Jeff Albert's blog and podcast home
You hear stories, but yikes…
Little-Known Music Magazine Attempts Big-Time Ad-Sales Scheme – Idolator
The gist: Joyce, who’s under the impression that his magazine is a “highly influential force within the indie rock genre,” asks Johnson if he’s planning on advertising Amplifier. Johnson says no, explaining that Birdman’s ad budget is nonexistent; Joyce replies with an off-the-cuff “well, it was nice writing about your artists.”
This is an iPod pros/cons from the Bellville, IL newspaper, by a Chicago Tribune writer.
Belleville News-Democrat | 12/26/2006 | Doing megabyte math, other secrets to buying MP3’s
GOOD: Works easily with the PC or the Mac. Long battery life. Slim and unobtrusive. Not too few songs, not too many songs. Stylish.NOT SO GOOD: You can use only iTunes and eMusic to buy music. Other music stores aren’t compatible. Still, those two stores offer a lot of variety and are easy to use.
It is totally untrue that iTunes and eMusic are the only places you can buy music for your iPod. Music Stem , the store that Greenleaf Music uses, sells mp3s (which are by definition DRM free, and playable on an iPod or just about any other player), as does my store (Pepper Enterprises), and any number of other independent download stores. Some major labels are doing mp3 experiments with Yahoo Music and other outlets as well.
Why would this paper get this so wrong? If I were a paranoid iPod apologist, I would say that it is due to a bias against Apple, but I don’t think that is the case. I think they just don’t know what they are talking about.
Will Amazon put pressure on the eMusic model? – The Digital Music Weblog
Amazon’s new DRM free store promises to offer variable pricing and an ala-carte model which closer matches the success of iTunes, rather than the X downloads per month deal on offer at eMusic.
I love eMusic. I would love it even more if it went a la carte, especially if it could go a la carte and keep the price per track close to where it is now. I realize that without the guaranteed subscription revenue that tracks would be more than the circa $.25 they are now, but the eMusic catalogue sold a la carte at $.60 – .75 per track would be totally rockin’. Maybe this Amazon move will push it that way.
It’s nice to know that other musicians have similar thoughts on DRM.
Where would we all be without that first life changing album that a friend taped for us when we were 12? When I was in high school, I used to sneak my director’s albums out of the band room and take them home and tape them, then stealthily return them. (Well, I thought I was stealthy, come to find out, he knew all along.) In my adult life, I have purchased everyone of those albums that I could find.
Digital rights in question as business model – Yahoo! News
…the major record labels by and large insist their music must have some sort of DRM protection before they’ll license it for digital distribution. Increasingly, the wisdom of this stance is coming under scrutiny.
Finally, people are starting to realize this.
DRM, they say, simply forces consumers to buy hardware with proprietary technology that enriches software companies rather than artists or labels.
The conversation has heated up now that Microsoft is preparing to enter the race with another closed system as part of its Zune strategy. Once Zune is launched, there will be two large, deep-pocketed digital services offering music that is not only incompatible with each other, but also with the many other digital music devices and services already in existence.
“That doesn’t sound like a very exciting future to me,” Packman said during a recent panel appearance at the Digital Music Forum West conference in Los Angeles. “There’s no way you can say with a straight face that that’s something consumers want. This has to get solved for the industry to grow.”
Shouldn’t we as consumers insist that the companies we do business with give us what we want?
“The notion that a track I buy in DRM is protected and one without DRM isn’t is a fallacy,” Goldberg says. “It’s all nonsense. Music is never going to be protected, and anybody who tells you that is not being honest. Yes, you can put up speed bumps, but the people who really want to steal music are going to steal it. So you’re just making it hard for people who want to do the right thing to get the music they legitimately purchased on the devices and services that they want.”
As a wise friend of mine says, “if you can get it to come out of speakers, you can copy it.”
I don’t know if c|net counts as mainstream, but it is about time Creative Commons gets some wide press coverage.
Creative Commons–an answer to the copyright debate? | Perspectives | CNET News.com
Creative Commons seeks to offer creators methods to protect their works while also encouraging certain uses of them. It wants to improve a system marked by increasingly restrictive default rules with “a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright.”
I use the Creative Commons Share Music License quite a bit. I released all of my album One under that license, and we have some bonus tracks from the recent Lucky 7s recording available under that license.
Using that CC license lets people know that it is ok, and even encouraged, to share those tracks with their friends, or use them on their podcasts, without having to get my permission or worry about breaking the law. I have found it to be an exceptional way to get the word out about interesting music.
This article is about hearing in Canada in which the Canadian PROs are proposing tariffs on online music sales.
Canada sets key hearings on online music sales | Tech&Sci | Internet | Reuters.com
CSI further proposes that services authorizing copying of musical works onto portable devices pay a minimum fee of $1.40 Canadian ($1.24) per subscriber per month, while services that do not allow portability pay a minimum of 60 cents Canadian (53 cents) per subscriber.
Let me get this straight. It should cost me more than twice as much to be able to listen to music (that I have paid for) in my back yard or my car, than it should if I only listen to it in my office. That is so stupid.
People pirate music because the owners of the music do stupid crap like that. If a customer is willing to do the right thing and pay for their online music, then the owners of the music should be willing to do the right thing and let the customers listen to it whenever and wherever they please.
AP Wire | 08/19/2006 | Online music holdouts give in as iTunes popularity surges
This article is mostly about acts finially going to some form of online distribution, but some of the reasons they give for staying away are pretty lame.
But the artists argue online distribution leaves them with too small a profit.
I get about $.57 per song sold on iTunes, and that is after I give a cut to a distributor. There is much less overhead because there are no physical product manufacturing costs. If the artists are getting shafted on iTunes sales, the problem is with their label, not the format.
Others have avoided the Internet altogether out of piracy concerns. (Most online stories, however, use rights-management technology to protect against unauthorized distribution.)
They say this like it is harder to pirate something that came on a CD than it is to pirate something bought online. Are they really that stupid, or do they think we are?
I think the key to fighting piracy is to treat your customers with respect, and give them quality product at reasonable prices.
This ties in a bit to this previous post about Blue Note.
The Daily Jazz: Trinidad Oil Company – Feelin’ Alright
i’m sure some of you will complain that this “isn’t jazz”, but, well, it’s on Blue Note, it suits my mood tonight, and that’s good enough for me
The fact that it is on Blue Note is used as an arguement to defend its “jazzness”. I don’t really care if it qualifies as jazz, as long as it sounds good, but this sort of thinking is an example of how EMI will damage its Blue Note brand by expanding it to non-jazz adult music.
Admittedly, I’m a little old school about that label. I’m still a bit irked that they quit making all of the CD faces with their standard blue and white design. Oh well, progress…
I just picked up a few used LPs from an internet friend. It is funny how our memories of things change. Every time I get involved in a conversation about CD packaging, someone mentions the good old days with vinyl and the big jackets, and all of the wondeful info they carried. That was true, sometimes.
Two of the LPs (Roswell Rudd – Inside Job on Arista, and Enrico Rava Quartet on ECM) have nothing more than basic discographical info on them. No extensive info on gatefold covers or printed on the inner sleeve. Just two panels of record jacket. They look cool, and sound great, but they aren’t any sort of liner note utopia like some folks remember LPs to be.
The other LP I picked up is Mel Lewis and Friends on Horizon/A&M from 1976. This one does have more liner note info, including this great quote from the back of the jacket.
One could hardly ask for a more stylishly swinging pianist than Hank Jones, a more aggressively attentive bassist than Ron Carter, or a more ferociously fertile trumpter than Freddie Hubbard. The fourth member, tenor saxophonist Mike Brecker, is not as widely known…
My how times change.