meta-roj

as i continue to explore the fringes of the music business that i haven’t really addressed in public yet, my next note-to-self points to metajam. as i recall this came up in a discussion with musicbrainz chief instigator robert kaye. this is a quickie.

the line is “Put Your Music Career Into Your Own Hands.”

in the diy-tradition, a long line of contact- and career-management softwares have appeared on the scene. i vaguely remember some shareware apps from back in the 80’s, and now, with metajam, not only do you get a tour/contact management package, but you get website and song management in a $199 package.

i’m sure metajam could be a good thing for some musicians out there trying to make a career happen, but i’m underwhelmed. i guess i think you have better things to spend $200 on.

tonight i thought i’d take a moment to harass echo. this is another post i’ve long-delayed, in the hopes that something would happen on the website to give me some meat to chew into, but… so far no such thing has happened.

echo is child of best buy, borders, tower records, hastings entertainment, wherehouse music and virgin. and they are proud to tell you that this “group of seven” has over 3,300 retail locations, over $24 billion in annual sales and over 900 million customer transactions per year. they are also proud to tell you this:

Echo’s technology is built around a scalable, fault-tolerant, highly distributed architecture that leverages industry standards to provide maximum functionality, easy configuration and integration with third party applications, and support for a variety of user-facing platforms

and really, who’s technology isn’t, eh? or was that 1999?

Echo is continually expanding and improving its services through the in-house development of cutting edge technology, as well as the cultivation of new technology partnerships with software, service, and hardware companies

yes. no sitting on their laurels here.

congratulations, echo, you’ve said so little in so many words. it’s only news for the players, but i did find a hint (from feb 2002) of what once was, and might be again.

i was tempted to just chuck this note-to-post on the principle that echo doesn’t deserve the space – this is vapor in the purest sense. but, in the interest of a broad overview of this business of music, i thought i should at least mention it. someday, there may be something to comment on, but for now, the big music retailers have gotten together and decided that buzzwords can save their businesses.

this reuters report (via abc) has a line i just wanted to put “on the record”

According to London-based research firm Informa Media Group, the retail value of global music sales will drop to $28.2 billion this year from $30.9 billion in 2002 and to $28 billion in 2004 before returning to growth in 2005 as new Internet music services take off.

update: since this was such an interesting statistic, i decided to go looking for an original source. i found this from a this from a november 2002 report by the same research company:

Global music forecasts (in millions) (source)

so, that’s interesting reading, but then they say this:

Digital music sales will increase in the years to 2007 but will remain a niche sector. By 2007, digital sales will account for an estimated 1.2% of the global total

hmmmm.

with the inauguration out of the way, i thought i’d take a little time to ponder one of the writings of one john perry barlow. yes. governor schwarzenegger. i said it.

It’s time for the experientialists – those of us who don’t get our reality from television, who actually read about what what we can’t experience directly – to emerge from our psychic sanctuaries and become seriously involved in the ugly business of politics.

this is a call to arms – intellectual arms. there are less than 12 months left until the united states gets to test broken voting machines in an effort to determine our own fate. demand functional machines.

we’ve seen the bush vision of the world, and it’s time to decide if it’s what we want. if not, we need an alternative. a bold, american, visionary alternative. it’s time to consider the issues that are bigger than ourselves.

i’ve decided that this is not my america. you need to make up your mind. soon.

i’ve done some (in my own ironic way), and i rant occasionally.

i need to do more. you need to do more.

update: joi is doing more

after much delay (this has been sitting here as a to-post reminder for over a month now), i’ve finally gotten around to throwing a few thoughts together on magnatune. magnatune was founded in may, made my sphere of attention sometime toward the end of the summer (probably something to do with the cc license), and eventually hit my corner of the blogosphere with this october post over at the big picture. since then, the pressure’s been on me, and i’ve been ignoring it.

magnatune comes out of the box (as it were) with the assertion “we are not evil.” so, naturally, an analysis should challenge that assertion and see if it holds up.

what is magnatune

the fully-boiled down magnatune concept is to be “not evil,” provide the traditional label functions of discrimination and distribution, and treat music as shareware.

you might have to have some old-school geek in you to really understand that statement, so i’ll expand on it a bit. a very little bit. the shareware concept is essentially “try before you buy” – the wares are distributed, freely, so you can sample them. if you like it, and you use it, you’re expected to give something back (generally, some dollars). there’s a large component of “honor system” with shareware, and the creator generally retains their rights (as opposed to plans that just give it all away).

with magnatune, the audience decides how much to give back – between $5 and $18. since i firmly believe that the value in music is created as the artist and audience come together, this isn’t a bad approach – particularly for studio musicians that really only deal in recordings.

music must be free somewhere (a point i’ve previously emphasized), so to address this issue, magnatune runs “radio stations” with their artists. it also appears that they’re not just running one track from each album (the “hit” or “single”), but really giving the whole work a shot at “airplay.” (someone should correct me if i’m wrong about that…)

what is magnatune about

magnatune does share their concepts, in detail, in public. so this wins bonus points on the transparency (heh) issue and gives me a decent chance of shining a little light. i don’t want to simply quote or repeat that material, so, go. read. i’ll be here when you get back.

basically, magnatune tries to put more control in the hands of the musicians, but not so much that the garbage gets through. as john buckman (founder) points out, many music destination sites are absolutely filled with garbage – anyone who can pay, can play, no matter how horrid they are. then the discrimination problem is entirely on the shoulders of the audience, or some trusted musigeeks.

magnatune has a sort of peer-review process which is intended to keep the junk out. so far, at this scale, it seems to work. we’ll have to see how it works when magnatune is trying to juggle 25,000 or 500,000 tracks (and oh, if they only had that problem, eh?)

with more control comes more value, so magnatune is also giving the musicians a “better deal” – better than a traditional record label contract, anyway.

what’s on magnatune

at the moment, magnatune is carrying 75 artists with 145 albums containing 1915 songs. (for those of you considering the junk factor on the album format, that’s 13.2 songs per album – we’ll explore this more on another day).

the business of magnatune

magnatune artists keep 50%. that’s not just 50% of music sales, but also 50% of merchandise and other “side line” revenues, including (importantly) commercial licensing.

magnatune is, apparently, focusing on “under-served” genres (what tim oren might call foothills. while i have my own thoughts on the values and costs of the “genre system,” it is fundamentally useful to help solve the attention problem. today, magnatune is organized into classical, electronica, metal & punk rock, new age, rock & pop, world and other. these are further subdivided, and a quick spin through the material suggests they’ve succeded in finding good stuff in these segments.

this is a relatively small selection of material, representing largely “niche” genres. the stats say the top-valued album (average price paid) is $11.50 (artist take at 50%: $5.75). the 50th-ranked album (of 145) is valued at $8.37 (artist take at 50%: $4.185). (we’ll probably expore that a bit too, on another day).

sales figures indicate that some 30% of magnatune sales are “classical.” i can’t tell if that’s part of “the plan” or just an artifact of the kind of publicity they’ve gotten so far.

i honestly can’t say if the economics will work out, if this approach can find enough of an audience to bring enough revenue to keep everyone fed, but it’s a valid and working approach.

there’s always the chance that there’s some creative (“evil”) bookkeeping going on behind the scenes, but for now we can give magnatune the benefit of the doubt. this changes the minute they hire anyone who worked in management or accounting at enron.

what to do with magnatune

try it. check out the “radio” – see if you can find things you like. and if you like them, buy them.

i’ve got some more thoughts on magnatune’s potential, but i do want to wrap up this post. heckle me for thoughts on future directions, album junk factors and magnatune album-value – those are big chunks i’ve left out today that (i think) are probably worth exploring.

what about that evil

oh, yeah. i think we can say that magnatune isn’t evil. for now 🙂

musician and patron

songwriter

film composer

just a brief note for anyone who hasn’t heard from me lately.

i had a drive fail (western digital wd1000jb) a few days ago, and while i didn’t lose any “stored data” – it’s very likely that i lost about 12 hours of email.

anyway, i’ve been working through the recovery process (and using the event as an excuse to clean a few things up and get reorganized a bit, but today (as you can probably see from the content here on the blog), i’m mostly back in business.

i now return you to your normally scheduled net.

it’s been a while since i gave you fine people a business model of the hour to play with, so, with a nod to my last post, i give you today’s business model of the hour: plastic thumb jackets.

here’s the problem: with biometrics taking off, and an established (cheap, and easy) mode of faking fingerprints, it’s going to be more and more important to keep your fingerprints secure. that means keeping them off things where they aren’t supposed to be, which is everything except the fingerprint scanners.

as a fan of least-complicated solutions to well-defined problems, the solution is, i think, fairly simple. finger condoms. keep your thumbs (or whatever fingers you’re using as ids) wrapped up in plastic jackets all the time, unless you’re actually using them for an important identification or authorization function.

i’m thinking a kit. plastic finger jackets, which should be a bit more durable than latex and hypoallergenic, plus a small “wipe up your own prints” widget that includes a little squeegee/brush and some solvent so you can clean up the scanner after you’ve used it.

remember: you only have one set of fingers.

there are sure to be objections – the first one i can think of is that once everyone’s got all their fingers wrapped in plastic jackets, there won’t be any fingerprints left at crime scenes anymore. but, there’s always an upside, and this means that all those hours wasted by police looking for and preserving fingerprints can be used for something more productive.

update: patent application: “method and system for securing the fingerprint from accidental deposition on surfaces which might compromise the identity of the user”