meta-roj

reuters has a story with a little tiny paragraph toward the end that reinforces my long discussion here on meta-roj that the cd format is the best opportunity in the histoy of recorded music for the upstart, unsigned musicians in the competition for attention…

Music Downloaders Hit by Acronym Cacophony [reuters, july 5, 2004]

But using acronyms to market music can be a risky proposition, particularly once consumers learn that the music they bought on the Internet is shackled and bound compared with free-roam compact discs.

about a month ago, i ran across an article on the phenomenon of the farewell tour… something we’re seeing so much these days, that they’re getting silly with the names… the eagles “farewell i” tour and phil collins and his “first final farewell” tour.

the article touches on several possible and interrelated things, but i guess the most dramatic is the economic conflict between mortgages and falling record-sales revenue. in my own head, i’ve broken down all the potential revenue in music into three categories – performances, patrons and recordings. so with the bottom falling out (relatively speaking) of the recording segment, it’s no surprise to me to see people with established relationships with audiences back out on the road milking that cow again. it’s also no surprise to see (well, hear) so many old hits in commercials.

But the music landscape has changed, rapidly creating a disconnect between artist and fan. Music, to young people, is a song on iTunes or the hit single of the week – not a way of life, as it once was, says Styx manager Charlie Brusco. Pop stars with long-term career potential are a dying breed.

what do you think?

a couple weeks ago, i picked up on the news from slashdot that od2 brought out their penny-per-track streamer service. that was june 15th. a week later, we got the news that loudeye acquired od2. that’s music business news from meta-roj. now let’s play some games.

what’s a penny-per-song work out to in the attention market? if we go with the same assumptions i used back in september, the music-time works out to about 800 hours and 12,000 songs per year, at the low, low price of $218 (1 usd = 0.55 gbp). that’s the financial part… and that’s not terribly interesting, but we need a basis for comparison.

the alternative comes from the sky. of course, these don’t work in europe, and od2’s streamer is only in europe, but despite the barriers erected in the music business, i’m going to go ahead and make the comparison.

xm offers a $50 pc-based receiver, plus $10 a month, or $170 (saving $48), or i can spend that extra money and get a portable self-contained unit. sirius has a similar self-contained receiver at about the same – $100 and $10/month. now, to be fair, these satellite-based streamers actually push 100+ channels, 24 hours a day, including stuff that isn’t music, but for comparison, a 24-hour-a-day-for-a-year stream (131,400 tracks) from od2 would cost $2389.

what we don’t know is how the attention/participation thing works with this. how active do i have to be to work with od2? will i spend hours setting up playlists for myself? will someone else? with the satellite options, i get streaming audio in 100+ different pre-packaged formats, and they work like a radio.

i won’t be rushing out to throw my money at a penny-per-track streamer anytime soon, unless it gets a lot more compelling. maybe a good thing that they closed the deal with loudeye already.

this was reported back in january by the bbc.

there was this little legal battle betwen the british phonographic industry (bpi) and cd-wow, and just a couple weeks before going to court, they reached a settlement. this was back in january. from the press release on the settlement:

CD-WOW/BPI settle out of court – higher music prices for consumers [cd times, january 21, 2004]

The record industry claimed that CD WOW! was obtaining sound recordings from outside Europe and selling them to UK and Irish consumers. As a result of the settlement CD WOW! has agreed that it will not sell CDs that have been first placed on the market outside Europe to UK and Irish customers. It will only sell CDs that have first been placed on the European market to UK and Irish customers. All other details of the settlement are confidential.

i mention this, so many months later because i want to have something to point to when i next go on a rant about the music market, i want to have something to point to here to demonstrate just how far the music industry is willing to go to maintain prices in spite of their future.

Trying to Buy CDs in a College Town [siva vaidhyanathan]

I was shocked to find that this town had no independent record stores any more. The last closed some weeks ago. The only way to get a CD was to drive out to the Interstate and visit Wal-Mart or Borders.

the experience does matter… and this saddens me as well. i just wrote about irate, which is one alternative to the discovery problem, but nothing beats a good, pointless, debate about the merits of this-band or that-band. it’s a matter of taste, and nobody’s going to win these debates, but they are part of being engaged in the music. they’re part of building those life-long relationships with the performers. no “thumbs-up/thumbs-down click” or browsing-through-reviews will ever achieve the depth and passion of someone who’s life is, literally, soaking in music.

sux, man.

i think it’s worth noting that the thing that’s dying off here is the musigeek, not the cd.

Trying to Buy CDs in a College Town [siva vaidhyanathan]

So I bought both albums from I-Tunes and burned them onto blank CDs.

this has been sitting around gathering dust for months (september!), and i never got around to writing about it, so i thought i’d take a fresh peek and see what was going on….

way back in the distant past, i stumbled into an interview over at kuro5hin with irate geek anthony jones by this idiot programmer.

this, of course, not to be confused with the other irate, which apparently comes from this guy, who is not anthony jones. nor should you confuse this or this anthony jones. this is turning into something as complex as the paris hilton problem. but that’s a different subject. back to the irate of interest….

what we have here is a sort of peer-reviewed search engine – an aggregator, of sorts. it’s centralized, managed, and precisely limited in its scope (apparently no plans to include p2p integration or payment mechanisms) – it’s simply about finding decent music. that’s important as a potential solution to the problem of the missing musigeeks.

on the downside, this solution is based on a widely distributed review model, so rather than finding a musigeek that’s deeply into something and that you can trust to tell you what you like (hey dj), you’re relying on thousands of one-click reviews. as a discovery tool, it’s not a bad thing, as long as you’re willing to be active enough to twist it to your taste.

new in development is a mechanism to normalize volume, which is a huge deal for me, since there’s a race to be louder with a lot of tracks, and the chances of getting thousands of bands to stick to a concept of recording standards is about zero. even with just a few major labels, they ended up in a race for volume at the expense of the music. anyway, this problem is pretty much completely unpossible to fix – if musicians put crappy recordings out there, you can’t blame anyone but the musicians. i think you really have two options when it come to recording – make it sound good, or make it mean something and give it context. if you’re smart, you’ll score a little bit of both. someone remind me to come back to that subject someday.

also new is some good news from the people at creative commons – support for the cc licenses and integration with magnatune. important developments, because this means musicians can engage irate and a path to revenue at the same time and on the terms they think work best.

the can of worms this does open is the whole active vs. passive media experience question – rating music is an active mode, and even a one-click vote (is that patented yet?) means being engaged in the listening experience. that shows up in the comment here:

I’ve been surprised by how few people actually use the rating facility on iTunes. I thought it was normal to use it continually, but so few people I know share that compulsion.

long time meta-roj music business co-conspirator barry ritholtz has his review of irate from back in october. in his follow-up there, he brings up an interesting, constant problem in the business of music – which bin do you get stuck in?

The lack of genre distinction colors the rating process. Example: I tend to be pretty forgiving of alt.rock, as long as there’s a melody and tasty guitar licks. So my overall rating on songs from that genre are probably on average higher then lets say pop or hip hop, where I tend to be much more critical (as I like the genre less). iRate has been feeding me more alt.rock songs; Good for listening, perhaps less good for musical discovery.

ever since we started slapping labels on music, there’s been some difficulty with how well they stick, and who gets to pick the label. is she a folk singer because she doesn’t have a drum kit behind her, or is she an acoustic rock goddess? and the finer the grain gets, the more problem you have with discovery – spend all your time in the folk category and you missed some great music you really would enjoy over in the world music (what?) bin.

i’ll throw the freebie at anthony on that subject. i’m a big fan of a simple, elegant user interface, but… maybe there’s some room for the musigeekier irate users to collaboratively tag genres while they’re tagging ratings. since the data is centralized, maybe there’s some potential in following them by individual – point me in the direction of barry’s idea of “good” “alt.rock.”

for a [very] little more on irate…. i drop the following suggestions:

jeroen
brad

there you have it – because irate is still around, and the web is timeless.

what happens when you mix an abusive business model with a person and a microphone? you get a speech on the trouble with filesharing…

sister machinegun, dna lounge, june 16

So, everything we’ve played — see, I give this speech every night, I mix it up a bit. We call it an “Audience Specific Interlude.” Like, at this point, I’ll say something about something tht happened to me in San Francisco…. and I’ll make it “amusing…”

Anyways, everything we’ve played in this set up to this juncture, this crossroads, this… interlude… is released on Positron Records, which we own and operate, the representative of which [at the merch booth] will be happy to supply you with a fix in that regard, for a modest fee which will go toward letting us sleep in a hotel room instead of the van…

Everything after that juncture (that interlude) is released on Wax Trax Records. which means it’s owned by — actually it’s not owned by TVT Records, it’s owned by Credit Suisse. so technically speaking, the first four Sister Machine Gun albums are released on Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank, which is kind of cool when you think about it.

The point being, I don’t get fuckin’ paid for that shit, not a dime, not a single red cent. So you can go ahead and go home, and — hey, you can download it right the fuck here, they got WiFi. Just get up on Morpheus or some fuckin’ thing and get that shit for free.

Anyways, with that said, here we go.

and for the record, i should be more of a dna-groupie than i am.

contraband is, in one definition, goods or merchandise whose importation, exportation, or possession is forbidden, which gives me a nice, fat ironic platform to sit myself upon.

i last toyed with sunncomm back in november as a sort of brief wrap-up to a series of posts on the drm-hackjob that is the sunncomm cd protection technology (1, 2, 3, 4).

with cory’s piece on drm fresh in my mind and some news about the first sunncomm-drm-protected #1 cd in the united states (“contraband” from velvet revolver), i thought it was time to take a bit of a break from the stupid-government-tricks phase here at meta-roj and jump back into the business-of-music stuff a bit.

since we last explored sunncomm, they have changed their name (now sunncomm international as opposed to sunncomm technologies) and acquired dark noise technologies in an attempt to expand their cd-protection regime to cover the analog hole. they’ve also apparently learned several lessons from the famous shift-key debacle – their “marketing and sales arm” is called quiettiger now. the quieter, the better, no doubt. they’ve also inked deals with emi and a few other companies.

now, i haven’t actually worked the darknoise gimmick, and i don’t even know if it’s present on the velvet revolver cd, but this is what they have to say about thier widget:

winston keech of darknoise, in stereophile

The technology, called ‘Q-Spoiler’, works by encoding the original digital audio file with a unique hidden signal. The signal is embedded in the audio master and becomes an indelible part of the actual audio file in addition to aiding in subsequent origin identification. Should the original CD be copied, so, too, is the hidden signal and identification ‘tag.’ Unless [it is] illegally invoked, the listener is unaware of the hidden signal’s presence. Attempts to illegally copy the protected audio using analog recording devices, analog-to-digital converters, or psychoacoustic compression codes, such as MP3, will invoke the hidden signal which transforms to become audible within the range of human hearing, thus ruining the unauthorized copy

we’ve discussed drm as “damage” (with another nod to kevin), but this is literally damaging the audio in the hope of making drm stick.

drm won’t stick.

cory explains just how drm is bad mojo. kevin’s said drm destroys value for a long time. even steve jobs knows about the future of drm (since then, apple has pretty much lost that religion). and i guess you know by now that i agree. in fact, one of the main reasons i think there is a lot of life left in the cd format is because it’s from an age of innocence where decent digital technology was unencumbered by silly drm overhead. the basic cd is just that – basic. no region-coding, no shift-key happening, no software-installing – it’s just a 12 centimeter chunk of polycarbonate that happens to hold music and works in billions of gadgets.

perhaps darknoise will work in the short-term because the sound of current-generation cd’s is simply awful, and the darknoise noise won’t sound any worse than the clipped-off transients the recording industry is imposing on us all. perhaps it’s enugh to save sunncomm from oblivion (their stock price has popped up to 16 cents or so with all the good news), but fundamentally, they’re annoying consumers. they apparently believe that annoying just a small percentage of customers is a legitimate tradeoff in this business model:

peter jacobs, sunncomm ceo [news.com]

We hear from less than half of one percent of people who have the Velvet Revolver disc. Most of those questions are related to getting the songs onto an iPod.

billboard reports that the contraband package sold 256,000 units in its first week. half of one percent of 256,000 is 1280. worse, the people who are annoyed or inconvenienced by this drm wrapper might just be the ones with the most influence – brandon fuller, shane cartmill, tom johnson, eric olsen and others will be talking about this for a while.

i hope sunncomm has their call center pumped up to handle the volume as the rest of the buyers face interesting questions about why their cd doesn’t do what they thought it should do. there’s a label on the package that says the cd is “protected against unauthorized duplication” – so some people might not be buying. they’ll never know how the release could’ve done if it weren’t wrapped in drm – i’m quite sure the music is already “out on the net” – anyone with a mac and an internet connection didn’t even have to hold the shift key.

Shane Cartmill

The first test was to rip the CD into AAC format in iTunes for transfer to my iPod. It worked flawlessly just like any other CD. Next I popped the CD into my trusty Mac, opened Toast and clicked copy. Five minutes later I had a perfect reproduction of the disc. In the words of Johnny Bench in the old Krylon Paint commercials, “no runs, no drips, no errors.” Finally, I tested it in every CD device I owned – seven total. The disc played fine at home, in the computer, on the road and in the portable CD devices.

the bigger issue is the relative value of the drm-wrapped polycarbonate version, which is conveniently addressed elsewhere in the same post:

Shane Cartmill

What angered me is that iTunes offers Contraband for $9.99 and I can burn it 7 times and transfer it to unlimited iPods. But purchasing the actual disc for four dollars more gave me more restrictions.

i’m not railing against drm because i’m pro-consumer, or pro-music-pirate or even pro-boston-strangler. to me, it’s a fairly simple business case. licensing the drm technology increases the cost of each unit, and having the drm wrapper on the cd can only negatively impact unit sales (short and long term), so i don’t understand why this industry is so interested in this stuff.

it’s always noteworthy when we have first-hand material to share on controversial subjects – first-hand stories from the ground where bombs are falling makes war a little less abstract and video-game-like. twice, in the past few days, we’ve had important messages sitting here at the meta-roj blog addressed by the persons that they refer to. william cooper came forward with a comment on june 10th, and today, carlo oddo apparently added his two cents to a post on the sons of 97 radio. it’s taken quite a long time (150+ days), but better late than never, i suppose. maybe it’s the tail end of the honesty outbreak?

of course, it’s impossible to verify that these are actually the people they claim to be, but for the sake of argument, we can let that slide for now….

something that john foxworthy points out in a follow-up comment, is that this reads like a prepared statement – in fact, it looks like the same statement that rolling stone got when they ran with the story.

in any case, carlo oddo didn’t pick up the whole collection of 97 radio material available here – he hasn’t (at least not from that ip this week) read the original post (with it’s 70-ish collection of comments), nor did he read the bit about it breaking into the tv news over here, so it’s hard to give the guy credit for really engaging the subject in the space provided.

if you’re here looking for information on 97 radio, carlo oddo, talent 2k, cigmusic, alternativespin, rapvibe or any of the other potential faces of this operation, you can read carlo’s response in the comments here.

i think it’s important and valuable to make the platform available for rebuttal [different story]. the 97 radio story here at the meta-roj blog has turned into a huge [relative to this dark corner of the net, anyway] phenomenon. by april the story had generated over 1200 “direct hits” from people looking for information on the subject. today, that score is up to over 2800. (i’m defining “direct hits” as reading the individual-entry page – it’s impossible to get an accurate count, because the same material appears on the front page of the blog for a while, and in the music business archive, so at least this many people saw the material. i also don’t know how many of them bothered to read everything.

we broke this story at the meta-roj blog on january 11, 2004.

[queries with less than 5 total aren’t presented here]

something worth noting is that the queries a few months ago were mostly for the names and players in the story. since then the words “scam” and “fraud” have creeped into the vocabulary more and more. this suggests something to me.

it’s a good thing to bring attention to the people that would take advantage of others – and i’m happy to provide that platform – but i’m also very concerned with the positive things that people do, so i thought i’d draw your attention there while i had you here.

i should also apologize – i haven’t really followed up on the cig music/alternative spin/rapvibe post. i suppose i should try to do that someday.

the tapeworm collective seems to be vaguely similar to re:combo, but obviously, i didn’t run into it back then.

looks like a bit more than 25 artist-collaborators in the mix here, with a 24-track $9.99 cd available, plus a webcast.

[via metafilter]