iChoons

If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

If Apple is so forward-looking and have so much influence in popular culture (not to mention the all-important lobbyists) why don't they just do it?

Just do it! Take the bull by the horns and drop DRM tomorrow. While you are at it, drop the price of a single song to 25 cent.

Embody your archetype Steve-O - become the anti-establishment hero that you keep telling us you are.

Or is this just another cynical marketing ploy?

hmm. Thought so...

I was having a spirited online discussion today with a bunch of strangers (as you do). We were talking about something close to our hearts (well, OK, I was tacking madly away from the main point of the conversation...) music, movies, media players, media companies and the very future of our culture.

Along the way someone said that there is nothing inherently evil about DRM (I reminded them of the Sony Rootkit fiasco...). But this got me thinking. What could happen if DRM, Copyright issues and the whole mess was taken to its (ill)logic conclusion?

I realised that the media companies are quickly gaining control over the entire cultural history of the 20th century and a method to control the cultural history (such as it is) of the coming centuries.

My take on the whole thing is that DRM should be avoided like the plague. I do not buy any music that foists DRM on me. Neither do I have an issue with recording my LP's (and ironically some tapes) to digital and listening to them. That's fair use.

For new music though, there are not that many compelling options. Magnatune has been around for a long time and supplies some niche independent music. While Magnatune is one of the oldies at this stage, there are hundreds of sites (niche or otherwise) offering independent music.

Magnatune has an unusual business model. It offers the customer the choice of how much they would like ot pay with the average $5 pre-selected. On average, customers actually pay just short of $9!

Its a discussion for another time, but the salient point is that given the choice, and with regard to music they have sourced, a customer will not only pay for music but pay more than they have to.

These successful distributors all deal with so-called niche music, independent music and pretty much everything that the majors would pass on. Which is a good thing.

Nobody is becoming super-rich from these services but the point is providing distribution channels from a musician to their present and future audience and fans.

The majors steer clear of these services, however, another fine online distributor eMusic has been getting mid-management agreement for deals since it began but as these requests bubble up to higher management they unilaterally get knocked on the head even with so-called 'long-tail' music.

The music industry is not run by or for people who appreciate music. It has one goal only - to make money. They try to achieve this by producing cookie cutter music, blowing with the wind (until we are all sick of the smell) and protecting their back-catalogue with uber-zealousness.

Eventually this will lead to people turning away from the traditional music industry and turning on to the likes of Magnatune, MySpace (who knows..!), YouTube etc. as thier primary source of music - Hallelujah!

Software like Democracy Player, Songbird etc. will help to replace the restrictive Media Players from MS, Apple etc.

But by then it will be too late, our cultural history will be locked away from us forever. If you want to legally access a tune form 1950's you will have to talk to the media companies. If you want to legally watch a Betty Boop cartoon, see reruns of Knight Rider, watch the moon landings - you will have to talk to the big media companies.

These media companies will not be interested in taking to individuals or even special interest groups. There is no way they would bow to pressure to release to the public domain all recordings by a 1930's performer - unless they could release a digitally remastered boxed set and the whole nine yards of coffee table books and all the rest of the tchotchke that make the big media companies think that they define popular culture.

In comparison releasing the recordings of an obscure artist to the public domain would cost too much in lawyers fees and paperwork - its more profitable to leave it to moulder in the archives and eventually (blissfully) require dumping and burning.

Increasingly the media companies are using Copyright, DRM and even the DMCA to lock down all our modern cultural history also through conglomeration of corporate bodies (Time Warner AOL Universal) that leads to the consolidation of scattered music/movies/whatever collections under one corporate heel.

When more and more popular culture comes under the sway of fewer people we get a situation where there is no leverage - one side holds all the cards and will never fold.

These corporations have proven that they do not want to release old recordings / media / whatever (see the Eldred case in the states as an offthetopofmyhead example...) unless they can turn enough of a profit from them.

To labour a point - for a large corporation to do this it involves a lot of outlay - lawyers, marketing, lawyers, remixing, lawyers, distribution, lawyers, marketing, lawyers.... This effectively means that these recordings won't ever be released. The content is actually less than worthless to the conglomerate - the best option for them, from a business perspective (their only perspective) would be to destroy the whole kit and kaboodle.

Lets put this bluntly - the media companies would profit from erasing the cultural history of the 20th Century.

Yes, thats a nightmare scenario, but the facts are diverging in this direction...

What to do?

If a grassroots or even independent operation were allowed access to the collection they could cheaply and effectively distribute it, effectively securing it for future generations - the media companies could even get a kick back based on the distribution numbers -there is a lot of money in that long tail - some sort of licensing deal could be setup with the fees used for something altruistic that the companies would otherwise not pay for...whatever, just thinking of a carrot...

This would allow our generation and the next to continue to remix our cultural leagacy to create its own just as we have - remember there are no new stories just variations on a theme.

Plus it would allow the media conglomerates to do what they do best - make press releases and pay lawyers.

What we are heading for now, I truly believe, is a modern digital library of Alexandria.

Anyway, something I feel strongly about so apologies for the long rant.

Before the music dies

This is a fantastic looking documentary consisting of many musicians and industry types taking about the problems that the record industry is facing.

That term 'record industry' was used by one of the people featured in the film and describes the situation perfectly.

The 'record' industry is involved primarily with the promotion and disemmination of 'hits' of mainstream music. They take no action that will adversly affect their bottom line.

The 'music' industry is people who actually care about music. These people might not make a whole load of money, but they generally tend to look after their own, promote talent above saleability (well...) and generally are my last hope for the generation of new music I will want to listen to in the future.

Can't wait until the film comes out.

not!

In case you didnt see it, Bank of America employees recently plagarised U2's song at a meeting/ceelebration of the merger with Capital One (I think). They basically rewrote the words of the song and sang their own version.

Imagine the cutzpah! Standing up in front of all your fellow workers, bosses and new worker drones to rip the soul out of a song that many of those present had a life afirming/changing moment while listening to. Oh yeah, and someon posted it to YouTube.

All good. Fifteen minutes of fame (well, maybe slightly longer...) until the Universal music lawyers come a knocking with their cease and desist. It seems that money cant buy everything, or maybe some Universal attack sharks actually have a soul after all!

Or maybe something else is going on here.

The Bank of America performance is a parody of the original U2 song, regardless of how dead-pan the two (w)bankers were in their delivery (and the singer wasnt too bad actually!)

Parody is allowable and covered by free speech and all that in the United States and I would hazard a guess everywhere else in the world. The fact that the bulk of the YouTube servers reside in the United States should mean that U.S. law covers them anyway.

So why did the lawyers think that it was OK to start throwing around legal documents with sharp, snappy words beginning in C and ending in T? (cease and desist..! dirty mind...)

Well, for a start, that is what lawyers do. They justify their existence by doing lawyery stuff.

Also, unfortunately, the music industry has initiated a reasonable revenue stream through the simple method of suing Joe and Jane Doe. This activity carries no extra costs such as R&D, packaging, producers, recording costs etc., its as simple as putting a coin in a vending machine and getting your crisps or chocolate bar.

The same logic might apply to the U2 parody sung by the Bank Employees.

When I first saw it I was both appauled and entranced and couldnt believe that they trod so roughly on my dreams. Now? I am behind them 100%

Legislation, not piracy is the biggest threat to the music industry today. It should be all about music - the leeches, sharks and hangers-on will drag the industry to a watery grave.

Hmm, not such a bad thing though - without the 'industry' the musicians would quicly fill the void left and create something that would take advantage of the internet, peoples attitudes, technology and create a new golden age of music.

Grab a guitar, get out on the streets and parody a famous song.

Do it today, do it for the musicians. All we have to loose is coked up record comany executives and god knows we dont need more of them.

Well, maybe not impossible, but big. Real BIG!

He has posted this comment on the Wikipedia mailing list:

I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.

Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you
like to see purchased and released under a free license?

Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.

I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.

--Jimbo

Well, shiver me timbers.

This is fantastic. Beating the big media companies at their own game'o'greed by asking them to name a price and paying it.

Hopefully we (the commons) will get to free as much copyright material (I'm thinking its all stuff form the first half of the last century anyway...) and set a precedent before the big media companies decide to put a match to our digital library of Alexandria to do away with their accounting nightmare.

Jimmy Wales is a God. First he stands up to China, and wins, and now this! Is there nothing this man cannot achieve?!!

:)

This is the full text of the post but you can follow the subsequent discussion at the mailing list here

There is also a 'meta' page on Wikipedia itself (not sure of the meta terminology...)

Apple has admitted that iPods manufactured in sweat shops in China have been infested with the RavMonE virus whihc will only affect Windows computers.

Apple has downplayed the risk saying that only 1% of the video iPods are infected with the virus and that an up to date anti-virus program should have no problem dealing with the virus.

Who knew that Steve Jobs was an Irish politician at heart - 'Ah sure it'll be grand lads!'

Update: Just clocked this in a press release on the Apple site

As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses...

Are you serious Apple? WTF?

The sentence continues...

....and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.

well, thats alright then isnt it?

Lets break this down - Apple produced a virus infected product and shipped it without sufficiently testing it which could result in some people being infected and losing 'data'. This 'data' will probably include unrecoverable baby pictures, emails from loved ones, lovers and other 'sentimental' valued data. No doubt Apple will then write a press release with a subtext along the lines of:

We are very upset that Windows users don't practice a rigourous backup procedure, we realise that we fucked up, but seriously dudes, those windows users, I mean how hard is it to stick a DVD in and do a backup? Ha ha

Fuckers

The FInancial Times reports that Universal 'music' has sued two video sharing sites for copyright infringement.

This is the same Universal 'music' who has already squared off to the new GooTube (Google owned YouTube) claiming that they would not hesitate to sue them for copyright infringement. Of course it would be cheaper for them to ask Google to take down the infringing videos, but there you go.

Universal is well within its rights (legally if not morally) to sue the two video sharing sites. After all as the article states:

In separate lawsuits, Universal alleged that Grouper.com – recently acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment – and Bolt.com had built up traffic by encouraging users to share music videos from its artists without their permission.

Well fair enough then, people have been sharing these videos on line, without permission even. Thats theft right? I mean everytime someone watches one of those videos online a DVD dissapears in a puff of smoke frm the stores of Universal 'music'. Right?

The article goes on:

In one incident, it claimed a video for the Mariah Carey song “Shake it Off” was viewed more than 50,000 times on Grouper without the company’s permission.

50,000 infringements of copyright. Universal 'music' must be bleeding and walking funny after that surely!

But hey! Wait a second here. Did they just say that 50,000 people watched a Mariah Carey video? Without having to be medicated and propped up in front of it? And more than that, it actually cost Universal 'music' nothing, zilch, nada, diddly-squat to achieve the grand figure of 50,000 viewers?

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE UNIVERSAL 'MUSIC'!!

What the fuck? Do you know how much marketing dollars it takes to make one person watch any video, never mind Mariah Carey? And in this case you have a targetted audience! Captive even (if not captivated). WHY NOT SELL SOME MARIAH CAREY CRAPOLA TO THEM WHEN THEY ARE WATCHING THE VIDEO THAT COST YOU NOTHING TO GET IN FRONT OF THEIR EYES?? Ok it costs money to produce but the distribution cost are nothing!!

ARE THEY FUCKING INSANE? AM I THE ONLY PERSON WHO SEES THAT THERE IS A BIG NEW WAY TO MARKET TO THE AUDIENCE HERE?

You can lead a horse to water......

So what does this mean for Google? Nothing? Everything?

Google are a bunch of pretty smart guys who might even catch on to this an put some pressure on the media companies - make them an offer they cant refuse - and get some brain cells firing in the right way.

Regardless, there are interesting times ahead for us all. If Google has the balls (and more importantly the money) to flaunt the media companies intellectual property rights in an attempt to show them the one true path then we might get somewhere. Maybe even some CEO's might take a chance liten to the lower management and ignore the upper management and drop the dead donkey of DRM and stop treating their customers like criminals. Amen brother

OR, the media companies might just continue with business as usual and bring down Google, the internet, World of Warcraft, for shame.

Damn if I dont need a walk in the sun smeling some flowers right now.

In light of the subsequent fact of Google buying YouTube, this little bit of news is pretty interesting:

DivX and Google partner up

Imagine YouTube with DivX videos - high-quality online video. Fabulous!

Wow.

I mean....wow!

I have no words to adequately describe what Microsoft is about to pull off. I am actually, in a perverse way, impressed!

Even their marketing site for Zune expresses their deep, twisted hatred of their customers

Microsoft's Zune marketing site

Auto-conflagrating birds and weirdos with bunnys. Says it all.

They are pushing the message of sharing your music, emphasizing the WiFI aspect but then have DRM up to the keister to stop you er, sharing.

Also if you went and bought into the whole Plays for sure system then you are completely b0rked. The DRM in the Zune system (which includes software, hardware and an online music service) is completely incompatible with the DRM for Play For Sure. I haven't been able to find a clear migration strategy for such users either - maybe Microsoft thinks that customers will continue to use both services? Maybe Microsoft is mad.

To "paraphrase" Paul Allen:

Deliberate, deliberate, deliberate, deliberate, deliberate, deliberate, deliberate.....

Some people see this as a power move on Microsofts behalf, a cynical effort to grab market share from Apple and iTunes and keep them using heavy handed DRM. Lets have a quick round up of the pros and cons for that argument:

• Pros : Zune player and iPod look extremely similar
• Cons: Compared to iPod / iTunes the Zune message is diffuse, slightly ugly and un-compelling

• Pros: Microsoft is offering a 'buy out' plan for iTunes users to migrate to Zune (they have not yet offered such a thing for Play for Sure customers...)
• Cons: Microsoft aren't actually offering anything new, its a very 'me too' message - wheres the differentiation? Apple does the 'me too' thing with such style that people think they innovated the product/service in question. True to their history, Microsoft still thinks in beige.

• Pros: Microsoft is increasing the amount of DRM with no good reason other than to lock users into their systems. They are doing this across the board with the new Windows Media player 11 having onerous DRM 'capabilities'. This is plainly a case of locking down the borders and strengthening defences before going into battle.
• Cons: Not many for this argument I would think. People are being good little drones and swallowing the line about DRM 'protecting' them. This is true for Apple as much as for Microsoft.

• Pros: The Zune allows you to share your music with others by using WiFi
• Cons: three days, three plays - 'nuff said

No doubt the zune will be bought in small droves and leave the shelves like slightly warm cakes but in terms of splash - what's it all about?

I could not believe my eyes. Disney? DIsney who have driven the Sonny Bono act driving copyright to outlandish extremes so they can hang on to their corporate mascot and continue to hassle childrens parties?

Disney?

The Disney owned Hollywood records has partnered with Yahoo! to 'test the water'. Some choice quotes follow:

Yahoo tests 'Right' to MP3 downloads

"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."

Wow! Someone is actually getting it! Yes, there will always be a few (and initially quite a few, possibly mostly) bad eggs, but when the new approach is mainstream and every most media companies are doing it (perhaps ill-advisedly still using DRM on their 'premium' offerings) then most consumers won't mind paying for their music - especially if it follows eMusics lead and sells songs for about 25cent each.

Labels and Netcos will be watching sales of the album, which Yahoo! will promote heavily throughout its network of Web sites to see whether consumers are more interested in buying unprotected MP3 files and whether it has any impact on piracy.

Magnatune has been using a model that allows the consumer choose how much they want to pay for the album. A lot of people choose the 5 dollar minimum. But most choose the recommended price of 9 or 10 dollars and a lsignificant proportion actually pay 15 or 20 dollars per album.

They have been successful at this for years.

The mainstream media companies will see that it will work for them too. It might be slow to catch on and possibly even be a 'loss leader' for them but it will stabilise and they will reap the benefits of not having to lobby the U.S. and other Government to change laws, they wont have to pay clever (and sometimes underhanded) people to invent new ways of locking up your music and they wont have to spend money brokering deals with like-minded companies and hardware manufacturers to produce proprietary formats to lock out the competition.

They might even be so generous as to start paying the artists properly! Who knows?

I will leave the last word with Dave Goldberg of Yahoo! music

"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."