Posts tagged music industry
A couple of new feeds
Dec 8th
The content on this blog has been a bit more diverse of late and while I tend to take the approach that if I enjoy some of the content on a blog I might as well keep an eye on all of their content to get a more rounded view of the writer, I recognise that some readers may not be interested in tracking everything. As a result I’ve added separate feeds for my two key consulting foci. So if you’re just here for musings on music on the web, you might want to grab this feed and if you’re looking for thinking on the web and other technology for charities, campaigns and other non-profits then you’ll want this one. The main feed remains at its existing location.
I’m using feedburner to serve my various feeds and provide some statistics about their readership. The FeedSmith plugin makes it much easier to integrate that with this wordpress-based blog, but in some ways it’s a shame that it doesn’t automate the process of adding extra feeds. It’d be very nice to have a way to tell it “add a feedburner feed for tag X”. If it did, I’d probably try to automate that so that users could subscribe to very targetted chunks of content. As it is, for now hopefully these two extra feeds will help some people handle their blog intake a little more easily.
(this may also be an appropriate moment to apologise to anyone who was trying to access this site overnight. a slight change to my DNS settings had some unforeseen consequences. that is now taken care of and everything should be a little more stable than before as the site is sitting on a new hosting account)
Music like water in Denmark?
Oct 23rd
I usually try not to post twice in a day, particularly not on the same topic (there is more techie content coming soon, honest) but this has the potential to be big news: the Danish branch of the International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers “has seriously proposed allowing unrestricted downloads of music over peer-to-peer networks, in exchange for a modest monthly fee to be charged to all ISP users.”
This is a significant crack in the armor of the industry copyright zealots, and it’s strange that I can’t find an English-language announcement anywhere. My contacts say that the suggested monthly fee is 100 kroner, or approximately 16 Euros.
16 Euros is a little more than I pay for my emusic subscription, but this would be for a lot more music than the 65 downloads that buys me, and presumably the proposal is for all recorded music currently available through any major label, not just the selection emusic gets access to.
I remain sceptical that this will fly with ISPs, who the proposal suggest should pay the fee on behalf of their customers. 16 Euros is quite a hefty addition to the average internet connection charge.
I’d also quibble with Andy’s assertion that “the Danish IFPI represents the content producers themselves”: the IFPI represents “the recording industry worldwide” which isn’t quite the same thing as the content producers. If we use ‘production’ in the sense of ‘management of budgets, logistics, etc’ then perhaps the IFPI represents them, but there’s a significant difference between representing “the recording industry” and representing those whose creative work is being recorded (or is recording, for that matter.
Quibbles aside, this is a fascinating development.
New formats are not the answer to the music industry’s woes
Oct 15th
Guy Holmes seems to have a weird take on selling records. In a piece at the Guardian about his label Gut’s experiment with releasing a single on a hybrid vinyl/CD disc he comments:
The music business desperately, desperately needs to invent new formats; the CD is an antique, it’s 20 years old.
With little context available it’s hard to tell why, exactly, he thinks the industry needs a new format, but my guess is he’s been looking at the figures for the bubble the music industry experienced while consumers switched from cassette and LP to CD and wants to experience them again.
There are several problems with that approach. One is that now most of us have the means to rip our CDs into digital form it’s going to be much harder to re-sell us the same content. I might have replaced an LP with a CD because I didn’t have a record player any more, but not only do I still have several CD players, it’s easy for me to prepare for the future by ripping those CDs to use on a wide range of devices.
But that also leads us to the fact that the industry already has several new formats and only one of them is working. There’s DVD audio, there are HD CDs, there are SACDs and there are dozens of digital-only formats. And most consumers are only interested in the digital formats. For the vast majority of us (ie. everyone but serious audiophiles) CDs are good enough, and of the new options only the digital ones offer us a better experience.
Rather than casting around for gimmicks, labels would do well to look at why vinyl sales are rising in some quarters and why the new CD-like formats are failing. With their large canvas for artwork, LPs still offer a tactile experience that CDs can’t duplicate, as well as connecting us with a nostalgic experience and a wealth of cheap back catalogue items. DRM-free digital formats give us a way to play our music on a wide range of devices, to store, back-up and even repurpose the music, but lack a tactile experience.
Radiohead’s digital+discbox approach recognises that those options can be complimentary and provides something extra for their fans (their track record of high quality artwork doesn’t hurt). Beck’s “make your own sleeve” approach with The Information also tapped into a little of that. Understanding what’s going on may yield a sustainable model, self-acknowledged gimmicks won’t.
Total Music
Oct 14th
John Gruber comments in his usual incisive way on the claims that Universal Music are looking to start their own subscription service called Total Music. For a variety of reasons, not only the technical and financial ones that John details, the plan seems like the flailing about we’ve become used to hearing from an industry staring into an abyss and refusing to acknowledge the numerous bridges all around.
The original Business Week piece contains an amusing quote from Irving Azoff, who says:
Doug is doing the right thing taking on Steve Jobs,” says ex-MCA Records Chairman Irving Azoff, whose Azoff Music Management Group represents the Eagles, Journey, Christina Aguilera, and others. “The artists are behind him.
Sure, the Eagles, Journey and Christina Aguilera may be behind such a plan, and they may sell a lot of records, but they’re hardly a representative sample. Most likely they were picked because they’re the lowest common denominator for the Business Week readership but even if you add in a few of their peers, the vast majority of artists are going to be opposed to such an offering because it will either lock them out entirely or require them to sign the sorts of horrific deals major labels are known for.
Even if the major labels do get such a programme to market (about which I’m sceptical) and become uncharacteristically inclusive and giving, they’ve shown over the past few years that they are less and less capable of breaking new acts beyond one-hit-wonders. A subscription service might make that easier as less commitment is required to check out new acts, but that’s not much of a long-term strategy.
Music as a commodity may work that way, but artists need commitment from fans and support structure in order to attain longevity. A subscription service from the major labels would make it easier for us all to have a “free” supply of wallpaper music for background listening, but a more fundamental change of approach is needed from the major labels if they actually want to build up artists who might in the long-term bring them more profits. If the labels won’t do it under their own power, other people will step up who can help artists get the funding to do it themselves.
Radiohead’s Big Event
Oct 13th
A little blogging inertia seems to have set in over the past few months and it seems a bit late to comment on Radiohead’s approach to releasing their new album. Instead, now that the dust is settling, it seems a good time to connect it up with some commentary my friend Steve has been offering over on his blog.
Steve has been doing a lot of thinking about things like the emotional connections people make with music and what the change of experience from queuing outside a record shop to freely downloading means for how people value music something that, as an independent musician, is of quite immediate importance to him. When we have a constant flow of free or nearly-free new music washing over us, it suffers from some of the same attention problem that many of us have faced since RSS allowed us to theoretically track many hundreds of web sites but we didn’t have the tools to work out how to prioritise that and what could simply be left behind.
What I find most interesting about Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows is that they made an album release feel like an event for the first time in years. With no promotional copies sent out, there were no leaks, and everyone who wanted to hear the record could do so within a few hours of each other. Some people stayed up all night to be the first to download, others of us were just specially eager to get to our email the next morning, but either way there was a definite buzz around the web on October 10th.
Waiting for the email with download instructions to come in isn’t quite the same as queuing outside a record shop with other fans, but sharing comments on twitter had a little of the same feel. The band aren’t sharing sales statistics, but there’s little doubt they’ll be charting pretty high at last.fm this week even by Radiohead’s usual standards (they’re consistently in the top 5 in the artists’ chart). For musicians who don’t have to worry about exposure and/or are more interested in people connecting with the records than buying them, a high last.fm ranking says a lot more than competing with the latest ringtone-friendly tunes in the sales charts.
That experience/event aspect of Radiohead’s approach seems to me far more important than what they’re doing with pricing. Their adoption of downloads is only unprecedented because Radiohead operate on an entirely different scale from all but a handful of bands; bands have been giving records away for years. Stars beat them to the punch this summer by offering their new album as a “download-only promo”, and there are plenty of other examples. Because of the ‘event’, because the album was the thing of the moment, a thing to connect through, and not just because it was by Radiohead, a lot of people listened to it a lot more than if it had simply slipped out as promo after promo got leaked.
Obviously few bands can make a release quite as much of an event as Radiohead, with their legions of fans amongst music buyers and critics alike. This experiment has been done now and won’t work the same way again, but the band have shown that the cat isn’t entirely out of the bag and that it is still possible for an album release to be a major event for someone other than retailers or a select few able to make it to a launch party. The open question is whether other artists can manage a similar feat without Radiohead’s resources or the aid of what seems like novelty.