Prince: The Internet Is Over
Jul0
Read all about it here. I don’t think I can go as far as Prince, but I see his point. If the internet has rendered the law of supply and demand so lopsided that you have such an abundance of supply, then how do you create demand? In his case, by withdrawing.
His official web site is shut down. He refuses to allow his music to be posted to YouTube, iTunes, rhapsody.. What is left? Personal appearances?
His latest work is his 27th CD – 20TEN – which will be included as a freebie in the London Daily Mirror. This is the second time he’s taken this approach with a CD release.
Everyone else is talking about openness, context vs content, integrated virtual living, digital apps. This is the guy who changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol to be legally free of the controlling recording contract he had with Warner Brothers. Here’s the guy who outsmarted SoundScan by including CDs in the price of his live concerts so that they counted as sales, putting his album at the top of the Billboard charts in the early 2000′s. He can clearly think outside of the box and doesn’t mind enduring some pain for his beliefs.
Maybe he’s ahead of the curve again. Or maybe this time Prince has “left the (virtual) building.”
Terry McBride Presentation from Nov 2009 – Must Watch
Jun0
Excellent video presentation by Terry McBride on basic concepts of the new music business models: content/context, selling access rather than copies, the subscription based music model that is coming soon.
Limewire Loses
May0
The RIAA just won the lawsuit against file sharing service Limewire. While this is necessary and meaningful, noone believes file sharing will stop. There was a good comment I read today on Jeremy Silver’s blog.
Worldwide expenditure on anti-piracy measures is out of all proportion to the worldwide investment in new digital content business models. More importantly the investment in new ways to invest in content is not coming from the music industry. It’s coming from new entrants who are faced with the prospect of rights holders who make it difficult and expensive to try new things out. Rights holding companies typically demand advances and even equity in companies that dare to enter their sector with a new idea for creating economic growth.
This will be a long struggle to find methods of digital distribution of music where artists are compensated fairly. It will have to happen, however. It’s not just the music business that is affected. It’s any creative content producing entity that releases their product in a digital form: software developers, print publishers, news outlets, mobile app creators, television and movies, etc.
More to follow…
Virtual Gigs
Dec0
The movie Avatar was released last Friday. Haven’t seen it yet, but I plan on getting the 3-D glasses and experiencing it in a movie theater very soon. Critics say it revolutionalizes the way animation will be done in film. It reminds me of my experience a couple of years ago with Second Life.
Second Life is a virtual online world. You can join for free, but to really get the most out of it requires spending some money. The first thing you do is create an alter ego for yourself – an avatar. You decide how it looks, how it is dressed, how it moves, what vehicle it drives, where it lives, what it does. Some things are already made for you, but the good stuff is scripted and created by experts who charge for their services. The currency is Linden Dollars, which actually have a real monetary conversion rate. 5,000 Linden Dollars is currently worth about $20.00 US.
You can buy “land” – even own your own island. You can open up a business with a storefront on a main street in one of the cities. By spending a little real money, you can have a great virtual second life!
What about entertainment? It’s there, too. In real time – streaming to you live from someone’s desktop computer. Yesterday, I met one of the more popular Second Life entertainers – Noma Falta – in the flesh. She’s been “gigging” online now for the past two years and has built up a great reputation as one of the best blues singers in the online community. There’s a fee to watch and hear her perform, and it’s enabled her to bring in a steady stream of revenue to the point that this is pretty much all that she does.
You have to know that this wasn’t an instant thing. It took a long time for her to get the skills to not only control her avatar in real time but also stream a live performance over the internet and interact with the paying customers in the virtual room. She’s running an 8-core Mac, if that gives you an idea of how serious this is.
She also plays blues with a couple of guys in other countries in real time using NINJAM. She plays bass and sings from her location in the US, the drummer is in Japan, and the guitarist is in Germany. Sometimes they join her at the gig in Second Life.
It’s just nice to know that in this day and age where brick-and-mortar clubs are expecting free entertainment or even charging musicians to play, that the virtual online world offers a way to earn a living.
Read This
Nov0
Gerd Leonhard’s open letter to the music industry . There are some very good points here.
Off The Grid
Nov0
I was watching Al Gore promote his new book on television (yes I still watch it), and it got me to thinking about the current trend of moving toward decentralization.
He was speaking of alternative sources of energy and used as an example the possibility of creating a “super grid” of solar cell panels to provide electricity. According to Al, the earth receives enough energy from the sun within a short length of time (I think he said “a day”) to satisfy the needs of the world for a year. And that the science is at a point where it could happen. And that the obstacle to all of this is the companies who make their profit from our traditional energy sources.
A friend of mine, Ted Hatfield, is preparing to bulldoze his property in order to build a new home in its place that will be energy self-sufficient. His will be the model that his company will use to install these types of systems into new homes. He’s got it figured out. No more dependence on Georgia Power for electricity.
A small percentage of the country who live in the sunny areas of the country like Arizona and southern California have done this same thing. I know that right now the conversion rate for energy from one of those solar panels is ridiculously low. But that will change. So, if the trend continues and science makes it possible for the homeowner to own a home that doesn’t need outside assistance for electricity, that means no dependence on a central provider for electricity. We all have our little energy independent houses.
So it may be possible to extend the catastrophic events that have happened to our music industry to other industries who have depended on a centralized structure of distribution. My head hurts just thinking about it….
Mobile apps – new frontiers in hacking
Aug0
I’m a PC. Have been since 1984. That’s not to say I never wanted a Mac. I’ve always thought they were a step ahead with GUI’s and ease of use. But I’ve always balked at being limited to only using Apple products, watching “the bomb” crash your system with no way of tweaking the innards, and paying twice as much to get the same computing power as a PC.
Hackers have pretty much left Apple operating systems alone, but that’s changing. Soon, I predict Mac users will be investing in anti-virus software just like their PC counterparts. But now, because of the iPhone, Apple may become just as distrusted as Microsoft.
This article, Six Reasons To Jailbreak Your iPhone, makes it clear that the idea of a company dictating to a user what they can and cannot load on their own mobile device is a source of rebellion against that company. The telcos and mobile device manufacturers have in a sense become the new “record companies,” dictating top-down to their consumers in order to keep some kind of control over the profits generated by their technologies. And Google keeps rolling along with their open source apps, making money off of everyone.
Another look at Music 2.0
Jul0
Gerd Leonhard posted a very quick (18 minutes) but thorough overview of his vision of the future for media today. The two videos are here . (If you’re viewing this post after 7/2/09 search his site for “Music 2.0 – the future of the music business – in 18 minutes.”
If it seems confusing and hard to understand, remember that the phrases and concepts he’s using are in most cases terms coined by himself, and may at first sound like someone who’s gone to church too long and is “preaching to the choir.” Whether or not you agree with his view, you must consider the current of events around us right now that he describes and pay attention.
The two biggest cornerstones of change are:
It’s definitely worth a look.
Copyright Dilemma
Jun0
There’s an excellent article on the Jammie Thomas-Rassett file sharing case at the Wired web site.
The RIAA may have won the legal victory, but it has spawned a lot of bad PR from the heavy handed judgment against a lone individual. Thing is, they didn’t really want it to go this far in my opinion. I’m sure they thought that she would settle out of court for the $3000-5000 penalty that they had been able to extract from the other violators. Instead, she fought the machine – and lost big time. If there was any doubt that the laws of copyright do not apply anymore, this was the proof that they indeed do.
There is the law. Then there is human behavior.
In the days of Kazaa and Napster, anyone with a computer could participate in the sharing of “free” music. It hasn’t stopped. BitTorrent sites still abound and are starting to eat at the video and software industries as well as the music business. Most of us don’t think a thing about sending an MP3 of a song we like via email to our friends, but it is technically the same thing – distribution without consent from the copyright owner.
I’m glad to see the copyright laws being upheld. At the same time, our behavior is bound to modify the way those laws are enforced. You just can’t take 90 percent of the online population to court for infringement.
The direction indicated by media futurists is that the ISPs will be the ones that will pay for our use of music. Modeled after the radio and broadcast businesses, the idea is that they will be levied a fee based on usage, and that fee will be distributed according to the tracking of the usage. Maybe so.
Laws will have to be written to pave the way to levy the fees against the ISPs. That’s the telecoms and entertainment conglomerates we’re talking about. I don’t think that will happen without a substantial fight.
Then there has to be a way to track the usage so that 1) you can determine the amount of traffic and 2) who should get payment. Gracenote (the owners of the CDDB – compact disc database) have developed a widely used musical fingerprinting technology that could enable this kind of tracking. It’s the technology that brings the artist information from the internet to your music player software. That would mean that every web site that deals in music in some way would need to license and incorporate the Gracenote software so that the music could be tracked.
Then there has to be a central place where the information gets collected and from which artists and writers are paid. ASCAP and BMI currently do this for performance royalties in the U.S., but there is nothing in place for the internet. The closest is SoundExchange, but it is still in its infancy.
In short, “music like water” is in reality a long ways off in my thinking. This case proves the Copyright Act still has some teeth, but it may have to coexist with millions of mom and pop pirates.
Japan’s new Copyright Law
Jun0
Japan is strengthening its copyright law to include a clause that makes it illegal for a private user to download copyrighted material that has been uploaded without the copyright holder’s permission. The full article is here. I don’t know how it will be enforced or what the penalties will be for infringement, but it’s in place.
For years I’ve considered the internet as it is to be like the “wild wild west” in the 1800′s where existing laws kind of adapt to the new landscape. It makes me think that there will be a parallel internet created soon which will be much more tightly controlled, all content will have a price structure attached, and the convenience and availability of things will make us choose to use it over the relatively unstructured web that exists now.
To use an analogy, it might be thought of as being similar to the difference between AM and FM radio. When commercial radio began, AM was all there was. FM appeared in the 60′s with better fidelity for music including the ability to broadcast in stereo – the new music format. College stations encouraged piracy in their own way by broadcasting entire albums and notifying listeners when to begin taping on their cassette recorders.
AM radio still exists, but as a sort of voice rant wilderness. I think the old web will still exist, too, but only by those who would still dare to risk getting a computer virus or battle having their privacy invaded. Feel free to disagree..