meta-roj

mp3.com’s been through a rollercoaster of changes in recent history, but the last one finally drives a nail into the businesses of hundreds of thousands of musicians. more than a million songs, from more than a quarter-million artists are going to be destroyed in the next couple weeks.

a tragic business decision for musicians, and probably something breaking michael robertson’s heart this week. i hope the efforts of the good people at archive.org to save the music are successful.

there really isn’t much more to say about this. it’s a tragedy for art and culture.

read more about it at the register, again, professor lessig’s blog, p2p net, kuro5hin, and san diego union tribune. (plenty of others as this news filters out…)

this is semi-old news (the sale was several weeks ago), but with the announcements going out to artists, the full impact has hit. not a whole lot of notice either. how fast could you find alternatives for hosting your music? how fast could you do it while you were on the road playing bars in ohio? suffice to say, cnet doesn’t appreciate that each musician is really an enterprise – and doesn’t appreciate the impact of their decisions on those enterprises. anyone in the music business willing to sign a deal with cnet in the future should remember this decision.

i imagine this is designed to position cnet as yet another online music site. just in case you’re keeping score… itunes, buymusic, musicmatch, napster 2, musicnet, rhapsody, walmart, microsoft, echo (maybe) and cnet/mp3.com.

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.

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 🙂

i stumbled into an interesting paper over at the center for economic and policy research by dean baker (a co-director of the center), titled the artistic freedom voucher: internet age alternative to copyrights.

it’s a relatively short paper, so i encourage you to read it.

the basic idea is to create a sort of single-payer system for the arts – allocate money by voucher, so the population makes the ‘artistic call,’ but fund the system through a refundable tax credit and require participants in the system to release their material to the public domain earlier than the standard copyright regime. as you might imagine, i have some first-impressions….

one of my biggest concerns is that any system that demands artists relinquish their copyrights, while also allowing other organizations to retain copyrights under the “existing system.” invites a sort of general abuse through the system. yes, you got paid your $5000 for that great childrens’ storybook, and now that you’ve been paid, you give up all rights to the work, and disney is free to make the movie, lock up their rights, essentially forever.

the brothers grimm aren’t around to cringe at the “disneyfied” versions of the stories they pulled together from the common culture so many years ago, but i imagine many living artists would be quite disturbed by such things. this problem with the afv proposal is fairly easily addressed by the good people over at creative commons.

baker also states “it is also worth noting that much of this saving will take the form of lower advertising costs” – this savings, of course, is in the form of corporations appropriating artistic works from the vastly expanded public domain without any regard for the wishes of the creators. of course, the value of using existing art in advertising is that there’s a sort of implied endorsement that comes with the package.

baker’s assertion that “creative workers are only entitled to be paid once for their work, not twice” misses a large dose of reality. aging rock stars are funding their old-age healthcare needs with “second payments” from tv commercials –
* led zeppelin, rock ‘n’ roll for cadillac
* the who, tommy (the overture, anyway) for clarinex
* the cure, pictures of you for hp
* squeeze, tempted for gap and burger king
* queen, you’re my best friend for yahoo
* the who, happy jack for hummer
* gary numan, cars for oldsmobile
* george clinton, atomic dog for mcdonald’s
* cyndi lauper, true colors for kodak
* alphaville, forever young for saturn
* baltimora, tarzan boy for listerine (nothing like a one-hit wonder 🙂 )
* van halen, right now for pepsi
* the cult, she sells sanctuary for nissan
* abba, dancing queen for visa
* ozzy osbourne, crazy train for mitsubishi
* the rolling stones, start me up for microsoft’s windows 95 launch
* styx, mr. roboto for volkswagen
* iggy pop lust for life for royal caribbean cruises

(just digging through my culturally-soaked brain – but that’s enough to make the point. drop into adtunes for more).

there’s also the issue of the cost to manage this system. for some clues, we can look at existing “performance rights” organizations. i guess you can probably figure 10% to 15% off the top.

finally, politics. we don’t have a very solid track record of political support for the arts in this country (witness the perpetual nea-funding debates), so could anything this bold actually happen? the artistic associations (riaa, mpaa, etc) will want to weigh in on the legislation that creates such a system, and i would bet that it doesn’t come through in “pure” form.

update (2003.11.30): mighty fast pig has thoughts.

james hetfield is “bummed.”

in this reuters report (via abc), we have some comments on metallica’s latest release st. anger, which has moved 1.5 million units in the us since june and was a #1 debut.

maybe there’s some blowback from the mp3-fans in the united states – maybe. then again, maybe the band understands what’s going on…. american metallica fans have expectations, and maybe this….

“it’s a very challenging record”

“constructed by a computer program and features no guitar solos.”

…isn’t what american metallica-oids expect.

since this theory echoes some of my previous comments (see “the ponderous public” and “i liked you better yesterday”) on plan g, i thought i’d use it to reinforce my own preconceptions in public.

because there aren’t enough slices in the demographic pie at your local neighborhood magazine rack, coming to a rack near you is tracks, a new music rag about “music built to last”.

ignoring for a moment the business of magazines (which i know nothing about), this quote got my attention:

Over the past decade, music buyers over age 30 have become the majority. They accounted for 56 percent of the music purchased in 2002, up from 46 percent a decade earlier, according to the Recording Industry Association of America

can you guess what that says between the lines?

reuters has a piece (via cnn) on microsoft’s plans to enter the online music fray in 2004 (yeah, that could be several weeks away).

this, of course, sets up the battle of microsoft vs. walmart vs. apple vs. all the other little upstarts and spinoffs and reinventions.

as usual, my concern is for the musicians. as the only group without power in this exchange (labels have their catalogs and copyrights, microsoft has money, walmart has money, apple has ipods), i have to assume that as these services rush to cut deals and squeeze pennies, the most likely squeeze will be the musicians.

a lot will depend on the particular terms of the contacts, of course, but since the “standard industry contract” is already a pretty major screw to the musician, i don’t expect many of them to get a decent shot at this generation and mode of music distribution.

just one more reason i haven’t paid much attention to the back catalog, despite the huge pile of dollars locked up in there.

in other itunes news (and i am compelled to comment on this), itunes is one of time’s inventions of the year.

this smells like proof that “invention” is now more about style than function. and that will be very interesting with the new players in town. does “apple cool” beat “walmart prices”? can they get along with each other, or will one or both of them resort to [questionable?] tactics to eliminate the competition?