Category: Business

Boing Boing: Apple’s hypocritical slam against French DRM-interop law

Cory has posted a great rant on Apple’s reaction to the proposed French DRM law.

BBC NEWS | Technology | French MPs vote to open up iTunes

The French parliament has backed plans to give consumers more choice over music downloads from the internet.

MPs backed a draft law to force Apple, Sony and Microsoft to share their proprietary copy-protection systems by 296 to 193 votes.

The aim is to ensure that digital music can be played on any player, regardless of its format or source.

I don’t know how this will affect the French market, but I know how it would affect me. It wouldn’t get me to use a player other than my iPod, but it would get me to look at other download services besides iTunes Music Store, especially for stuff that ITMS doesn’t have.

Sell shares in your band or label to fund your next CD. Personalized artistic venture capital.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Fans splash cash for hot new band

When Four Day Hombre were offered a string of record deals two-and-a-half years ago, the financial clout and creative control the band wanted were missing.

“We came close to a couple of (major) deals and then we were going to go through an independent label, but then it just fell through,” singer Simon Wainwright says.

“We decided that it was either carry on and get the money one way or another and set up a label and do it ourselves – or it was just throw the towel in and say enough’s enough.

“And none of us were really ready to do that.”

So the band sent an email to fans asking them to buy shares in their own label.

Alamo Music was born and the band promptly gave themselves a three-album deal.

Creative financing is the way of the future. Let’s hope creative financing skips the creative accounting.

Yahoo exec: Labels should sell music without DRM | News.blog | CNET News.com

Yahoo Music chief Dave Goldberg raised eyebrows Thursday at the Music 2.0 conference in Los Angeles with a proposal rarely heard from executives at large digital music services: Record labels should try selling music online without copy protection.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said that Goldberg was “basically trying to move the industry forward,” and wanted to prompt industry-wide discussion “about what the consumer experience is.”

Wow…run your business based on providing a good consumer exprience…BRILLIANT! Too bad the majors probably won’t see the logic in that. Actually, I guess it isn’t too bad, because that leaves more room for the rest of us.

WSJ.com – Amazon Plans Music Service To Rival iTunes

Now Amazon, the world’s No. 1 online retailer, is in advanced talks with the four global music companies about a digital-music service with a range of features designed to set it apart. Among them: Amazon-branded portable music players, designed and built for the retailer, and a subscription service that would deeply discount and preload those devices with songs, not unlike mobile phones that are included with subscription plans as part of the deal.

I don’t see how Amazon branded players or a subscription service would set them apart. There are already players and subscription services in the market. To me, this looks like another attempt to tie content to hardware, and I am convinced that is the wrong way to go, despite the one instance where it has been successful (the iPod/iTunes scene).

The article makes no mention of a DRM scheme, excpet in this reference:

Amazon would face the same challenges as other music-player makers: buying enough flash memory to store content on small music-player devices and securing music content

“Securing music content”? Is that a euphemism for “coming up with some way to pacify the majors, eventhough we all know that if you can make it come out of speakers, you can copy it”?

Someday, someone will realize that strong content and ease of consumer use are what is going to drive this market, not attempts to control consumer behavior. Who ever sorts that out, will rule the world.

As part of the on-going DMCA rule-making proceedings, the RIAA and other copyright industry associations submitted a filing that included this gem as part of their argument that space-shifting and format-shifting do not count as noninfringing uses, even when you are talking about making copies of your own CDs:

“Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even routinely granted, necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization.

EFF: DeepLinks – RIAA Says Ripping CDs to Your iPod is NOT Fair Use

In corporate or organization situations, non-enforcement or selective enforcement of bylaws has been a grounds for invalidating that bylaw. I don’t think the RIAA should be able to selectively assert their copyright.

For those who may not remember, here’s what Don Verrilli said to the Supreme Court last year:

“The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it’s been on their website for some time now, that it’s perfectly lawful to take a CD that you’ve purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod.”

So now if they say that it isn’t legal, am I suddenly a criminal, because the RIAA changed its mind?

Hopefully our legal system will start to act based on common sense and the best interest of the public at large, instead of in the interests of a desperate group violently grasping at a dissolving business model.

Via Boing Boing.

WOMMA: Word of Mouth Marketing Association

The essence of the WOMMA Code comes down to the Honesty ROI:

* Honesty of Relationship: You say who you’re speaking for
* Honesty of Opinion: You say what you believe
* Honesty of Identity: You never obscure your identity

As independent artists, we do a lot of word of mouth marketing, and often ask our friends and fans to do it as well. These seem like very sensible guide lines, especially in the internet forum/blog world.

One take on the intersection of the Grammy’s and jazz.

calendarlive.com: One lone Grammy RSVP

In the upper echelons of pop music, success is measured in millions of units sold and, it seems, tons of bling on display. Nominees in the album of the year category have total sales of nearly 15 million copies.

In Holman’s section of the Grammy program, sales totals seem to be short a few zeros — some 15,000 units combined for all five large jazz ensemble finalists, according to a Nielsen SoundScan tally of sales through retail outlets. Not surprisingly, the winning entry, Holland’s album, accounts for 12,000 of those scanned sales. The John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble’s “A Blessing” is at the low end of the SoundScan tally, with 100 copies.

The artists and their labels point out that their actual totals, supplemented by sales at gigs and through websites — and typically not tracked by SoundScan — is closer to 20,000. That’s still just a sliver of the 5.2 million copies Mariah Carey’s “The Emancipation of Mimi” has sold.

I am a member of NARAS, but I didn’t vote this year. The jazz categories were the only ones that I knew any of the music well enough to vote on, and even in those categories there were nominated recordings that I hadn’t heard.

Last year they did a cool thing by making all of the record of the year nominees available for free on iTunes to voting members. That made me comfortable voting in that category, because I had heard all of the records. This year they made more nominated music available, but they did it through yahoo! Music, which is PC only. I am a Mac user, and didn’t go through the extra trouble to get on a different machine to listen to the stuff. I ended up not voting. It seems to me like the percentage of Mac users among NARAS members is probably much higher than the general population.

Boing Boing: Our music preferences are driven by the crowd as much as taste

This ties in nicely with some of our recent discussion about why people buy or don’t buy music that has seemingly equal placement and presence.

I think this is the one place where magazine awards and poll placement can be helpful. It makes people think that other people like the stuff, so they are more likely to follow suit and like it themselves.

You have to be popular to get popular. As Brother Ray said, “you gotta have something, before you can get something, how do you get your first is still a mystery to me.” Apparently he had it figured out.