earlier this month that it would step up a campaign to extract more fees from businesses for their use of music, as new figures showed a 15 per cent rise in performance rights around the world.

Techdirt:

I’ve been noticing an interesting trend lately. While more folks aren’t totally averse to the idea that they need to somehow embrace “free,” they’re mishandling what they do with “free” and then going on to complain how “free” doesn’t work. The basic problem is this: they hear about the importance of “free” and so they give something away for free. But they don’t have a business model around the free content. They don’t understand the economic forces at work. They just give stuff away and pray… and then whine when nothing happens. As we’ve pointed out before, no one says that “free” by itself pays the bills. You need to have a more complete strategy than that — and it involves a lot more than “give it away and pray.” It’s good that they’re at least trying, but if they don’t understand the real issues and fail at the experiments, they suddenly come back and claim that “free” isn’t the answer, and suddenly rule out all business models involving free. And that is a real recipe for failure.

The Register

Nokia will be handing over its entire handset profit margin – and more – to the record industry for its “Comes With Music” progamme, according to media analysts.

The Hollywood Reporter this week reports that Nokia is paying the world’s biggest label, Universal Music Group, $35 per handset to bundle access to the label’s catalogue. Punters are allowed to keep music they download.

Music business insiders expressed astonishment to us at Nokia’s generosity: it’s seven times what some privately estimated the deal was worth. Paid Content puts the payment to UMG at $33.5 per handset for the first 2.5 million units, falling as volumes increase.

But what if Nokia succeeds in replicating the deal with other labels? Then the extent of the programme becomes apparent. One blog, basing its estimate on market share, figures the subsidy would rise to $116 per handset. But that’s a lowball figure, we reckon: it excludes publishing royalties, and underestimates the size of the indie sector which is as high as 40pc of the market, particularly with the yoof demographic Nokia wants.

The back of our envelope shows a figure closer to $150 per handset.

Either way, that comfortably wipes out any hope of a profit for Nokia on the CWM. The average selling price of a mobile handset is a shade over $100; Nokia’s gross margin around a third of that.

The pride of Finnish business has been undergoing a crisis of confidence in recent years – making it easy pickings for new media consultants. These are typified by WiReD magazine’s Chris Anderson, who recently lectured the company on the wisdom of giving stuff away. “Zero” was a “Radical Price”, he advised. And “Minus Eighty” sure is a radical profit margin, Chris!

How the music business must wish it met “paytards” like Nokia every day.

– Entertainment on The Huffington Post

After 17 years of running my record label spinART Records, I shut it down. The advent and general adoption of the Internet, digital media and hardware took control of the global music industry away from the record labels and media outlets and handed it to the masses. For the first time in history, through sites like TuneCore, all music creators can choose to be their own record label. There are no longer subjective gatekeepers controlling who gets let “in,” promoted and exposed. The choice is ours. Now, anyone can be famous.

Rolling Stone

Wal-Mart is like no traditional record seller. Unlike a typical Tower store, which stocks 60,000 titles, an average Wal-Mart carries about 5,000 CDs. That leaves little room on the shelf for developing artists or independent labels. There’s also scant space for catalog albums, which now represent about forty percent of all sales.

TorrentFreak

Following a huge increase in complaints from the music, movie and software industries, the four major Japanese ISP organizations have agreed that they will work with copyright holders to track down copyright infringing file-sharers and disconnect them from the internet.

The Huffington Post

Apple Inc. is negotiating with record labels over a deal to give iPhone and iPod customers free access to the entire iTunes music library if they pay extra for the devices.

The Financial Times is reporting that the sticking point in the talks is how much Cupertino-based Apple will pay the record labels for the access. The newspaper cites unnamed music industry sources for Wednesday’s report.

Apple declined to comment.

The newspaper reports that Apple is looking at offering the unlimited music bundle with for the iPod and iPhone, and also a monthly music subscription service only for the iPhone.

Wired

Having failed to stop piracy by suing internet users, the music industry is for the first time seriously considering a file sharing surcharge that internet service providers would collect from users.

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

“It looks like Trent Reznor’s new Nine Inch Nails album experiment is a success. Among the various options he gave fans, the most expensive was the $300 Limited Edition Ultra Deluxe Package. It took just over a day for that package to completely sell out, earning Reznor $750,000 in revenue from just that option alone.”

Los Angeles Times

For the first time last year, nearly half of all teenagers bought no compact discs, a dramatic increase from 2006, when 38% of teens shunned such purchases, according to a new report released Tuesday.

The illegal sharing of music online continued to soar in 2007, but
there was one sign of hope that legal downloading was picking up steam.
In the last year, Apple Inc.’s iTunes store, which sells only digital
downloads, jumped ahead of Best Buy Co. to become the No. 2 U.S. music
seller, trailing Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

TechRadar.com

Spare a thought for the people over at file-sharing website The Pirate Bay – they’re being attacked from all sides at the moment.

Following recent lawsuits and calls for ISPs to monitor illegal file sharing activities on websites such as The Pirate Bay, now artists Prince and The Village People are to sue the file-sharing website in a Swedish court, according to news website E24.se.

“We’re looking at damages of millions of dollars, and we will act in both US and Swedish courts,” John Giacobbi, president of law firm Web Sheriff, said in a statement. The law firm specialises in copyright issues, E24.se reports.

Other artists, including Van Morrison and copyright holders of Chet Baker’s back catalogue, can also be included in the lawsuit, Giacobbi said.

Arstechnica

The race is on to get the last word in on the Comcast/BitTorrent
controversy.
With ten days left to file, telcos, trade, and advocacy groups are
sending the Federal Communications Commission their statements on
whether Comcast and other ISPs purposefully degrade peer to peer
traffic, and if so, what to do about it. Not surprisingly, the debate
pits broadband content providers and advocacy groups against the big
telcos, cable companies, and their trade association backers.

Just about every big phone company has filed a statement challenging the FCC’s authority to deal with this problem. AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest all submitted lengthy remarks on February 13th, the last day for comments on the proceeding (parties can still reply to comments through the 28th).

The Industry Standard

One of Denmark’s largest ISPs said on Wednesday it will fight a court injunction mandating that it shut off access to a file-sharing Web site, in what could be a closely-watched battle with the music industry in Europe.

Tele2 met with representatives of other ISPs on Monday and decided to challenge the injunction, said Nicholai Pfeiffer, Tele2’s chief of regulations.

As a result, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is understood to have filed on Tuesday a further justification for the injunction with the court, Pfeiffer said.

Tele2 has complied with the injunction and blocked its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay, a Web site that hosts torrents, or small information files used to download larger files from the BitTorrent P-to-P (peer-to-peer) network. The IFPI alleges that Danish Internet users are using BitTorrent to download, without authorization, copyright content that they found using The Pirate Bay’s list of available torrents.

No other Danish ISP has been ordered to shut off access to The Pirate Bay. However, IFPI plans to send letters this week to other Danish ISPs asking them to also block The Pirate Bay, said Jesper Bay [cq], spokesman.

“Whether they are going to do that or not, it’s up to them,” Bay said, adding that IFPI hasn’t decided whether to pursue more injunctions.

Bay said the injunction has two purposes: It sends a signal to ISPs that they have a responsibility to stop piracy and to users that downloading copyright content without permission is illegal.

The content the IFPI objects to is actually hosted on the PCs of users around the world. The torrents coordinate the download of file fragments from different PCs, and those fragments are eventually linked together to form a complete file that can then be uploaded to other machines. BitTorrent has many legitimate uses, including software distribution, and is used by some media companies to deliver their content.

The record industry has employed companies specializing in file-sharing forensics to track down individual Internet users it says are sharing copyright content illegally. It also sought to shut down Web sites such as The Pirate Bay that are part of the P-to-P network.

The Danish court concluded that Tele2 was assisting in copyright infringement. Tele2, as well as other ISPs that have come under pressure, maintain they are blind to what their customers transmit on their networks and should not be responsible for policing content.

“Our overall view is we don’t actually want to take sides in this dispute between IFPI and The Pirate Bay,” Pfeiffer said.

The Pirate Bay said on Friday that traffic from Denmark has shot up 12 percent since Tele2’s block was imposed. The Pirate Bay also set up an alternative Web site for Tele2 customers giving them instructions on how to circumvent the block.

Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay faces trouble in its own waters. In Sweden, charges of profiting and encouraging copyright infringement are pending against four people involved with the Web site.

International Herald Tribune

Singers and musicians should earn royalty fees for 95 years — almost double the current 50-year limit, a European Union official said Thursday as he promised to draft new copyright protection rules.

“If nothing is done, thousands of European performers who recorded in the late 1950s and 1960s will lose all of their airplay royalties over the next ten years,” said EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, the union’s internal market chief. “These royalties are often their sole pension.”

People are living longer and 50 years of copyright protection no longer give lifetime income to artists who recorded hits in their late teens or early twenties, he said.

Most European composers and lyricists currently receive lifetime copyright protection which is passed on to their descendants for another 70 years. The new EU rules would not change that.

But the change would mean that performers would get the same 95-year copyright period enjoyed by their U.S. counterparts.

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Torsson, P., & Fleischer, R. (2005). The Grey Commons, 22C3. Berlin.

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p2pnet.net

This year was Mininova’s third birthday and almost by way of celebration, yesterday it announced several new features, one of them offering musicians a new way to reach potential listeners.

“In close cooperation with the guys from BitLet, we added a ’stream this music’ button to torrents containing music (MP3/OGG Vorbis) files (example),” says Niek on the Mininova blog.

This lets users play the music right in their browse, without nedding downloads from a BitTorrent client.

But, it’s only enabled on distributed (featured) torrents and, “Artists who’re interested in this feature are invited to sign up for the free Mininova Content Distribution service.

 Listening Post from Wired.com

The major labels, eager to wrest control over digital music pricing and distribution from Apple, are considering a project called Total Music that would allow them to charge device manufacturers, cellphone service providers, and other businesses $5 per month for the right to let their customers listen to free music. At this point, Total Music is being championed by Universal Music Group and Sony/BMG, but the other two majors could be interested too.

But there’s at least one problem with the plan. When an entire industry colludes to set terms and pricing, the Department of Justice tends to get interested for antitrust reasons.

Apparently, that is what is happening. According to the Music Ally newsletter, the DoJ has served Universal and Sony/BMG with notices to find out more about Total Music, and has also requested information from Warner Music Group and EMI (see update below).

Mi2N – Music Industry News Network

* Total revenue of $989 million increased 7% from $928 million in the prior-year quarter, and grew 1% on a constant-currency basis.

* Digital revenue was $141 million, or 14% of total revenue, up 9% sequentially from $130 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007 and up 41% from $100 million in the prior-year quarter.

* Operating income decreased 45% to $44 million from $80 million in the prior-year quarter. Operating income in the first quarter includes an $18 million impairment charge related to Bulldog Entertainment, an entertainment services company purchased in May 2007, a business we have since exited.

* Operating income before depreciation and amortization (OIBDA) fell 8% to $129 million from $140 million in the prior-year quarter.

* Net loss of $0.11 per diluted share, which reflects the previously noted $18 million or $0.12 per share impairment charge, declined from net income of $0.12 per diluted share in the prior-year quarter.

Intellectual Property Watch »

CANNES – Music industry 1.0 is dead, but 2.0 has not arrived quite yet. New models for making money from music and music rights are being looked for desperately at the world’s largest music fair, Midem, this week in Cannes.

| News | This is London

Music fans around the world faced confusion today as it was announced they would be able to download unlimited, free songs without breaking the law.

A revamped online file-sharing service had vowed to offer a catalogue of 30million free songs that are compatible with iPods, but record labels have denied they had granted permission to share the songs.

Qtrax, which makes its debut today, is the latest online music venture counting on the lure of free songs to draw in music fans.

The key to their revolutionary venture was thought to be advertising, which they hope will pay the bills, namely record company licensing fees.

The New York-based service was among several peer-to-peer file-sharing applications that emerged following the shutdown of Napster, the pioneer service that enabled millions to illegally copy songs stored in other computers.

But Warner Music said it had not authorised the use of its tracks by Qtrax – and later Universal Music Group and EMI followed suit, saying they did not have licensing deals with Qtrax and discussions were continuing.

Justin Kazmark, a spokesman for New York-based Qtrax, has declined to comment.

Rough translation: But no. Of course not. Never. Who on earth would want to listen all the music of the earth? Sometimes I ask a friend to download me something. Me? Never. I ask my brother to do it for me. No, seriously. I tried once, but there were so many viruses. And anyways, I don’t listen too much music nowadays.

Where do you make money?

Live performances. Royalties. TV.

BBC NEWS | Technology

In February 2006, a part-time Canadian music student established a modest, non-commercial website that used collaborative wiki tools, such as those used by Wikipedia, to create an online library of public domain musical scores.

Within a matter of months, the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) featured more than 1,000 musical scores for which the copyright had expired in Canada.

Within two years – without any funding, sponsorship or promotion – the site had become the largest public domain music score library on the internet, generating a million hits per day, featuring over 15,000 scores by over 1,000 composers, and adding 2,000 new scores each month.

In mid-October this year the IMSLP disappeared from the internet.

Universal Edition, an Austrian music publisher, retained a Canadian law firm to demand that the site block European users from accessing certain works and from adding new scores for which the copyright had not expired in Europe.

The company noted that while the music scores entered the public domain in Canada 50 years after a composer’s death, Europe’s copyright term is 20 years longer.

Wired

In the first month, about a million fans downloaded In Rainbows. Roughly 40 percent of them paid for it, according to comScore, at an average of $6 each, netting the band nearly $3 million. Plus, since it owns the master recording (a first for the band), Radiohead was also able to license the album for a record label to distribute the old-fashioned way — on CD. In the US, it goes on sale January 1 through TBD Records/ATO Records Group.

While pay-what-you-will worked for Radiohead, though, it’s hard to imagine the model paying off for Miley Cyrus — aka chart-topping teenybopper Hannah Montana. Cyrus’ label, Walt Disney Records, will stick to selling CDs in Wal-Mart, thank you very much. But the truth is that Radiohead didn’t intend In Rainbows to start a revolution. The experiment simply proves there is plenty of room for innovation in the music business — this is just one of many new paths. Wired asked David Byrne — a legendary innovator himself and the man who wrote the Talking Heads song “Radio Head” from which the group takes its name — to talk with Yorke about the In Rainbows distribution strategy and what others can learn from the experience.

BusinessWeek

In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony (SNE) and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of its collection available without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software some time in the first quarter, according to people familiar with the matter.

Quart » Hírek »

Kétszer annyi zenét töltöttek le pénzért Nagy-Britanniában a karácsony utáni hétben, mint egy éve ugyanekkor, illetve fele annyit, mint amennyit 2004-ben egész évben. A közel hárommillió letöltés a legnagyobb mennyiség, amit hét nap leforgása alatt valaha elértek. A legnépszerűbb letöltések között Timbaland, Amy Winehouse és The Pogues, viszont albumokat még mindig cd-n vesznek az emberek (mármint a szigetországban).

A British Phonographic Industries (BPI) szerint a letöltések részben a karácsonykor ajándékozott mp3-lejátszók népszerűsége miatt ugrottak meg ennyire. Egészen pontosan 2,95 millió letöltés volt az év utolsó hetében Nagy Britanniában, ami egyrészt kétszer annyi, mint a tavalyi karácsony utáni átlag, viszont ha az éves 77,5 milliót nézzük (ami szintén a tavalyi duplája), akkor 2007 heti átlagának is csupán nem sokkal több, mint kétszereséről van szó, ami a karácsonyi szezont tekintve azért nem tűnik olyan iszonyatosan meglepőnek. Ettől függetlenül persze heti rekordmennyiségről van szó, sőt, 2004-ben, amikor a legális zeneletöltés beindult, egész évben 5,8 millió letöltés volt. Matt Phillips, a BPI szóvivője szerint bár számítottak rá, hogy nagyobb mértékben töltenek majd le az ünnepek után, rekordmennyiségre nem számítottak. Egyébként a karácsonyt megelőző héten is magasabb volt a letöltések száma, mint az éves átlag, egészen konkrétan kétmillió.

Motley Fool

As I’ve said before, a good sign of a dying industry that investors might want to avoid is when it would rather litigate than innovate, signaling a potential destroyer of value. If it starts to pursue paying customers — which doesn’t seem that outlandish at this point — then I guess we’ll all know the extent of the desperation. Investor, beware.

Wired

This year, 22 percent of all music sold in the US will move through iTunes. “If iTunes gets up to 40 or 50 percent, they’ll have too much power for anyone else to enter the business,” says James McQuivey, who analyzes the digital music industry for Forrester Research. If the labels want out, they have two choices: Find a way to unseat the iPod or allow iTunes’ competitors to sell unprotected files that can play on Apple’s ubiquitous device.

Silicon Alley Insider

iTunes buyers who want to purchase Jay-Z’s newest album, the soundtrack to the American Gangster movie, are out of luck. That’s because the rapper insists that fans buy the entire album, not individual tracks, and Apple’s (AAPL) online store won’t allow that.

Jay-Z’s not the first artist to stay off of iTunes because of an album vs. tracks dispute (other notable holdouts include Radiohead). But is the first time he’s had a problem with it: You can buy much of his earlier music, track by track, on iTunes today. What gives?
Jay-Z is also the titular head of Universal Music Group’s Def-Jam label, and his boss Doug Morris has become one of Apple’s (AAPL) loudest critics, so it’s easy to imagine that Jay-Z’s move had something to do with that — note that album will be sold via Amazon (AMZN), which is trying to create an iTunes competitor with UMG’s help.

Maybe the rapper is sincere when he says he wants fans to experience the entire album as a whole, just like they’d watch a film all the way through instead of scenes. Or it may just be Jay-Z wishing he could dial the clock back to the late 90s, when people who wanted to buy an individual song had no choice but to buy the album it was on — a lousy deal for consumers but fantastic for the music business.

Whatever the motivations are, the result will be the same: Fans who want to acquire Jay-Z’s music legally have lost their easiest and most widely used option, which means they’ll be that much less likely to pay for it at all.

TorrentFreak

“I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted.”

TorrentFreak

The Pirate Bay is featuring the Swedish glam rock band “Lamont” on their frontpage. Unlike the major record labels, Lamont recognizes the power of filesharing and they give away their album for free. Not without success, over 100,000 people downloaded their album in less than 24 hours, numbers that other artists can only dream of.

Boing Boing

Gracenote, the company that usually provides the album information when you rip a CD, launched an interesting Music Map application that shows the “popularity” of artists and albums by region and country in many parts of the world. It does this based on how often Gracenote’s database is queried about particular albums or artists.

Link to Flash map

Silicon Alley Insider

Napster’s 2Q highlights: Revenues are up 24% y/y, to $31.6 million, and the company has stopped burning cash. The lowlights: It’s no longer burning money because it’s retreating from its core business: Selling all-you-can-eat music subscriptions. A year ago the company spent $8.5 million on sales and marketing, and this quarter that number had shrunk to $5 million.

The results: six months ago the subscription music service had 830,000 subs, three months ago it had 770,000, and now it has 750,000. The company says that last drop was expected, because kids stop using the service during the summer. But it’s not as if those numbers will swell this fall: NAPS projects only a 4% revenue increase for next quarter.

So instead of talking up its core subscription business, Napster is now pinning its hopes on the mobile industry. Music on your cellphone may one day be a real business, but hard to see why Napster is going to be the company that will capitalize on it. In the meantime, Napster has concluded that PC-based music subscriptions aren’t a growth business — the same conclusion that Yahoo! Music, RealNetworks and MTV have already come to.

The Rawking Refuses To Stop! :: When I said I wanted to be your blog

What I’m saying is, the lack of a legitimate, legal service with the same quality, ease and variety of OiNK is a huge, gaping hole in the music business right now and if anyone wants to make money on a recording ever again, you guys had better fill it the hell up.

mudd up! » archive »

Oink had everything by certain artists. Literally, everything. I searched for ‘DJ Rupture’ and found every release I’d ever done, from an obscure 7″ on a Swedish label to 320kpbs rips of my first 12″, self-released back in 1999. It was shocking. And reassuring. The big labels want music to equal money, but as much as anything else, music is memory, as priceless and worthless as memory…

The Canadian Press

LONDON – British and Dutch police shut down what they say is one the world’s biggest online sources of pirated music Tuesday and arrested the website’s 24-year-old suspected operator.The invitation-only OiNK website specialized in distributing albums leaked before their official release by record companies, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said.

Many among OiNK’s estimated 180,000 members paid “donations” to upload or download albums, often weeks before their release, and within hours albums would be distributed through public forums and blogs across the Internet. Users were invited to the site if they could prove they had music to share, the IFPI said.

The IFPI said more than 60 major albums were leaked on OiNK so far this year, making it the primary source worldwide for illegal prerelease music.

Prerelease piracy is considered particularly damaging to music sales as it leads to early mixes and unfinished versions of artists’ recordings circulating on the Internet months before the release.

Police in Cleveland, in northeast England, said they were tracing the money generated through the website, expected to amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The arrest of a 24-year-old IT worker at a house in Middlesbrough, northeast England, followed a two-year investigation by Dutch and British police and raids co-ordinated by Interpol.

Cleveland police said the man, whose name was not released, was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and infringement of copyright law.

OiNK’s servers, in Amsterdam, were shut down by Dutch police, the IFPI said.

“OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of prerelease music online,” said Jeremy Banks, the head of the IFPI’s Internet Anti-Piracy Unit.

“This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online.”

and an OINK user who thinks otherwise…

“Personally i’ve never downloaded a pre-release album on oink (don’t need oink for that, every public tracker has those kind of releases). I like OiNK because you could find that extremely-rare edition that you’d have died for and you could listen to it and decide if that was worth your money.
If you couldn’t find a release on oink, those record probably simply did’t exist.

oh…i’m so sad…”

kottke.org

Marginal Revolution and CNN (and New York magazine and Reddit and etc.) asked their respective readers: how much did you pay for In Rainbows, Radiohead’s new album which is only available as a pay-what-you-want download.

Yahoo! News UK

Britney Spears’ music label filed a copyright infringement suit on Thursday, accusing the popular Internet gossip site PerezHilton.com of posting unauthorized recordings from her forthcoming album.
(Advertisement)

The lawsuit came a day after Jive Records, part of Sony BMG Music Entertainment’s Zomba Label Group, announced that it would release “Blackout” two weeks earlier than originally planned because some tracks had been leaked online.

“Blackout,” Spears’ first album of new material in four years, is now slated to reach stores October 30 in the United States and a day earlier internationally.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, accuses PerezHilton.com and its proprietor, Mario Lavandeira, of illegally obtaining and posting at least 10 completed songs and unfinished demos during the past three months.

The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages and a court order barring further infringement by the site.

coolfer

Inspired by an archive-digging post by Jason Kottke, here are some industry-related articles I’ve dug up since the New York Times opened up its online archives (back to 1981). I’ve enjoyed reading about industry changes, Napster and the emergence of the Internet given knowledge of how the industry and technology has developed over the years.

The Telegraph

Artists are increasingly making their fortunes from live events rather than records. In North America alone, figures by industry monitor Pollstar show ticket sales have more than doubled to $3.6bn (£1.8bn) in the past five years. The Rolling Stones made $139m from touring last year, and more the year before. Stuck behind computer screens all day, we enjoy our mass gatherings, and those who followed the Stones in their youth can afford £200 to see them on stage today.

With both new and established acts now capable of making money without the backing of a big company, McGee says record labels are being left out of the loop. He scoffs at their efforts to make up lost ground by developing into “multimedia entertainment companies that can manage bands and share in live income”.

But try they must. Revenues from record sales in Britain have dropped by more than £130m since 2004. The true cost to the industry could be far greater. TNS, the market researcher, looked at the spending habits of file-sharers between 2003 and 2005 and estimated a £1bn loss to the country in retail spend.

Times Online

10%: proportion of music sales worldwide that come from internet downloads

10,000: people in 18 countries threatened with legal action

20bn: tracks are illegally downloaded each year

14%: of broadband users regularly engage in illegal file-sharing

795m: estimated number of legal downloads bought last year

4m: songs can currently be purchased online

£1bn: what legal music download market is worth

25: illegal downloads for every legitimate music purchase

TECH.BLORGE.com

Amazon’s long awaited DRM-less music download store just hit the web, and, for a moment there, I thought it might have become vaporware. Thankfully, that didn’t turn out to be the case, giving me a chance to put the store through its paces. Here’s my review of the Amazon MP3 Download Store.

Amazon is going out on a limb here, offering DRM-less MP3 tracks at 256kbps at $0.89 per song. DRM-less music download stores have been done before, but they usually lack in music selection. Amazon is looking to change the music download world by giving users the opportunity to do anything they want with their music while offering a huge selection of both popular and unpopular/underground artists, but does it do this well?

Businesswire

“SpiralFrog is committed to solving music piracy by changing the way people discover music with free content, an engaging site and finally offering a real alternative to illicit file-sharing,” said Mohen.

“Our Apologies.

At this time, the SpiralFrog Web site is available only to residents of the United States of America and Canada.” sais Spiralfrog.

Back to piratebay.

Listening Post – Wired Blogs

If you’re looking for a way to grab music from peer-to-peer networks without that nagging feeling that you’re depriving a starving artist of her next meal (or a label exec of that Learjet upgrade), Grooveshark might help. It’s a P2P app like Limewire or Kazaa, except you have to pay for tracks (“around $0.99”). The artist/label takes their cut, and then Grooveshark splits the remainder 50/50 with the user who uploaded the track to the buyer.

Once the service launches (it’s in private beta), you’ll be able to purchase tracks via the web, but you’ll need to run a small client (Linux/Mac/Windows) in order to share. The system apparently selects the highest bitrate file available when you purchase a track, and all tracks are delivered in the unprotected MP3 format. Artist information is created and edited using a wiki-style collaborative system. Bands and artists whose music is not already shared by Grooveshark users can share their own music in order to seed it into the system.

This is an interesting concept, but one problem is likely to be the size of the music catalog, because songs aren’t available unless the artist/label want them to be. Grooveshark says “it has gotten interest of a ton of independent labels as well as some larger ones (Magnatunes/Naxos/Sheridan Square),” but in order for a store like this to be useful, it has to be truly comprehensive.

One way to solve the problem would be to allow all music to be sold through the site, only paying the artists and labels who register — sort of like SoundExchange does.

Update: Grooveshark is in fact going to index songs from any label so the catalog problems I mention above shouldn’t be a factor. Problem solved?

variety

Starbucks may not be the powerful promotional partner Hollywood thought it would be.

Paramount
Classics’ “Arctic Tale” has become the second pic backed by the coffee
giant not able to translate the company’s caffeine buzz into strong box
office. (Starbucks previously backed Lionsgate’s “Akeelah and the Bee.”)

The
environmentally focused docu revolving around polar bears and walruses
has earned $484,000 since bowing July 25. Pic’s widest opening on 227
theaters occurred in its fourth week of release Aug. 17. It plays in
158 venues in its fifth frame this weekend.

National Geographic
Films produced “Arctic,” as well as surprise hit “March of the
Penguins,” which went on to earn $77 million for Warner Independent in
2005.

Par Classics (a division of Paramount Vantage) had hoped
the success of the penguin tale would rub off on its own pic and help
sell more tickets.

But it also hoped that having Starbucks aboard
would raise awareness for the film and entice the company’s 44 million
weekly customers to hit the multiplexes.

Starbucks installed
signage and stickers in 6,800 of its stores, printed “Arctic”-branded
cup sleeves, sold plush walruses and the pic’s soundtrack and sponsored
discussions in select stores nationwide about climate change. Materials
for the movie also appear on the company’s website.

Chain doesn’t
have video screens in its stores as rival Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf
does, so footage from a pic it pushes can’t be displayed in stores.

Campaign runs in stores in the U.S. and Canada through Monday.

Starbucks
said it didn’t go further and create a themed Frappuccino, for example,
because it didn’t want to overly commercialize the tie-in.

“With
all of our entertainment options, we are careful to promote our
products and projects in a tasteful manner and not to interfere with
the coffeehouse experience,” said Ken Lombard, prexy of Starbucks
Entertainment.

Starbucks’ pic deals go beyond a traditional promo
pact like that of, say, General Motors for “Transformers,” because
Starbucks collects a percentage of a movie’s profits in return for its
marketing muscle.

And that unusual payoff pact winds up putting a
bigger spotlight on the results of the films the company decides to
back — especially given that Starbucks does not invest in the
production of the films it promotes.

Promo partners are
increasingly becoming a studio’s best friend, with brands ponying up
their own marketing dollars to help push pics and make their companies
seem more appealing to customers through entertainment tie-ins.

Starbucks
has long been considered a potential powerhouse for Hollywood,
especially after helping launch music artists and assisting more
familiar ones to sell CDs.

But it hasn’t fared as well on the film front.

“Arctic
Tale’s” performance has been chilly so far. Its $484,000 compares with
the $4 million “Penguins” had earned by the end of its fourth week when
it played on 132 screens.

“Akeelah,” the first film Starbucks
promoted, ultimately earned $19 million. Pic still turned a profit
given its $8 million production budget (Lionsgate spent around $20
million to market it). But industryites had expected it to earn more
given Starbucks’ backing and rhetoric from the Seattle-based company
that it’s a bona fide entertainment player.

“We are an innovative
company that is not afraid to go outside of our comfort zone, and
‘Akeelah’ and ‘Arctic Tale’ showed us the coffeehouse can be a means to
introduce films to our customers they might not normally be exposed
to,” Lombard said.

Pics also are a way to associate Starbucks with a particular message — climate change in the case of “Arctic Tale.”

“We
introduced ‘Arctic Tale’ to our customers because we want to spark a
dialogue about environmental issues,” Lombard said. “The coffeehouse is
a great place to inspire such discussion. There is no more important
issue facing our planet today than climate change.” The tie-in was an
“avenue to get people of all ages to talk … and hopefully be inspired
to be a part of the solution.”

But studios ultimately want
Starbucks customers to be inspired to buy tickets; the B.O. tallies
show that Starbucks may still need to massage its marketing efforts
when it comes to studio partnerships.

When it announced the
“Arctic Tale” deal, Lombard said the company had “learned its lesson”
as a result of its “Akeelah” campaign, saying it needed to make a
better effort to let customers know it wants them to “go see” the films
it promotes.

“We are still evaluating our ‘Arctic Tale’
promotion,” Lombard said. “Nonetheless, we are always looking to
provide tangible customer experiences that educate and inspire
discussion and go beyond traditional movie marketing.”

Par
Vantage and National Geographic Films execs say that while they’re
disappointed with the B.O. for “Arctic Tale,” they’re happy with
Starbucks’ effort and look forward to sales of the eventual DVD in the
company’s stores.

“They were great partners and awesome to work
with,” said one National Geographic exec. “They did everything they
said they would do. I’d work with them again in a heartbeat.”

Given
some of the negative critical reaction to the U.S. version of “Arctic
Tale,” National Geographic Films is lobbying to sell the European
version of the docu on DVD, complete with a different score, songs and
narration.

Starbucks pushed a healthy number of “Akeelah” DVDs.
It’s also sold other studio titles like Warner Bros.’ “Happy Feet” and
Sony’s “The Pursuit of Happyness.”

But then again, a DVD can be easily picked up and purchased as a customer is ordering a grande vanilla latte.

Read the full article at:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117970763.html

New York Times, September 2, 2007

Rick Rubin is listening. A song by a new band called the Gossip is playing, and he is concentrating. He appears to be in a trance. His eyes are tightly closed and he is swaying back and forth to the beat, trying at once to hear what is right and wrong about the music. Rubin, who resembles a medium-size bear with a long, gray beard, is curled into the corner of a tufted velvet couch in the library of a house he owns but where he no longer lives. This three-story 1923 Spanish villa steeped in music history — Johnny Cash recorded in the basement studio; Jakob Dylan is recording a solo album there now — is used by Rubin for meetings. And ever since May, when he officially became co-head of Columbia Records, Rubin has been having nearly constant meetings. Beginning in 1984, when he started Def Jam Recordings, until his more recent occupation as a career-transforming, chart-topping, Grammy Award-winning producer for dozens of artists, as diverse as the Dixie Chicks, Slayer, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Neil Diamond, Rubin, who is 44, has never gone to an office of any kind. One of his conditions for taking the job at Sony, which owns Columbia, was that he wouldn’t be required to have a desk or a phone in any of the corporate outposts. That wasn’t a problem: Columbia didn’t want Rubin to punch a clock. It wanted him to save the company. And just maybe the record business.

Read the rest of this entry »

Media Buyer Planner

This year, internet ad spending in the U.S. will outpace radio, according to a new report from eMarketer. Online spending has already overtaken radio in the U.K., writes Media Life.

The eMarketer forecast predicts that online ad spending will hit $21.7 billion for 2007 – $1.3 billion more than radio. Internet spending trailed radio by more than $3 billion last year. The report also predicts that web spending will double between now and 2011, where as radio spending will grow by just $2.2 billion.

eMarketer’s prediction suggests that the internet will surpass radio a year before a similar prediction from ZenithOptimedia, which said back in April that the change would take place in 2008.

A judge in the city of Pécs has sentenced two individuals caught accidentally with 85 and 735 illegally copied CDs and DVDs to seven and eighteen months suspended prison term and 2 million HUF penality. The damage was 12 million HUF. The prosecution has not appealed the decision.

ASVA.hu

Precedens értékû, jogerõs ítéletet hozott a Pécsi Városi Bíróság a napokban egy évek óta húzódó, szerzõi jogokat sértõ kalóz-ügyben – adta hírül az ASVA, az Audiovizuális Mûvek Szerzõi Jogait Védõ Közcélú Alapítvány. A bírói döntés értelmében a két elkövetõ hét hónap, illetve egy év hat hónap szabadságvesztésre és összesen több mint 2 millió forint pénzbírság megfizetésére ítéltetett. A jog 1992 óta ad lehetõséget arra, hogy a szerzõi jogok megsértését akár szabadságvesztés kirovásával is sújtsa a bíróság
Az 2004 nyara óta húzódó ügyben az egyik elkövetõt 85 rendbeli, a szerzõi jogok üzletszerûen elkövetett megsértésének bûntettében és szerzõi, vagy szerzõi joghoz kapcsolódó jogok védelmét biztosító mûszaki intézkedés kijátszásának vétségében találta bûnösnek a pécsi bíróság, így õt halmazati büntetésként hét hónapi szabadságvesztésre, míg társát, aki 735 rendbeli, a szerzõi jogok üzletszerûen elkövetett megsértésének bûntettében találtatott bûnösnek, 1 év hat hónap börtönbüntetésre ítélte a bíróság. Mindkét esetben a szabadságvesztés végrehajtását próbaidõre felfüggeszti a bíróság.

IndyStar.com

BigChampagne’s clients say ignoring file sharing wouldn’t make sense. “It’s a fact of life at this time,” says Rich Meyer, Mediabase’s president and executive vice president at Premiere.
Joe Fleischer, BigChampagne’s vice president for sales and marketing, says the legality of grabbing music is a separate issue from the insight into people’s taste the downloads offer. He notes the company incorporates legal, paid downloads from sites like iTunes into its data, though they represent a fraction of all downloads.
Currently, says Emmis radio head Rick Cummings, the download information is not as helpful as the phone calls known in the business as “call-out” research, in which people listen to clips of songs and rate them. But at some point, the download data are “going to be the primary method of research.”
It’s getting harder to do passive call-out research, Cummings says, because “people don’t have time, they have their phone blocked.” But Emmis perseveres with the calls, in part because it reaches a slightly different listener that way — people who don’t necessarily buy or download music regularly but who like to listen to the radio.
Filesharers tend to be bigger music fans than radio listeners and generally warm to new songs faster. But basing a playlist exclusively on downloaders’ tastes could end up alienating more passive listeners, Cummings says.
It also isn’t easy to tell which medium influences the other more. “When a radio station adds a song, you oftentimes see an immediate bump in downloading activity” in that city, says Meyer of Mediabase.

Economist.com

Jul 5th 2007

From The Economist print edition

Faced with shrinking profits, record labels are touting a new approach

Get article background

IT HAS become a familiar refrain. For years record labels, citing tumbling CD sales
blamed on internet piracy, have decried the decline of the music
industry. The reality is rather more subtle, as Edgar Bronfman, the
chairman of Warner Music, a big record company, pointed out last month.
“The music industry is growing,” he told an investor conference in New
York. “The record industry is not growing.”

Indeed. Seven
years ago musicians derived two-thirds of their income, via record
labels, from pre-recorded music, with the other one-third coming from
concert tours, merchandise and endorsements, according to the Music
Managers Forum, a trade group in London. But today those proportions
have been reversed—cutting the labels off from the industry’s biggest
and fastest-growing sources of revenue. Concert-ticket sales in North
America alone increased from $1.7 billion in 2000 to over $3.1 billion
last year, according to Pollstar, a trade magazine.

Frustrated
record companies have responded by trying to get their artists to spend
more time promoting records and less time touring and endorsing
products, says Jeanne Meyer of EMI, another big
record label. “Sometimes you’ve got a tug of war going on,” she says.
Yet the more labels spend on marketing pre-recorded music, the more
they raise their artists’ profiles and boost their other, more
lucrative, sources of income. Pre-recorded music, no longer the main
cash cow, increasingly serves merely as a marketing tool for T-shirts
and concert tickets. The best seats for The Police’s world tour this
summer cost over $900; the group’s entire catalogue on CD costs less than $100.

Record labels have come up with a remedy: the “360° contract”. Instead of settling for a cut of CD sales,
they increasingly offer artists broader contracts that encompass live
music, merchandise and endorsement deals. Such deals, also known as
multiple-rights or all-rights contracts, are particularly important in
regions with rampant CD piracy, such as Africa,
Asia and Latin America. “The market has made it necessary—we’ve got to
look for something else,” says Manuel Cuevas, an industry executive in
Mexico City. His company, the Mexican subsidiary of a major label,
decided earlier this year to adopt the 360° model. “It’s a discussion
you have with every new artist now,” says EMI‘s Ms Meyer.

Although
record labels like the idea, artists are unsurprisingly less keen. Few
established artists have accepted 360° deals, though the labels trumpet
the exceptions, including Robbie Williams, the Pussycat Dolls and Korn.
It is more profitable, the artists say, to stick with artist-management
agencies, which have traditionally handled the job of cultivating
careers beyond the realm of recordings.

Management
agencies are also considered to have more respect for their artists’
interests. Record labels, for example, have been criticised for
obtaining rights to the names of artists and bands for use in internet
addresses. Some clauses stipulate that name ownership applies even
after contracts expire or artists die. This can prevent musicians from
launching websites to promote tours, sell merchandise, and communicate
with fans as they see fit. “Record companies don’t exactly give many
artists the warm, fuzzy feeling,” says Gary Bongiovanni, the editor of Pollstar.

Musicians
with small fan bases and little business experience are much more
receptive to the idea of 360° deals. There is no shortage of aspiring
artists, and some will become big names. Juha Ruusunen, the founder of TWU,
a small management agency for heavy-metal bands based in Jyväskylä,
Finland, says European labels have begun to sign up new talent with
360° contracts. As record labels move more aggressively into the
artist-management field, Mr Ruusunen worries that his agency might
struggle to compete.

Building a
roster of 360° talent, one deal at a time, is slow going. It is quicker
for labels to buy artist-management agencies. Last month Universal
Music made a £104m ($205m) offer for Sanctuary, a struggling British
label with a management arm that represents musicians including Elton
John and Robert Plant. Sanctuary also owns two other artist-management
companies and runs Bravado, a merchandising operation. Sanctuary’s
shareholders will decide whether to accept Universal’s offer, which is
considered generous, this month.

For its part
Warner Music has expressed interest in Front Line Management, one of
America’s biggest agencies. And last month Warner announced the
formation of Brand Asset Group, an artist-management joint venture with
Violator Management, a firm that negotiates roles for rappers in films,
advertisements, video games and TV programmes,
and licenses their names and images to promote drinks, books and
clothes. (Its clients include 50 Cent, Diddy and Busta Rhymes.)

The shift
away from recorded music is due in part to the recognition that touring
and merchandise are more lucrative. But it may also be a consequence of
internet piracy, as free downloads give music fans more money to spend
on other things. Jwana Godinho, the director of Música no Coração, a
concert promoter in Lisbon, thinks many music lovers have a “mental
budget” that they are prepared to spend on music, and have switched
their spending from CDs to tickets and merchandise.

The logical
conclusion is for artists to give away their music as a promotional
tool. Some are doing just that. This week Prince announced that his new
album, “Planet Earth”, will be given away in Britain for free with the Mail on Sunday,
a national newspaper, on July 15th. (For years Prince has made far more
money from live performances than from album sales; he was the
industry’s top earner in 2004.) Outraged British music retailers were
quick to condemn the idea. As far as the record industry is concerned,
it is madness. But for the music industry, it could well be the shape
of things to come.

Los Angeles Times

Album sales continued their downward slide in the first half of the year but sales of digital tracks are up almost 50% over this time last year.

A total of 229.8 million albums were sold in the U.S. from Jan. 1 to July 1, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures released Wednesday. That’s a 15% decrease compared with the same period last year. Meanwhile, digital track sales increased 49% to 417.3 million this year.

Los Angeles Times

Universal Music Group declined to renew its yearlong deal to license songs to Apple Inc. in the most public clash to date between a record label and the top retailer of digital music.

The largest of the four major labels informed Apple last week, people familiar with the matter said Monday.

Universal has no plans to stop selling music over Apple’s iTunes music store, which sells a majority of digitized tracks in the U.S., the people said.

But top Universal executives wanted the right to offer exclusive tracks to other Web retailers that could emerge, such as Amazon.com.

Under the previous deal with Apple, Universal was obliged to sell on iTunes any music it sold digitally elsewhere.

Times Online

The music download website whose activities threatened to scupper Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has been shut down.

The site, Allofmp3.com, was quietly closed as the Kremlin sought to end criticism from the United States that Russia was failing to clamp down on music and video piracy.

The site had attracted 5.5 million subscribers buying songs for between 10 and
20 US cents each, compared with 99 cents at Apple’s American iTunes store
and 79p in the UK.

Most customers were in Russia, but it was estimated to be the second most
popular download site in Britain after iTunes. It was set up in 2000 by six
computer programmers, who initially developed the site for their personal
use then built it into a business earning a reputed $30 million a year.

The Mp3Sparks.com site looks virtually identical and claims to offer thousands
of albums by popular artists for around 15 US cents per song. Bon Jovi’s
latest disc, for example, was on offer for $2.11.

MediaServices said that the site was registered with the Russian Licensing
Societies, which it claimed had the right under Russian law to “grant
licences and to collect royalties for the use of music without necessarily
obtaining permission from the copyright owners”.

The company’s website said that it paid 15 per cent of proceeds to the
licencing societies for distribution to copyright holders. It added that it
was considering an additional payment of 5 per cent to performing artists,
whether or not they owned the copyright, “despite no legal requirement to do
so”.

New York Times

The Universal Music Group of Vivendi, the world’s biggest music corporation, last week notified Apple that it will not renew its annual contract to sell music through iTunes, according to executives briefed on the issue who asked for anonymity because negotiations between the companies are confidential.

Instead, Universal said that it would market music to Apple at will, a move that could allow Universal to remove its songs from the iTunes service on short notice if the two sides do not agree on pricing or other terms in the future, these executives said.

Universal’s roster of artists includes stars like U2, Akon and Amy Winehouse.

Representatives for Universal and Apple declined to comment. The move, which comes after a standoff in negotiations, is likely to be regarded in the music industry as a boiling over of the long-simmering tensions between Mr. Jobs and the major record labels.

With the shift, Universal appears to be aiming to regain a bit of leverage — although at the risk of provoking a showdown with Mr. Jobs.

Music industry attacks Sunday newspaper’s free Prince CD | | Guardian Unlimited Business

The eagerly awaited new album by Prince is being launched as a free CD with a national Sunday newspaper in a move that has drawn widespread criticism from music retailers.

The Mail on Sunday revealed yesterday that the 10-track Planet Earth CD will be available with an “imminent” edition, making it the first place in the world to get the album. Planet Earth will go on sale on July 24.

One music store executive described the plan as “madness” while others said it was a huge insult to an industry battling fierce competition from supermarkets and online stores. Prince’s label has cut its ties with the album in the UK to try to appease music stores.

The Entertainment Retailers Association said the giveaway “beggars belief”. “It would be an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career,” ERA co-chairman Paul Quirk told a music conference. “It would be yet another example of the damaging covermount culture which is destroying any perception of value around recorded music.

“The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday.”

via newswire

– Decline compounds 12% drop in 2006 – the largest year-over-year
decrease in Canada since the advent of widespread unauthorized
file-swapping in 1999
– Unabated counterfeiting and Internet file-swapping cited as primary
factors in decline
– Recording industry, other business groups step up call for government
action against piracy

The Pirate Bay is experimenting with the tipping model. I wish them all the best.

Playble – Paying Artists for Free Music

The Pirate Bay has started a unique collaboration with the members of the Swedish rock band Lamont and their manager Kristopher S. Wilbur. After lengthy discussions about the future of the record industry and its implications for the many talented artists and songwriters around the world, we discovered that we held the same vision. The shared insight that the record industry—with its current business model—is outdated inspired the birth of Playble.com.

This innovative music site will allow users to download music by artists for free and still support them financially. Playble.com will give companies with strong brands the opportunity to support music and artists directly. Welcome to Playble.com.

The Register

Serial internet investor and musician Peter Gabriel today took the wraps off We7, a free at the point of use music download service where tracks are paid for by 10-second adverts spliced to their beginning.

The tracks will be MP3-encoded, and unencumbered by DRM, the firm said. A representative told The Register that the files will be encoded at 192Kbps.

Advertisers will pay We7 between £0.30 and £0.60 per download, and by listening to an ad-supported song a few times the consumer wins rights to access a version without a commercial. The firm is quoted in today’s Times saying “three, four or five” listens will be needed.

The ads will be demographically-targeted on age, location and gender, but the option will be there for fans to pay for tunes sans-sponsorship from the get-go if they want; the rep said that 320Kbps was under review for these customers. The We7 site also has a limited Last.fm-style social recommendation facility.

Jobs says Apple customers not into renting music | Technology | Reuters

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs indicated on Wednesday he is unlikely to give in to calls from the music industry to add a subscription-based model to Apple’s wildly popular iTunes online music store.

“Never say never, but customers don’t seem to be interested in it,” Jobs told Reuters in an interview after Apple reported blow-out quarterly results. “The subscription model has failed so far.”

His comments come as the company he co-founded gears up for contract renewal negotiations with the major record labels over the next month.

Since Apple launched iTunes in 2003, it has sold more than 2.5 billion songs and now offers increasing numbers of television shows and movies.

Many in the music industry hope iTunes will ultimately start, in effect, renting music online, so record companies can make more money from recurring income. But Jobs said he had seen little consumer demand for that.

“People want to own their music,” he said.

Yahoo! News

Amazon, which is considered the best bet to challenge iTunes’ supremacy in the digital world, is shooting to launch its MP3 digital download store in May, a target date it has yet to publicly acknowledge. (Amazon declines comment.) Meanwhile, sources familiar with the situation say Universal Music Group plans to test the sale of unprotected digital music files, including some of its classical music catalog conceivably including titles by
Andrea Bocelli, at the new Amazon store and other outlets.

Two Hungarian music lover/journalist/artist from the Hungarian language Quart music blog tried to purchase two songs they recently reviewed: an Arcade Fire album and an LCD Sound System album from various online services. The whole article is here in Hungarian, I try to sum up their experiences in English:

iTunes
The iTunes store doesn’t accept Hungarian bank-cards. This option is out.

eMusic
Huge catalog of indie records, but sadly nothing from the big 4, so no Universal distributed Arcade Fire and no Warner distributed LCD.

Rhapsody, Napster
They don’t accept Hungarian bank-cards either.

Zune Marketplace
Zune is not sold in Hungray.

Sony Connect
The songs are tied to Sony devices, which they do not own.

Yahoo! Music Jukebox
This service had serious performance problems, after 20 minutes of trying and several complete freezes they have given up trying.

Allofmp3.com
Perfect service, great prices, but (percieved as?) illegal, and they wanted to play by the rules.

Beatport.com
Great service, but neither of the desired bands are in the catalog. So they have bought something else, in mp3.

Audio Lunchbox
Like eMusic.

Dalok.hu
This Hungarian service is run by the collecting society of performing artists. For little more than 0.50 USD one can buy songs from Hungarian performers. Works great, the price is right, through the catalog needs some expansion.

Songo.hu
Half a million songs in this Hungarian music store, but no LCD or Arcade Fire. Expensive and wma-bound.

T-Online Zeneáruház
The first service where they could find at least a song from the new LCD album. But this is the last good thing that can be said about this service: expensive, wma-bound, extremely user-unfriendly.

Mp3music.hu
Small, but friendly store run by CLS records. No AF or LCD.

So at the end of the day, instead of buying two full albums, preferably in mp3 format, they ended up having only one song in wma. What do music companies think, what will Hungarian potential music buyers do when they realize that even though they are part of the European Union, even though they are willing to pay for music, all they experience is the utter failure of the market?

I would really appreciate if you could share your experiences with us here about how y

via CeskeNoviny

A case of illegal music file sharing on the Internet has resulted in a court sentence for the first time in the Czech Republic, police officer Libor Macek who deals with such cases told journalists today.

The perpetrator, who used the name Lubsoft on the Internet, caused damage of more than one million crowns. He received a suspended sentence of seven months in prison.

Microsoft changes tune on selling DRM-free songs

Following digital music pioneer Apple Inc.’s lead, Microsoft Corp. said it will soon sell digital music online without digital rights management (DRM) protection.

Microsoft’s apparent change of heart on selling DRM-free music came in response to Apple’s deal earlier in the week to sell unprotected content from recording company EMI Group PLC. The company previously claimed that DRM was necessary for current and emerging digital media business models.

“The EMI announcement on Monday was not exclusive to Apple,” said Katy Asher, a Microsoft spokeswoman on the Zune team, in an e-mail to the IDG News Service today. She said Microsoft has been talking with EMI and other record labels “for some time now” about offering unprotected music on its Zune players in an effort to meet the needs of its customers.

“Consumers have made it clear that unprotected music is something they want,” Asher said. “We plan on offering it to them as soon as our label partners are comfortable with it.”

WSJ.com – Login

In a major break with the music industry’s longstanding antipiracy strategy, EMI Group PLC is set to announce today that it plans to sell significant amounts of its catalog without anticopying software, according to people familiar with the matter.

The London music company is to make its announcement at a London news conference featuring Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs. EMI is to sell songs without the software — known as digital rights management — through Apple’s iTunes Store and possibly through other online outlets.

The scary thing is, that they are (or should be) all real alternatives, and each and every prank shows a solution to the current problems.

R.I.A.A. Announces File Sharing Amnesty Program

In a stunning turnabout, the R.I.A.A. has announced a new amnesty program for computer users who have shared and/or downloaded copyrighted files illegally.

The new program, christened “Files for Free HD Time”, works like this: you go to a special website setup by the R.I.A.A. where you can upload any previously illegally downloaded files. In other words: give them back and avoid prosecution. Plus, for every 12 files you put back, you will be rewarded with certificates for 120 Free HD Radio minutes which can be used in any city where HD Radio is now operating.

“We’re very excited about this new amnesty program and our lawyers are especially looking forward to filing much less litigation in the future,” said spokesperson, April Furst.

To see how many files have already been returned or to return any illegally shared files you may have on your computer, visit the R.I.A.A. Amnesty Website.

Major labels to disband RIAA

The Big 4 will be disbanding all existing trade organizations and founding a single new organisation to be called Friends of the Labels which will work with p2p developers and independent artists to formulate ‘fair use’ practices and policies, and creative pricing and distribution structures.

Lawrence Lessig joins RIAA board of directors

Lawrence Lessig, best known for his work promoting his Creative Commons foundation, announced today that he will join the Board of Directors of the Recording Industry Association of America. “We’re pleased to welcome Professor Lessig into our cabal, er, uh, association” said RIAA head Cary Sherman.

TimesOnline

About to leak a copy of the new Arctic Monkeys album on the net? Don’t bother unless you’re willing to risk a knock on the door from the Web Sheriff.

Cutting-edge bands who built a following by letting fans trade MP3 song files are secretly hiring web enforcers to track down and remove unauthorised leaks that might destroy album sales.

The web detectives trace the source of a leak and individuals found to have deliberately spread copyright-protected material receive a personal visit followed by legal threats.

This sounds very-very familiar. Adrian Johns has a wonderful article on “Pop music pirate hunters”,  telling the story of early 1900’s British music publishers who used barely legal private enforcement hitmen to intimidate sheet music pirates. Well worth a read.

iTunes has 2 million+ songs, napster, MSN music, Rhapsody, eMusic has 1 million + each.

New York Times

To date, Last.fm has “scrobbled” 65 million tracks by 8 million artists, in just about every country in the world.

Just to add another measure. Gracenote (aka CDDB) has info about more than 3.8 million CDs, over 48 million tracks. Looong way to go.

What I propose is an aggressive six-month trial by a major P2P service (any
takers?) that could finally give us clear insight into the behavior of
P2P users. Is it about interoperability, community and deep catalog, or
is it all about free? We need to know.

Here’s how it would work: Leave the service exactly as it is: no
filtering, no DRM, no changes to its current offering of unprotected
MP3s. The rare tracks, bootlegs-they all stay there. Just charge for
each piece of content and split the revenue between the service and the
content owners.

Read the rest of this entry »

I guess this also means, that if you don’t have your 60th birthday, and you are not Elton John, then you will never see a 100% of your back catalog online.

iTunes scoops Sir Elton John catalogue exclusive – iPod/iTunes – Macworld UK

Sir Elton John this morning revealed plans to make his entire catalogue of releases available exclusively through iTunes starting next week.

The entire catalogue of 400 tracks will be made available through the store starting 26 March, his artist management agents explained. The music will be available exclusively there until 30 April, when it will be made available through other music services.

The artist explained: “I’ve wanted my music to be available for digital download worldwide for some time, but I knew that the entire catalogue not just the hits needed care and attention to be released in this way. Now that it’s happening, I’m pleased for the fans’ sake.

Sales of Music, Long in Decline, Plunge Sharply Rise in Downloading Fails to Boost Industry

“Sales are so down and so off that, as a
manager, I look at a CD as part of the marketing of an artist, more
than as an income stream,” says Mr. Rabhan. “It’s the vehicle that
drives the tour, the merchandise, building the brand, and that’s it.
There’s no money.”
Jeff Rabhan, who manages artists and music producers including
Jermaine Dupri, Kelis and Elliott Yamin

Read the rest of this entry »

Music executives judge Jobs, lament losses | CNET News.com

Apple, digital rights management (DRM) and the public’s willingness to pirate music were discussed, debated and lamented once more by attendees of the Digital Music Forum East conference.

“We’re running out of time,” Ted Cohen, managing director of music consulting firm TAG Strategic, told the roughly 200 attendees. “We need to get money flowing from consumers and get them used to paying for music again.”

The call to arms by Cohen, who was moderating a panel discussion titled “The State of the Digital Union,” comes as the music industry suffers through one of the worst slumps in its history.

CD sales fell 23 percent worldwide between 2000 and 2006. Legal sales of digital songs aren’t making up the difference either. Last year saw a 131 percent jump in digital sales, but overall the industry still saw about a 4 percent decline in revenue.

That has the industry pointing fingers at a number of things they believe caused the decline.

At the opening of the conference, some of the panel members lashed out at Jobs. Members said Jobs’ call three weeks ago for DRM-free music was “insincere” and a “red herring.”

“Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats,” Jobs wrote in a letter that rocked the music industry. “In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.”

Jobs’ position was perceived by many in the music industry as a 180-degree shift in direction. The view expressed at the conference is that Apple has maintained a stranglehold on the digital music industry by locking up iTunes music with DRM.

Cohen told the audience that if Jobs was really sincere about doing away with DRM, he would soon release movies from Disney–the studio Jobs holds a major stake in–without any software protection. An Apple representative declined to comment on Tuesday on remarks made by the panel.

Panel member Mike Bebel, CEO of Ruckus music service, said: “Look, I don’t think anybody is necessarily down on Apple. The problem is the proprietary implementation of technology…and it’s causing everybody else who is participating in the marketplace–the other service providers, the labels, the users–a lot of pain. If they could simply open it up, everybody would love them.”

The role of DRM
Panel members–who included Thomas Gewecke, Sony BMG senior vice president, and Gabriel Levy, general manager of RealNetworks Europe–were divided about what the music industry should do about DRM in general.

Most of the panel members, save for Greg Scholl, CEO of independent music label The Orchard, believe that some form of DRM is necessary.

Scholl said flatly that DRM doesn’t work. “The idea that DRM gives us choice isn’t right,” he said.

“The economics of the business are over for good and aren’t ever going to be the way they were before,” Scholl said. This is a position that some in the music industry are starting to warm up to.

In January, EMI said it was reviewing a request
by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to allow reverse engineering of
its digital rights management software. That EMI would even consider
the proposal was seen in many circles as a step forward by the anti-DRM
camp.

Gewecke also defended record labels against the criticism that the
music industry has its head in the sand and just doesn’t understand the
Digital Age. He said that Sony BMG is working with technologists and
retailers, and is constantly is looking for technological solutions to
some of the industry’s problems.

He also said that despite all the bad news, there’s plenty for the sector to be encouraged about.

“We
routinely talk to companies about what’s different,” Gewecke said.
“We’re constantly looking for where value is being created in a
business model. We are being flexible. There’s still an evolution that
has to happen. I say it’s an optimistic time considering there’s more
music being listened to now than ever before. There’s more
opportunities to monetize the music. We want to be out there looking
for new ideas and companies.”

arstechnica:

Earlier this month it was widely reported that EMI was indeed ready to cast DRM into the dark abyss and earn the company the honorable status of being the first major music label to realize that DRM alienates honest customers. As it turns out, the company is indeed open to the possibility of ditching DRM, but they expect to be paid well for it, and the online music retailers aren’t ready to meet their demands.

EMI is the only major record label to seriously consider abandoning the disaster that is DRM, but earlier reports that focused on the company’s reformist attitude apparently missed the mark: EMI is willing to lose the DRM, but they demand a considerable advance payment to make it happen. According to Bloomberg, EMI has backed out of talks for now because no one will pay what they’re asking. No dollar amounts are known at this time.

Online music giants Apple and Microsoft, along with smaller players including RealNetworks and Yahoo! Music, sought to indulge EMI’s demands by waving leafy-green dollar bills at the company, but it wasn’t what EMI asked for, and the company subsequently put the talks on hold. Warner’s renewed interest in EMI is likely another contributing factor to EMI’s own cold feet: Warner’s leadership is devoted to DRM, making the DRM-free discussions all the more circumspect.

Crain’s New York Business

Music recording company Warner Music Group Corp. said Thursday its quarterly profit fell 74% due to fewer albums released during the period and soft domestic and European sales.

Manhattan-based Warner earned $18 million, or 12 cents per share, in its fiscal first quarter ended Dec. 31, down from $69 million, or 46 cents per share, in the year-earlier period.

Revenue fell 11% to $928 million in the latest quarter.

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial expected a profit of 24 cents per share on revenue of $944.8 million.

The company said the market was challenging, especially for its recorded music business segment, and that it faced difficult year-over-year comparisons. Digital revenue grew 45% to $100 in the first quarter but slid 4% from $104 million in the fourth quarter of 2006.

Revenue for the company’s recorded music business decreased 13% to $800 million on softer domestic and European sales. The company said Asia Pacific sales were helped by strength in Japanese local repertoire.

Michael Fleisher, Warner Music Group’s chief financial officer, said 2007 results will be weighted to the back end of the year.

Bloomberg

Feb. 14 (Bloomberg) — EMI Group Plc, the U.K. record
company that signed the Beatles, cut its revenue and profit
forecasts for the second time this year as music sales slump in
the U.S.

EMI shares had the biggest slide in two years after the
company said full-year sales at its recorded music division will
fall 15 percent and earnings will miss analysts’ estimates.
London-based EMI last month predicted a 10 percent sales drop.

The company, which released albums by Robbie Williams and
Norah Jones in the second half, today reported an
“unprecedented level of market decline” and “an exceptionally
high level of product returns.” EMI ousted its top two music
executives on Jan. 12 after disappointing holiday sales. EMI has
failed to produce best-selling U.S. albums and lost revenue to
piracy.

“EMI has got an awful lot of work to do in terms of
securing its future,” said Henk Potts, an equity strategist at
Barclays Wealth. “EMI has specific problems related to its
company. The artists on its books look as though they are
underperforming.”

The shares fell 28.75 pence, or 12 percent, to 210.75 pence
in London, giving the company a market value of 1.69 billion
pounds ($3.3 billion). It was the biggest drop since Feb. 7,
2005, driving the stock to the lowest since Oct. 27, 2005.

Shares of New York-based Warner Music Group Corp. fell
$1.27, or 6.6 percent, to $18.12 at 4:01 p.m. in New York Stock
Exchange composite trading. They’ve fallen 11 percent in the
past year.

`Deterioration’

“This revision to expectations is as a result of the
continued and accelerating deterioration in market conditions in
North America,” EMI said today in a statement. Profit for the
year ending March 31 “will be significantly below current
market expectations.”

The North American market for compact discs has contracted
20 percent this year, EMI said, citing Nielsen Soundscan
figures.

“They have always had a problem in the U.S. in terms of
generating artists’ sales,” said Alex Degroote, an analyst at
Panmure Gordon. “This Christmas period the release schedule
hasn’t worked for them at all.”

EMI, the world’s third-biggest music company, said it will
give a performance update on April 18 and report full-year
results on May 23.

Credit-Default Swaps

Credit-default swap contracts based on EMI debt rose about
9,500 euros to 181,000 euros, according to prices compiled by
Bloomberg. The price is the annual cost in a five-year contract
based on 10 million euros of EMI bonds and loans. Credit-default
swaps are used to speculate on a company’s ability to repay
debt. An increase indicates a deterioration in credit quality.

EMI has about 990 million pounds of bonds outstanding,
according to Bloomberg data.

“There’s very high financial risk associated with this
company,” Panmure Gordon’s Degroote said. “I would be very
surprised if the dividend isn’t cut totally.”

EMI ousted Alain Levy, CEO of the recorded music division,
and David Munns, the unit’s vice chairman last month. Eric
Nicoli, then chairman, was named chief executive officer. EMI
also announced a restructuring in January and said the one-time
expense of the cost-cutting program will be as much as 150
million pounds.

Merger Attempts

Slumping sales have led Nicoli, 56, to several attempts to
combine with Warner Music Group, the world’s fourth-largest
music company, as a way to reduce costs.

In July, EMI and Warner abandoned $4.6 billion bids for
each other after a European Union ruling damped prospects for
regulatory approval.

In December, EMI ended talks to be acquired by buyout firm
Permira Advisers LLP, after failing to agree on a price.

The music company has been counting on releases by Norah
Jones, Robbie Williams, Keith Urban and the Beatles to boost
sales in the second half. EMI had none of the 10 best-selling
albums in the U.S. last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group led all music companies
in U.S. album market share last year at 32 percent. It is the
world’s biggest music company.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment was second at 27 percent.
Warner Music was the only company with an increase, up 1 point
to 18 percent. EMI was fourth in the U.S. with 10.2 percent.
Sony BMG is a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG.

EMI’s recorded music unit’s artists didn’t win any of the
top 12 Grammy awards that were broadcast this week. Of the
categories shown on television, Sony BMG won the most awards
with five. Universal Music Group won four and Warner took one
for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Stadium Arcadium.”

EMI has two divisions: EMI Music, the recorded music unit,
and EMI Music Publishing, which manages song copyrights. EMI
reiterated today that the publishing unit “continues to perform
in line with expectations.”

Loss

EMI reported a first-half loss of 30.6 million pounds in
November, saying sales fell 6.1 percent because this year’s
release schedule is weighted to the second half more than usual.

As part of its restructuring EMI combined its U.S. Capitol
and Virgin labels last month to create Capitol Music Group.
Jason Flom, head of Virgin Records in the U.S., was named to run
the new group. On Jan. 31 the company named Lee Trink president
of Capitol Music and Jeff Kempler chief operating officer,
reporting to Flom. Both were executive vice presidents at
Virgin.

EMI traces its history to the earliest days of recorded
music, and became known as Electric and Musical Industries in
1931. During the 1950s EMI released Elvis Presley’s first
records outside the U.S. and bought Capitol Records, gaining
Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole and Peggy Lee.

International Herald Tribune

“FIFA 07,” a video game for soccer fans, costs around €50 in Europe. In South Korea, five million players have downloaded the online version free — yet Electronic Arts, the publisher, is cheering them on.

Realizing that it was impossible to sell “FIFA Online” in a country where piracy is rampant, Electronic Arts started giving away the game last spring. Once the players were hooked, the company offered for sale ways to gain an edge on opponents; extending the career of a star player, for instance, costs less than $1. Since May, Electronic Arts has sold 700,000 of these enhancements.

In the traditional media world, as well, readers
are turning to free: According to the World Association of Newspapers
in Paris, at least 28 million free newspapers are distributed every day
around the world, 19 million of them in Europe, where the total has
doubled over the past three years. And digital over-the-air TV systems
like Freeview in Britain now offer dozens of channels, providing an
alternative to pay-TV for consumers who refuse to limit themselves to a
handful of viewing options.

Qtrax will resemble illegal file-sharing
networks, using peer-to-peer technology to help users find and download
music. But executives hope that the promise of a licensed, safe and
legitimate service will attract users weaned on digital music but
unwilling to pay for it.

“There’s a whole generation of consumers who think free music is a
birthright,” said Allan Klepfisz, chief executive of Brilliant
Technologies, which is developing Qtrax. “The closer you are with a
business model to current consumer behavior, the better your chance of
success.”

Worldwide, media spending by consumers and
business users still handily outstrips advertising, by $944 billion to
$385 billion, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. But growth in
consumer spending on media in the United States has slowed sharply in
the past few years, analysts say.

Worldwide, PricewaterhouseCoopers expects spending on high-speed
Internet access, which delivers digitized media, to increase faster
than outlays on content that traditionally comes with a price tag —
books, magazines, cinema tickets and CDs, for instance. Global consumer
spending on Internet access is expected to rise at an 11.9 percent
annual rate through 2010, according to the firm.

To be sure, consumer spending on media is not
going to disappear anytime soon. According to a survey of 130 media
executives from around the world, conducted recently by Accenture, 31
percent forecast that subscription models would be the dominant
business model in five years’ time, with 25 percent opting for
so-called pay-per-play funding.

But 37 percent said advertiser financing would be the predominant business model in five years’ time.

Can media companies adapt to a world in which “free is the new paid”?

p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site

Chinese Internet search engine Baidu.com and Big 4 Organized Music member EMI say they’re going to run an advertising-supported online music streaming service in China.

“The agreement will see Chinese repertoire from EMI’s Typhoon Music being made available for streaming, at no charge, to all users of Baidu,” says ChinaTechNews.

Baidu will feature an ‘EMI Music Zone’ in its music search channel, “which will legally stream all of EMI Music’s Chinese repertoire, including recordings from artists such as Jolin Tsai, Stephanie Sun, David Tao, Sandy Lam and Richie Ren,” says the story, adding:

“While consumers listen to the music for free they will be exposed to Internet advertising, and EMI and Baidu will share the revenue generated by the advertising, a lackluster approach to monetizing and promoting digital music in China.”

Digital World Norway Outlaws iTunes

Norway has […] declare[d] that Apple’s iTunes store is illegal under Norwegian law.

Now this is insane and clearly against the interest of the artists.

The insanely great songs Apple won’t let you hear. – By Paul Collins – Slate Magazine

JAPAN SALES ONLY

“Killer Tune” is just that: It sounds like the Killers, and it is killer. It’s one of the most popular iTunes downloads for the band Straightener—but you haven’t heard it.

You can’t hear it.

The iTunes Music Store has a secret hiding in plain sight: Log out of your home account in the page’s upper-right corner, switch the country setting at the bottom of the page to Japan, and you’re dropped down a rabbit hole into a wonderland of great Japanese bands that you’ve never even heard of. And they’re nowhere to be found on iTunes U.S. You can listen to 30-second song teasers on the Japanese site, but if you try purchasing “Killer Tune”—or any other tune—from iTunes Japan with your U.S. credit card, you’ll get turned away: Your gaijin money’s no good there.

And there are 20 more countries where iTunes users can lurk among
the samples, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Greece, and
Australia. They won’t let you buy their songs, either. You can find an
EP of Scottish sensations the Fratellis at iTunes United States, for
instance, but their hit glam singalong “Chelsea Dagger” is in nearly
every country except the United States. (Their randy burlesque video for it, naturally, is all over YouTube.)

Even
so, window-shopping in the Japan store remains particularly
instructive. Why? Because variable pricing—a label demand that Apple
loudly and successfully fought off
in other countries—has quietly appeared there in the form of 150- and
200-yen songs. Whether “Killer Tune” gets the success it deserves or
not, someday we might all be turning Japanese.

MP3.com: DJ Drama arrested in RIAA piracy sting

A police SWAT team and antipiracy agents from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) raided the Atlanta-based Aphilliates Music Group office and Gangsta Grillz studio, arresting mix tape specialist Drama and his partner DJ Don Cannon. Authorities told Atlanta’s Fox 5 News that they confiscated more than 81,000 mix tape CDs, several computers, recording equipment, and four cars, among other items. Drama, real name Tyree Simmons, and DJ Don Cannon, spent the night in Fulton County Jail. The raid occurred under the Rackeetering Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act, and Drama and Cannon could face felony charges.

I doubt that SWAT team is needed against djs. They are either not only DJs ora something is really fucked up.

Yahoo! News

Global digital music sales almost doubled in 2006 to around $2 billion, or 10 percent of all sales, but have not yet reached the industry’s “holy grail” of offsetting the fall in CD sales, a trade organization said.

Senators aim to restrict Net, satellite radio recording | CNET News.com

“New radio services are allowing users to do more than simply listen to music,” Feinstein said in a statement. “What was once a passive listening experience has turned into a forum where users can record, manipulate, collect and create personalized music libraries.”

So

Satellite and Internet radio services would be required to restrict
listeners’ ability to record and play back individual songs, under new
legislation introduced this week in the U.S. Senate.

this is what the Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music Act, or
Perform Act, propses, reintroduced Thursday by Sens. Dianne Feinstein
(D-Calif.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and Lamar
Alexander (R-Tenn.).

this is insane.

The New York Times has an excellent article on the different views on mash-up culture:

Did you miss Eminem’s hit movie “8 Mile”? You’re in luck: Many of its rap battles and other major scenes are available for viewing on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site owned by Google. Indeed, until recently, the entire film was there, broken up into 12 nine-minute chunks to get around YouTube’s ban on longer clips.

An 18-year-old YouTube user calling himself Yosickoyo posted the movie six months ago. He declined to give his real name, but said in an e-mail message that he had made the film available as a favor to others who had shared movies. “I just want to thank them by uploading a movie that I have,” he wrote.

NBC Universal, whose Universal Pictures distributed “8 Mile” in 2002,
did not appreciate the gesture. The company asked YouTube to take down
the clips after it learned of them from a reporter.

“I think studios will sue if they don’t get a licensing deal they like,” said Jessica Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan
Law School. “My guess is if I were a movie studio, getting a cut of the
money is more profitable than shutting it down. But it’s complicated,
very complicated, and it’s only going to get worse.”

No one knows exactly how much Hollywood-derived content is uploaded to
the site without the studios’ consent, but academics and media
executives estimate it could be anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent.

The studios are happy to have some of their content on YouTube. Marc
Shmuger, chairman of Universal Pictures, said that for each new
release, Universal’s marketing team sends out a digital “tool kit” to
sites like YouTube with studio-approved graphics, clips, sound effects
and music videos that can be shared.

Mr. Shmuger said the studios need to embrace sites like YouTube because
they are the future of movie marketing. “If you want to be involved in
the cultural debate, you have to allow consumers to be more actively
involved,” he said. “That’s a different world order which we are not
used to.”

Already, several major music companies, including Universal Music
Group, once a corporate sibling to Universal Pictures but now owned by Vivendi,
have forged agreements with YouTube, which makes its money from
advertising, that allows music to be played in videos for a fee.

“We don’t want to kill this,” said Larry Kenswil, a Universal Music executive. “We see this as a new source of revenue for us.”

“I don’t consider any of this stuff piracy,” said Professor Litman of
the University of Michigan. “Folks are taking snippets and making them
their own.”

Ron Wheeler, a senior vice president of content protection at Fox
Entertainment Group, said that even though Fox was not being paid for
the right to use the “Napoleon Dynamite” clips, the company had not
asked that the video be taken down.

“We are not in the business of just saying no, but we do consider it unauthorized use,” Mr. Wheeler said.

Brian Grazer,
a producer of “8 Mile,” said some of the mashups he had seen were
“pretty hip.” But he said he, too, viewed them as a form of piracy: “It
bothers me artistically. Here’s this thing where you have no control;
they are chopping it up and putting your memories in a blender.”

The Directors Guild of America is already taking a hard line. The guild’s president, Michael Apted,
said in a statement that he and his fellow directors would challenge
the unauthorized use of any work. “We will aggressively protect our
members’ creative and economic rights,” he said.

Mr. Cotton, the NBC Universal lawyer, said that the YouTube
removal-request game could continue for only so long. “Sand is running
out of the hourglass,” he said. “Companies aren’t prepared to sit by
and not let this be addressed.”

Technorati Tags: YOutube, mash-up, NYT, copyright

FCC proposal could end payola probe

WASHINGTON — FCC commissioners are mulling a staff proposal that could resolve the agency’s investigation into payola allegations between the record labels and major radio broadcasters, according to industry and government sources. While details of the Enforcement Bureau’s proposal were sketchy, sources said that radio station groups would be required to set aside a certain amount of airtime for music produced independently. The radio groups also would agree to a code of conduct and an education program, the sources said. As part of the deal, the radio broadcasters would not admit to any wrongdoing.

The interesting thing is that when payola first emerged it was used by independents to promote a genre not carried by the majors then: rock’n’roll. Payola was a tool to crack the majors’ grip on the distribution channels. I wonder if p2p and CC distribution is the new way to crack the majors’ (who how own all the then independents) grip on the marketing and distribution channels.

Technorati Tags: payola, p2p

p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site

“The new site will offer all of Universal’s classical and jazz releases, including classic imprints such as Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Verve and Impulse, running to 125,000 tracks taken from nearly 8,000 CDs,”

“Clare Nash, who heads the classics and jazz unit’s new media business,
said the company decided to enter the market after industry research
showed digital stores were not providing high enough quality download
files and suitable search engines,” says Reuters.

“So they’re getting there and have the right idea. They just need to
drop the price, get rid of the DRM, offer alternate encodings and
digitise their whole back catalogue.”

Technorati Tags: music, DRM, back catalog, digitization, vivendi

powered by performancing firefox

2006: Year in Music: It Was Free Cuz I Stole It (Seattle Weekly)

Now is a bad time to be a giant music corporation, but ethically challenged music fans couldn’t ask for better days. Bootlegging has always been about catering directly to the fans, and the Internet breeds the best bootleggers yet: bigger and stronger and faster than ever before, the better to handle the demands of 10 million file sharers trading a billion and a half songs daily.

It’s clear now that the CD-R bent the CD over and the MP3 player finished it off, and although the industry is still in shock, smaller and more agile labels are already accepting the inevitable and locking in a vinyl/digital-only production schedule, then using merch like T-shirts—low production cost, high sale price, lots of options to ratchet up collectibility—to plug their revenue gaps.

Since file sharing is permanent enough now that you can buy $19-per-year lawsuit insurance, it’s time to acknowledge the bright side. Out-of-print doesn’t mean anything anymore. If you can learn about it, you can listen to it, and if the record company doesn’t want to reissue it, you can probably find it without even having to stand up. The romance is gone but the music is cheap, accessible, and instant—that’s the music industry of the future, brought to you now by Russian MP3 pirates, obsessive genre bloggers, and criminals selling albums off a blanket on the street. Highlights of a year of unfair shares:

Philadelphia Inquirer | 12/22/2006 | Music dies at Tower on Broad St.

Amid the holiday rush, Tower Records’ Center City store went out of business yesterday, two months after the once-revered chain was acquired for liquidation.

Not all record stores are suffering equally. Many local emporiums, like
hip-hop- and R&B-heavy Armand’s Records in Center City, and
WXPN-centric Main Street Music in Manayunk, are struggling to get by.
Others, like wide-ranging a.k.a. music in Old City and Repo’s South
Street store, which specializes in indie rock, are thriving.

Though downloading is inexorably eating into CD sales, “it still
only makes up about 5 or 6 percent of the business,” said Billboard
magazine’s Geoff Mayfield. He blames Tower’s demise equally on “lowball
pricing from mass merchants,” meaning stores like Best Buy, Target and
Wal-Mart. Those stores often sell new releases for as little as $9.99
to lure Jay-Z or U2 fans who might also pick up a digital camera or a
washing machine.

[see the same problem on the video rental and retail market from a few days ago.]

“It’s a struggle,” said Ben-Moyal, whose second-floor Chestnut
Street store was all but empty one afternoon this week. Business is
down 70 percent over the last few years, he says, partly due to a new
computer program, the Serato Scratch Live, that lets DJs use MP3 files
instead of the vinyl LPs that were the backbone of his business.

Store owners face a laundry list of obstacles. There’s a music-sharing culture in which 2.8 billion
ready-to-burn blank CDs were sold in 2006, according to the Consumer
Electronics Association, compared with about 588 million CDs of
recorded music. There’s competition from the likes of Amazon.com for
baby boomers who are too busy or intimidated to venture into stores.

Another approach that works at independent record stores, Donio said, is “the High Fidelity model, where it’s more about the music culture in the store.”

That’s the strategy of Amoeba Records, the three-store mini-chain on
the West Coast, whose stores offer such a vast selection of new and
used CDs that they are regarded as a Mecca to music-lovers. Co-owner
Marc Weinstein calls his customers “culture hounds” – as good a term as
any for the customers at a.k.a. on Second Street, where business this
week was buzzing.

“We really try to carry a vast array of different types of music,
and try to be as completist as possible,” said a.k.a.’s Mike Hoffman, a
former Third Street Jazz employee who carries 35,000 titles in his Old
City store. He said business is up three percent this year. “We really
cater to music heads.”

Marketplace: The end of musicals?

Lloyd Webber has three hit shows running in London, including his version of the Sound of Music.

But he warns the sound in the seven West End theatres he owns could become inaudible. The wireless mics his productions rely on could get too expensive to run.

Britain’s telecom regulator is to blame, he says. The regulator is planning to auction off to the highest bidder the airwaves used by theatres and concert venues.

A cell phone company with deep pockets is likely to win. The fees could then soar and the theatres could be priced out.

The regulator refuses to listen to the growing chorus of disapproval. Lloyd Webber warns the West End could fall silent, .that the end of Musical Theatre in Britain is nigh.

I am being mean now, but this is interesting.

Independent Online Edition > Americas

A group of rock ‘n’ roll’s elder statesmen have launched a legal battle against the owners of a website that sells music memorabilia and rare recordings – claiming they never gave permission for the items to be sold.

“Sagan simply doesn’t have the legal rights to exploit and profit from the extraordinary success of these musicians,” said Jeff Reeves, one of their lawyers. “This memorabilia was created in the first place for the purposes of promoting concerts and as gifts for fans and concert crew. Graham himself did not have the right to sell, reproduce or otherwise exploit these materials as a promoter, and neither does Sagan, who was not authorised to purchase these materials and who has absolutely no connection to the artists or their music.”

I don’t see the problem creating a secondary market for memorabilia. What is going to be next? Trying to control the second hand bookstores and used CD stores?

Yahoo! Canada News

Several major record labels sued the operator of the Russian music website AllofMP3.com, claiming the company has been profiting by selling copies of music without their permission. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in federal court in New York against Moscow-based Mediaservices, which owns AllofMP3 and another music site, allTunes.com.

What kind of authority a US federal court has over a Russian company?

Index – Tech:

A szervert lefoglalták, az üzemeltetőt feljelentették, házkutatást tartottak nála és kihallgatták, majd amikor az eljárás bűncselekmény hiányában megszűnt, pótmagánvádat is beterjesztettek ellene. De a ProArt teljes jogi arzenálja sem volt elég a Diablo Hub nevű fájlcsereközpont kiiktatására, az ügy a hangzatos nyilatkozatok ellenére a vádemelésig sem jutott el. Az ország egyik legnagyobb fájlcserélője most rágalmazás és hamis tanúzás miatt ellenperelné a szerzői jogvédő ernyőszervezetet.

 Computer Business Review:

According to the UK research, nearly one third of eight to 13 year olds are sharing songs on their mobiles via the Bluetooth wireless feature, but without the consent of copyright holders.

Out of the 1,500 children surveyed, 45% said that while they didn’t currently share music, they would like to in the future.

The Register:

The leading DRM digital download service, Apple’s iTunes, has experienced a collapse in sales revenues this year according to analyst company Forrester Research.

While the iTunes service saw healthy growth for much of the period, since January the monthly revenue has fallen by 65 per cent, with the average transaction size falling 17 per cent. The previous spring’s rebound wasn’t repeated this year.

Forrester revealed some fascinating details about iTunes purchasing habits. Some 3.2 per cent of online households (around 60 per cent of the wider population) bought at least one download, and these dabblers made on average 5.6 transactions, with the median household making just three a year. The median transaction was slightly under $3.

“iTunes sales are not cutting into CD sales,” he elaborated to us, “they’re an incremental purchase at best.

“There’s a problem here. CD sales have fallen 20 per cent over five years. The message here is not that CD sales are coming back, the ability to obtain pirated music is now so widespread the DRM looks to consumers more like a problem than a benefit.”

Forrester and Nielsen’s figures merely confirm that what the industry is losing in falling CD sales, it isn’t gaining in DRM downloads.

Mozart’s entire musical score now free on Internet | Entertainment | Entertainment News | Reuters.com:

The International Mozart Foundation in Salzburg, Austria has put a scholarly edition of the bound volumes of Mozart’s more than 600 works on a Web site.

The site allows visitors to find specific symphonies, arias or even single lines of text from some 24,000 pages of music.

“We had 45,000 hits in the first two hours…we would not have expected that,” program director Ulrich Leisinger told Reuters in a telephone interview.

The version appearing on the Internet is a digitized copy of the “New Mozart Edition” published by Barenreiter, of Kassel, Germany.

It is considered the “gold standard” of Mozart editions and Leisinger said Barenreiter was paid $400,000 for the digital publication rights.

Musicians Oppose Media Consolidation: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance:

Radio consolidation is shrinking playlists and creating a homogenized musical landscape, several singers and songwriters told the Federal Communication Commission on Monday. “Big radio is bad radio,” Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters Guild of America, told FCC commissioners in the second of six public meetings nationwide. “You can drive I-40 from Knoxville to Barstow, California, and hear the same 20 songs on every country radio station.”

IGN: RIAA Petitions Judges to Lower Artist Royalties:

“Mechanical royalties currently are out of whack with historical and international rates,” RIAA executive VP and General Counsel Steven Marks said. “We hope the judges will restore the proper balance by reducing the rate and moving to a more flexible percentage rate structure so that record companies can continue to create the sound recordings that drive revenues for music publishers.”

Now this sounds very much like RIAA wants to keep the artists on leash. Not only they have lost their grip on the production and distribution segment, they are now in heavy competition with other sources of revenues, that endanger their ability to control artists. Strange tactics, that is for sure.
The story was /.-ted, there the comments were heavily in favor of the artists and against RIAA. This is a signal that those, who do not condemn p2p networks (i guess the slashdot crowd is more on the p2p side) are not automatically against the artists, they are against the music industry.

Russia agrees to shut down Allofmp3.com | CNET News.com:

Russia has agreed to shut down Allofmp3.com and other music sites based in that country that the U.S. government says are offering downloads illegally.

The nation has struck the agreement with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative as it seeks entry to the World Trade Organization. The U.S. has suggested that it would hold up Russia’s acceptance in the WTO unless leaders there took action against digital piracy.

“Russia will take enforcement actions against the operation of Russia-based websites,” according to a press release issued November 19 by the U.S. Trade Representative. “(Russia will) investigate and prosecute companies that illegally distribute copyright works on the Internet.”

On Wednesday, Allofmp3.com was still operating. Gretchen Hamel, a spokeswoman for Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, said that she didn’t know when the deal requires the Russian government to begin taking action.

Allofmp3.com has denied charges of piracy by pointing out that the company is compliant with Russian copyright law. It says it is careful to pay royalties to artists via the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society, which claims to represent copyright holders.

Legal Music Services Compared:

Music Services Compared

File-sharing defendant says Kazaa has him covered:

As the RIAA-shepherded file-sharing lawsuits wend their way through the courts, we have seen defendants utilizing a handful of different strategies as they fight back. A novel defense comes courtesy of Arista v. Greubel, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas. David Greubel argues that even if is found liable for copyright infringement, Arista and the other record labels are barred from recovering any damages because the of the Kazaa settlement. In his first affirmative defense to Arista’s complaint, Greubel says that the RIAA has been “fully satisfied for any liability and damages” due to his alleged conduct because of its settlement with Sharman Networks. Since the RIAA held Kazaa’s parent company liable for the infringement of Kazaa users, Greubel argues, the cartel has been fully compensated for whatever harm Greubel may have done.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment 

The past year has also seen the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace, seen by some as a great way to reach potential fans and, with unsigned acts, talent-spotters who can offer record deals. But it is easy for material to be placed online illegally – and singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, now in his 30th year in the business, has particular concerns.

“The majority of people posting songs on to social-networking sites don’t have a record deal,” he says.

“They’re using the site as a way of getting attention to get a deal, so often the first legal contract they’re entering into regarding their work will be through the terms and conditions of that site.

“If we’re in a situation where sites are harvesting intellectual property rights, it almost becomes impossible to use these sites without consulting a lawyer.”

…

“I reckon if they’d been around 25 years ago, it would have saved me two years of playing in dingy pubs in south London,” he says.

…

“Undoubtedly Rupert Murdoch is making a lot of money selling advertising on MySpace and he’s not paying a penny for content.”

…

“The supply to Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda is going to lead to the collapse of HMV as a record business,” he predicts.

…

Jenner believes that the record industry has been wrong to license tracks which appear on CDs given away by magazines and newspapers.

This signalled discs “did not have a great value – that they were incredibly cheap to make”, he says.

“I suspect that making them cheaper is the record companies’ latest own-goal. They’re cheapening their premium product.”

He also fears the internet is misunderstood by labels.

“They weren’t really able to come to grips with the essential truth of the internet, which is that it’s all about sharing of files.”

RED HERRING

Lawsuits against P2P applications are old news in the peer file sharing market. So the story goes, a company gets sued, makes a few compromises to please the record industry and stays alive if it has the financial means to do so. But another application or service pops up to fill its place.

Now some analysts think the record industry should stop suing and instead look for ways to benefit from the technology. “The major label recording business is in heaps of trouble… they’ve [spent time] building a strategy to knock down P2P that might have been better spent on some other initiatives. But they’re certainly showing no signs of moving off it,” said Joe Fleischer, CEO of media research firm Big Champagne.

Despite being in the middle of a legal battle with the record industry, P2P service LimeWire is in talks with record labels and working on a “conversion plans for users,” said LimeWire consultant Laura Tunberg with consulting firm We Get It. She explains that LimeWire wants to give users legal purchasing options.

“A lot of users want a legitimate product,” said Ms. Tunberg. “We believe a certain percentage of our user base will be converted, and that this is a viable business model.”

“If you take away the free, a lot of the appeal of peer-to-peer clearly goes away,” said Mr. Mitchell. “It’s going to take some innovative and clever software development to drive the legitimate marketplace.”

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | 

“Under UK copyright law,” says Ben White, copyright and compliance manager at the British Library, “we are unable to copy for preservation purposes film or sound material that sits in our permanent collection.” A further complication is the fact that about 10% of the archive, which includes more than a million discs and 185,000 tapes, is unpublished. Much of that is known as orphan works – pieces whose owners are unknown. We know who owns When I’m 64, but who owns the archive’s recording of Nelson Mandela’s speech at the Rivonia trial?

“We think the extra 45 years is very important,” Richard Mollet, director of public affairs for the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the industry’s trade association says, calling the 1950s a “big bang moment” for the world impact of British music. “Copyrights are the asset bases of British record companies. If we enhance the asset base, we can go on to make other, more exciting entrepreneurial investment decisions. If we increase the length of the term, we increase the value of these assets. We think they should remain in British ownership, because that’s where they came from.”

Industry people often use the phrase “the Beatles extension” because the first Beatles recordings, owned by EMI – which has called for term extension in evidence submitted to the EU and the UK – will come out of copyright in 2012. When I’m 64 is 39 years old.

Much of the Beatles’ catalogue was sold to Michael Jackson, who outbid McCartney for the publishing rights in 1985 and has since sold them to Sony Records. McCartney has to pay royalties to sing many of his own songs. There are plenty of other, less famous musicians whose recordings are out of print yet locked in the ownership of someone who refuses to release them.

“Locked” is, however, a fighting word to Mollet: “We falsely hear it said that copyright equals locked up.” Not so, he insists: “It’s allowing companies to make available their back catalogues.”

Nonetheless, even without term extension, Glenn Gould’s 1955 performance – now out of copyright -of Bach’s Goldberg Variations is still available; it was recently reissued by Sony. And there are no industry figures for what proportion of revenue comes from old material.

“The cultural institutions are quite correctly identifying that they have film or recording stock that’s rotting away because of cost and, in some cases, ambiguity around whether it would be within the law to make preservation copies of that work,” says Paula le Dieu, managing director of the new media company Magic Lantern and former head of the BBC’s Creative Archive. “But they need to continuously be thinking about what the next problem is that they face: having made those digital copies, what access are they going to provide for the public?”

After all, she says, “a vast, vast collection of British cultural heritage is locked away on dusty shelves, of no apparent value or not enough value that people have been prepared to make even the most basic preservation efforts with that material, and why can’t the public access that material? Preservation is not enough.”

BBC NEWS | Technology | iPod fans ‘shunning iTunes store’:

They estimate that during 2006 Europeans will spend more than 385m euros (£260m) on digital music – the majority of this spending will be on tracks from Apple’s iTunes store. However, the report into the habits of iPod users reveals that 83% of iPod owners do not buy digital music regularly. The minority, 17%, buy and download music, usually single tracks, at least once per month. On average, the study reports, only 5% of the music on an iPod will be bought from online music stores. The rest will be from CDs the owner of an MP3 player already has or tracks they have downloaded from file-sharing sites.

Slyck News – iPod Sales help Apple Soar:

Today Apple is a premier technology firm. But don’t thank the Mac, at least not entirely. According to Apple’s financial report from last quarter, the company sold over 8.7 million iPods in the last quarter. Mac sales were also impressive, with a record 1.6 million units sold. Total revenue generated by the iPod equaled $1.6 billion, while the Macs made up the difference with over $2.2 billion in sales. What about the left over billion?

iTunes continued to played a small role in Apple’s revenue with about $452 million in sales. This represents a substantial increase of 70% from the same quarter in 2005, but is actually a drop of 1% from the 3rd quarter of this year. It’s clear from Apple’s financial report that the iTunes music store is no where near the money maker that the iPod or Mac represent. Although $452 million is hardly a number to dismiss, iPod’s dominance in the market is powered by factors other than Tunes.

Free-for-all over Russian music site – Print Version – International Herald Tribune:

Free-for-all over Russian music site By Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2006 PARIS A Moscow-based Web site that the U.S. Commerce Department has branded as the world’s highest- volume online seller of pirated music announced plans Tuesday to release hundreds of thousands of albums free. Low prices and ease of use have made AllofMP3 a consumer favorite among music download sites, but the site – which claims to operate legally under Russian copyright law – faces continuing legal battles with the music industry and harsh criticism from the U.S. government. On Tuesday, the credit card company Visa International said it had suspended card service to the site, citing concerns over copyright issues. The U.S. trade representative, Susan Schwab, has warned that continued operation of the site signals a lack of respect for intellectual property law that could jeopardize Russia’s long-sought entry into the World Trade Organization. The company, which lists no telephone number on its Web site and normally declines all comment, undertook a rare public relations offensive Tuesday. Vadim Mamotin, director general of the site’s parent company, Mediaservices, spoke through a translator during an interview by telephone with the International Herald Tribune and then participated in an online chat with 59 journalists. Defiant, Mamotin maintained that the company operated legally under Russian law. “In six years of operation we have never been convicted by a Russian court or declared illegal,” Mamotin said, speaking through the translator. “Under Russian law we are 100 percent legal.” The site, which claims five million subscribers and a growth rate of 5,000 a day, remunerates artists by paying 15 percent of its revenue to a collecting agency, the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society, or ROMS by its initials in Russian, Mamotin said.

Rolling Stone : Wal-Mart Wants $10 CDs:

Getting Wal-Mart excited about carrying a record is at the top of every label’s to-do list, but it’s harder than it sounds. There is an immense cultural chasm between slick industry executives and Severson’s team of three music buyers at Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Only one of the three had ever worked in music retailing — until that person moved to a new division in August and was replaced by someone who previously bought Wal-Mart’s salty snacks.

p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site:

While Wal-Mart represents nearly twenty percent of major-label music sales, music represents only about two percent of Wal-Mart’s total sales.

“If they got out of selling music, it would mean nothing to them,” the story has a label executive saying. “This keeps me awake at night.”

That’s end of the Ars Technical excerpt, but there’s more – a lot more – in the Rolling Stone story, and the conclusion is especially interesting.

“Major labels insist that the low prices mass retailers such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy demand are impossible for them to achieve,” it says, talking about whether or not the Big Four will ever drop their CD prices. But it has Best Buy senior vice president Gary Arnold saying,

“The record industry needs to refine their business models, because the consumer is the ultimate arbitrator. And the consumer feels music isn’t properly priced.”

So? So maybe WalMart can get CD prices lowered across the board, says Hannibal

Digital rights in question as business model | Tech&Sci | Technology | Reuters.com:

“There’s been no growth this year at all,” he says. “The market has stalled.” On a month-to-month basis for this year, average monthly downloads are flat, just as they were last year, averaging around 10 million a week. Of late, average weekly downloads have slightly slipped, from 11.5 million in January to 10.7 million at the end of September. That’s after an all-time high of almost 20 million downloads the week after Christmas. According to the most recent SoundScan year-to-year figures, digital album sales through October 1 have grown 115 percent over the same period last year, while downloaded individual tracks have grown 72 percent.

iTWire

The Jobs interview, which marked the fifth anniversary of iPod, revealed that the Apple co-founder claims that if you charge the market a price it will accept for music, users will forgo illegal downloads and pay iTunes to download tracks.

What Jobs didn’t say, however, is that the strategy only works up to a point. Of the hundreds and sometimes thousands of tracks that each iPod owner has on his or her player, on average only 20 to 25 were bought through iTunes.

via Slyck News 

“Despite the growth of legal online music services over the past year, free downloads outpaced online sales of music files by a wide margin among all age groups. Among respondents with Internet access, 30% said they downloaded free music tracks, compared with 11% who bought tracks online. Teenagers are the top downloaders, with 68% of those aged 15 to 20 saying they downloaded tracks for free last year and 23% making at least one online purchase.” This might be an indication that ‘try before you buy’ is something practiced by Canadians.

Canadians are also said be be attending concerts: “Live Music Performances Two thirds of Canadians saw live music performances last year, with 46% attending one to five concerts, 11% attending six to 10, and 11% attending more than 10 concerts. Performances by Canadian artists made up approximately three quarters of all concerts attended. “Around 29% of concert attendees bought CDs or DVDs at the shows and 19% bought other concertrelated merchandise.”

The Future of Music: New Artist Model at Work:

Barenaked Ladies grossed $978,127.99 in revenue from intellectual property in its first week music sales from their new album, Barenaked Ladies Are Free (Desperation Records/Nettwerk Music Group). Understanding this sales figure requires looking beyond the numbers on the charts, according to Terry McBride, band manager and CEO of the Nettwerk Music. McBride notes BNL released their album on their own artist-run label, Desperation Records, in multiple formats, from physical CDs to digital albums, deluxe editions, USB flash drives, ring tones, multi-tracks for remixing, streams, etc.

The changing art of measuring TV viewership – Network World:

Nielsen Media Research cannot collect data about what people watch on handheld video-viewing gadgets or from PCs streaming network TV shows. While Nielsen estimates around 90% of TV viewing still happens in homes, it’s this burgeoning 10% that TV networks and advertisers are desperate to delve into.

 “The industry is just dehydrated for this data,” says Bob Luff, Nielsen’s CTO, who oversees the design of the technology used to collect and measure TV viewing habits in more than 40,000 Nielsen homes. “But how do you measure what’s on a video iPod at 38,000 feet on an airplane’s fold-down tray?”

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Amie Street Takes Innovative Music Model Into Beta:

DRM-free music marketplace Amie Street is announcing its beta launch this morning. (Note: it looks like it’s having traffic issues today, but it is coming up if you’re patient.) We wrote about the company’s alpha launch and interesting demand-driven pricing model here in July. Songs uploaded by artists fluctuate in price according to demand over time. Users get recommendation tokens for each dollar they put into the system and get free credits if the songs they recommend rise in price. Artists receive 70% of sales proceeds. The company is angel funded, with one of the most notable angels being Robin Richards of MP3.com fame.

Variety.com – Yahoo tests ‘Right’ to MP3 downloads:

In a first for mainstream pop music, Yahoo! will sell Jesse McCartney’s new album “Right Where You Want Me,” from Disney-owned Hollywood Records, in the unprotected MP3 format.

“We’re trying to be realistic,” said Ken Bunt, senior VP of marketing at Hollywood Records. “Jesse’s single is already online and we haven’t put it out. Piracy happens regardless of what we do. So we’re going to see how Jesse’s album goes (as an MP3) and then decide on others going forward.”

“We think this is a really good experiment, because copy protection is not doing anything to stop people from stealing when you can just get unprotected tracks off of a CD or get music illegally online,” said Yahoo! Music topper Dave Goldberg. “We think it’s good to make it easy for consumers to get digital music on whatever device they want and for companies like us to not be reliant on one particular technology company for how our consumers can access music.”

Because Apple doesn’t license the copy-protection technology behind iTunes, musicstores like Yahoo!, Napster and Rhapsody that want to sell major-label music have to use Microsoft’s alternative.

EMusic is currently the only online musicstore that sells songs in MP3 format, but it specializes in indie music and doesn’t have any major-label tracks.

www.jeremydebeer.ca – Sony BMG Settles Canadian Class Actions:

Sony BMG has agreed to settle Canadian class action lawsuits relating to its use of restrictive contractual terms and DRM technologies on music CDs. If approved by the courts following hearings in late September, the Canadian settlement will resolve disputes in Québec, British Columbia and Ontario.

The structure of the agreement mirrors the one reached in the United States earlier this year, and the terms are generally similar. People who purchased CDs containing certain digital rights management systems will be entitled to various forms of compensation, depending on the type of software on the CD. Purchasers of “XCP” CDs will receive a DRM-free replacement disc and MP3 versions of the tracks, as well as a choice between either a cheque for C$8.40 (American purchasers got US$7.50) and a free album download, or 3 free album downloads. “MediaMax 3.0” purchasers get only a free MP3 version of the album they had bought, while “MediaMax 5.0” purchasers get the MP3s plus another free album download.

The Korea Times : Online Music Sharing Flourishes:

Soribada, the largest peer-to-peer music sharing service in South Korea, said yesterday the number of its paying subscribers exceeded 500,000 as of Saturday. The number of users who pay 3,000 won (3.12 USD, 671 HUF) per month for unlimited music downloads has steadily increased since the charging system was first adopted on July 10, it said. In August alone, over 300,000 have registered as new subscribers.

Here I collect the texts I have written as part of the research:

The Club model of cultural consumption and distribution

When it comes to the market of digital goods, clubs –buyers teaming up to buy a single item and share it among themselves– seem to have little or no economic significance. Digital files are either perfectly controlled, thus the producer can appropriate all of the consumer surplus that could have arose by forming a club, or there is no way to control unauthorized copying thus there is no price at which it would be reasonable to sell a good on the market.
But if we include other, noneconomic aspects of clubs, notably their ability to negotiate and
enforce norms on how a given good is accessed and used, clubs can have a significant effect
on markets. So far we have seen that technological protection measures and copyright laws cannot effectively curb unauthorized uses of digital content. User communities around jambands can be an exception from this general trend as together with the artists they have created a normative environment that is able to police and enforce undesirable actions.

Is there a way to propagate the emergence of such communities through adequate
technologies designed to connect artists and fans? What can we do to help fans and artists to negotiate rules they are both are happy with?

Bodó Balázs- Gyenge Anikó: A könyvtári kölcsönzések után fizetendő jogdíj közgazdasági
szempontú elemzése

A nyilvános könyvtári kölcsönzések után a jogosultaknak fizetendő jogdíj (Public Lending
Right – a továbbiakban PLR) ötlete több sebből is vérzik.
Ha a PLR-re mint a nemzeti kulturális politikától független eszközre tekintünk, mely e jogot természetjogi érveléssel a tulajdonhoz való jogból vezeti le, minden esetben oda jutunk, hogy a jogosultak monopoljogát kiterjesztjük és az ezzel járó járadékot növeljük. Ennek következménye jelentős fogyasztói csoportok kulturális fogyasztásból való kiszorulása lehet, melyre eddig a legolcsóbb és hatékonyabb megoldás a könyvtári kölcsönzés szabadsága volt.

Ha a PLR nemzeti kultúrpolitikai eszköz, akkor viszont azt a megállapítást tehetjük, hogy a PLR a meglévő kultúratámogatási rendszerek mellett való üzemeltetése indokolatlanul
bonyolult, és költséges, és ha az állami döntéshozók úgy találják, hogy van a költségvetésben kultúratámogatásra fordítható tartalék, akkor azt érdemes a meglévő intézményrendszeren keresztül szétosztani.

Végül pedig a jogosultak, szerzők szemszögéből megvizsgálva a kérdést: nincs olyan szerző a földön, aki visszavonná egy megjelent művét a könyvtárakból csak azért mert azt vélelmezi, hogy a kölcsönzések miatt eladásoktól esik el. Ennek az egyetlen oka az, hogy a szerzők számára a könyvtárban való jelenlét haszna nagyobb, mint a könyvtári olvasók által okozott kiesett kereslet. Már csak emiatt sem érdemes a PLR bevezetése.

The Pirates of The Pirates of the Caribbean

This is the PowerPoint presentation of the talk I gave on the Chicago Kent Law School this March.

Robin Hood Digital – english

“File-sharing communities are also remembering communities. They direct attention and thus demand, they discuss and thus keep alive cultural goods. When something is posted as available for download, not only those fetch it have requested a particular item, but also those who were standing nearby. These individuals are reciting work long forgotten like those who in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 memorize books to be able to share them with others.”

Sobri Joska Digital – in hungarian

Megjelent a Café Babel 2006 decemberi, Hiány c. számában.

“A Csendes Könyvtár és az összes többi hasonló szolgáltatás az úgynevezett közjavakra épülő internetes kooperációs hálózatokra (commons based peer production networks) példa. A piac által (kényszerűségből) szabadon hagyott résekben, marginális igények, érdekek körül a semmiből jönnek létre olyan közösségek, melyek a hálózat tagjai között elosztott különböző képességeket, erőforrásokat (időt, szkennert, karakterfelismerő programot, korrektúrázó képességet) képesek hatékonyan összehangolni egy olyan feladat érdekében, melynek gyümölcseit aztán mindenki szabadon és ingyenesen élvezheti.”

A szerzői jog gazdaságtana az online világban

Frissen elkészült könyvfejezet.

“A szerzői jog közgazdasági elemzése során a szerzőknek biztosított monopoljog különös figyelmet vívott ki magának. Ennek az az oka, hogy a monopol helyzetben levő termelők maguk határozzák meg a piaci árat, és ez az ár jellemzően nagyobb, mint amennyi versenyhelyzetben lenne. Tökéletes verseny esetén a piaci ár megegyezik a termék határköltségével, azaz azzal az összeggel, amennyibe a legutolsó példány elkészítése kerül. A monopóliumok határköltségnél magasabb ára azzal jár, hogy a piaci kereslet egy
része nem tudja megfizetni a monopolista szabta árat.”

A szőnyeg alá söpört archívum
Megjelent a Manager Magazin 2006. Decemberi számában Tartalomraktárak címen.

“Ma Magyarországon az a kérdés, hogy a piacra várnunk-e, hogy ezeket az archívumokat kiépítsék, a nehézkesen működő és alulfinanszírozott közintézményekre lőcsöljük-e ezt a feladatot, vagy megteremtjük annak lehetőségét, hogy a magyar kulturális közösség fenntartsa önmagát. A Neumann-ház megrendelésére elkészített Nemzeti Digitális Adattár 2.0 vitaanyag a közösségi archiválás lehetőségének kiterjesztését tartalmazza, az első lépés tehát ezügyben megtörtént. Még egy lépés azonban hátra van. Dekriminalizálni kellene kirillt, scan_dalt, helpert és társaik. Hogy ne fordulhasson elő az, hogy ennek az örökségnek piaci, személyes érdekeket sértő részei esetleg nem maradnak fenn. Hogy ne legyen bűnöző az a soktízezres közösség, amelyik a magyar audiovizuális örökség archiválásán dolgozik – társadalmi munkában.”

A retardált archívum

Megjelent az Élet és Irodalom 2007. január 5-i számában.

“A közpénzből finanszírozott, közszolgálati archívum kapuit minél szélesebbre kell tárni. A hat havi elérhetőséget nem szűkíteni kell, hanem az archívum digitalizálásával bővíteni. Az archívumi anyagok lementését, felhasználását, adott esetben átalakítását nem megakadályozni kell hanem a megfelelő jogi konstrukció kidolgozásával megengedni , támogatni, bátorítani. Ezt követeli a finanszírozás módja. Ezt követeli a közszolgálatiság jelentése. Ezt követeli a piaci értékesítés igénye. Ezt követeli a józan ész.”
PhD 2-page research proposal in english

A short description of my research.

Régebbi cikkek/ older writings

A „mély link”
Internetes tartalomszolgáltatók vs. internet

Megjelent a Beszélő 2003 szeptemberi számában.

“Mély link valójában nincs. Link van, mely mutathat bárhová: egy portál címoldalára, a legutolsó, senki által nem olvasott cikkére, képre, linkgyűjteményre, bárhova. A mély linkelést nem lehet megtiltani, csupán azt lehet technológiai eszközökkel elérni, hogy egy adott gyűjteménybe csak egy, a hivatalos kapun keresztül lehessen bejutni. Ott pedig, ahol korábban szabad volt az átjárás, jogi vagy technológiai falak kezdenek épülni, melyek az internet mindent mindennel összekötő hipertextuális szövetéből kiragadnak, elérhetetlenné tesznek tartalmakat. Az intertextualitásból kiemelt, a többi szöveggel való kapcsolatától megfosztott valami pedig megszűnik szövegnek lenni.”

Bolyongás egy áldás nélküli térben
Graffiti és street art mint a társadalmi diskurzus eszköze

Megjelent a Café Babelben 2004-ben.

“Az egyre lezáródó fizikai, média- és kulturális terekben az autonómia megteremtése egyre költségesebb: magas a lebukás veszélye és nagy a várható büntetés, megfizethetetlenek a kártérítési és nem utolsó sorban jogi költségek. Nehéz felbecsülni, hogy az egyre szigorodó ellenőrzési technikák milyen mértékben gátolják üzenetek megjelenését, hiszen a leginkább kockázatvállalókat kivéve az alkotóknak nem áll érdekükben láthatóvá válni, nem szeretnék magukra felhívni a figyelmet. Ha mégis, akkor a szólás szabadságát keresők szükségszerűen mozognak a gyengébb ellenállás, tehát olyan médiumok felé, melyek könnyebben támadhatók, azaz ellenőrzésük architekturális okokból nehezebben megoldható”

It was also clearly explained that the only products we sold on the website were historical recordings that Universal Music Sweden had refused for years – despite countless requests from fans – to release. It was also explained that the money raised from these sales was used to promote ABBA and Universal Music’s products via the ABBAMAIL website, mailing list, forum, newsletters etc. The MIPI representative said they didn’t care about that at all.

We found out in the early days that ABBA’s record company didn’t mind ABBAMAIL’s activities because they knew that it didn’t conflict with their products and that ultimately it benefitted them. They realised that ABBA fans needed to be kept interested in ABBA so they would be more willing to buy the next incarnation of GOLD or MORE GOLD or FOREVER GOLD or LOVE SONGS or THE DEFINITIVE COLLECTION etc. Their primary concern was that we didn’t make a “big deal” out of it – as long was we kept it low key and just sold to the hard-core fans, they were fine with it.

What has changed?

Well apparently the Managing Director of Universal Music in Sweden has made it his personal mission to close us down – he won’t stop until he achieves this.

via p2pnet.net

After so many companies failing in court to RIAA I am wonderning what they were hoping for? That noone will notice the several million users? Do they have a good defence?

Slyck News’ Thomas Mennecke speculates that:

Many believed, as did LimeWire, that their open source nature would preserve their existence – at least for some time to come.

I do not see that commercially exploting an open source software would mean an excuse from being sued. But anyway, whom will RIAA sue after they take LimeWire out? All the contributors who have developed the code?

LimeWire’s open source nature may not save the company from the RIAA’s onslaught, but it may save the Gnutella network. LimeWire’s newest features and talent comes from the open source world; even if Lime Group vanishes tomorrow, development won’t.

Well said.

GUse this tool to find downloadable mp3s on Google.

This is just great. The right search term for google is:
intitle:index.of “mp3″ +”Artis Name” -htm -html -php -asp “Last Modified”

Inside Bay Area reports: “Digital albums sales are up 126 percent in comparison to the first six months of last year. Thus far, some 14.7 million digital albums have been sold, which is a staggering figure, given that only 16.2 million were purchased in all of 2005.”

Darn! I was working on a very sophisticated argument based on the assumption that people prefer single tract to whole albums.

icLiverpool reports: “TECHNOLOGY allowing bands to sell their music direct to fans on the internet and protect against piracy will give more power to musicians. That’s the claim of Liverpool firm Safesell which is behind the system that plays on any Windows-compatible pc or mobile.

It can be sent to friends by email or peer-to-peer file sharing. At the end of a promotional period anyone wishing to play the track again is invited to buy a license online.

Co-founder Brian Pond said: “Safesell is the first product in the world to offer everything you need to sell music or video direct to customers. “It provides downloading in a format which cannot be pirated; it allows the artist to control pricing of tracks and album and the quality of download, the territories and currencies they want to deal with; and it manages the payments.””

Now that is really interesting, a real alternative to the traditional middlemen like record companies and marketplaces. I hope it will work out at the end, and it will charge reasonable transaction fees.

PC Pro reports that “P2P downloads made up 18 per cent of the digital tunes, with a further 11 per cent copied from friends’ CDs’; 65 per cent were ripped from purchased CDs with the remaining six per cent from paid-for download” in the UK. The study was done by British Music Rights (BMR), “an umbrella organisation representing a number of composers’, songwriters’ and music publishers’ bodies.”

These numbers seem to be a bit low for me, but this is not the point now. BMR wishes to use these numbers to push for a licence fee collected from hardware manufacturers and ISPs. I quess I can understand that, this is where cash is abundant, fight for a stake where there is a bounty.

But, the name they have coined:Value Recognition Right, is a telling us about an intent of making telcos and ISP’ part of the content value chain. This not only is damaging of Net Neutrality, but serious intrusion of the privacy of the users. Someone watching my packages, peeping into whether they are part of an illegal mp3, and metering these packages? Lobbying for rent seeking, instead of trying to create economic/legal/cultural models to gain revenue on the right of their own? Come on, this is plain wrong.