Label:Life

It’s been a week, the music industry has survived (apparently) and Radiohead have distributed over 1.2 million albums from their website. It’s not clear if these are all paying or not but either way you can bet that their next tour (coming 2008) will be a sell out.

According to a poll of 3,000 people the average payment was $8, so four quid – £4.8 million in a week. Seems a bit of a lesson to me…

To be honest I’m not sure how accurate we can call these figures but even if it were for free, that’s a lot of new fans in there. If I remember rightly there was an admin fee of 45p, which makes over £500,000 in administrative fees, presumably for bandwidth and storage (bet they wish they’d used Amazon S3 now).

The Big Champagne guys (they track downloads through p2p networks and bittorrent) are on about how illicit downloads of the album are dwarfing the real sales, but frankly, so what? More awareness, more fans, more merchandise, more gigs, more money – less need for a label or any traditional media coverage.

Prince is king… We’ve seen that Prince has given away his music with the daily papers in the UK after finally escaping from his deal. We’ve seen Radiohead do it, Oasis want to do it, NiN are there too, these amongst a growing number of artists are taking their destinies into their own hands, being proactive not reactive, we’ve yet to see how well this will serve them in the long term.

Madonna on the other hand has played her hand and signed a deal with Live Nation, not a record company but an events company. With a three album deal for £60 million and the backing of Live Nations gigging ability and fans unwillingness to pay for music, could this could possibly the shrewdest move yet and the real beginning of a new era for the music industry…?

Snocap was and still is a great idea. Putting control into the artists and labels hands, allowing them to sell their tunes directly form their website/blog/myspace pages. The only problem these days is that nobody wants to pay for music and as a result Snocap is laying off 60% of its staff and is getting ready to sell on.

the company’s music stores just weren’t catching on fast enough and its time to sell the company

The music industry currently requires that anybody getting involved from a distribution or technology point of view must be extremely AGILE, or they really don’t stand a chance. Things are changing too quickly to be hiring massive teams and making two year plans, it’s like the shift from sheet music to recorded music, adapt or die.

Well speaking of which (and not to put too fine a point on it) Trent Reznor’s
carefully crafted foray into the Pirate Bay looks like an absolute no-brainer to me… regardless of the corporate strings being pulled/cut etc…

If you get a bit of this :

“Before we look at full-fledged CROWD CLOUT, let’s start with one of its prerequisites, and a huge business opportunity waiting to happen in its own right: getting consumers to reveal their intentions”

With this :

http://digg.com/music/RIAA_claims_rights_to_all_artists_royalties

“I release some of my work under the CC license so sites like soma.fm and other people making videos can use my material without hunting me down to get my permission. But it seems SoundExchange is playing the job of the heavy here whether I like or not. Well, I don’t like it. How can this compulsory license override my free and open CC license. this crap just blows me away.”

the distillation of which is overwhelmingly:

“Fuck the RIAA.”

Which on Digg is pretty unusual – normally they can’t agree on anything.

Is Digg market research?... any kind of social barometer at all?

Dunno. It is to me.

What NIN are doing may just be paying cynical lip-service to one of the more enduring aspects of teen-spirit… but to be honest, at this point, for someone like NIN to NOT be positioning themselves in diametric opposition to the RIAA would be to be blindly, suicidally out of touch with their own culture.

Since this post last week Jammie Thomas, single parent mother of two has been fined $220,000 for sharing 24 tracks illegally, despite still protesting her innocence.

Read the full story here

Also, if you feel the need to help her out in some way visit this website where you can donate money through paypal and read up on her full story…

Having waited four years for their heroes to finish another record, Radiohead fans were understandably excited last week to learn that the band’s seventh album, In Rainbows, will finally be released on Wednesday. But what really rocked the fanbase – and heightened the air of gloom enveloping the global record industry – was the news that In Rainbows could be preordered and downloaded perfectly legally for as little as 1p at Radio-head.com.

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Maybe the music industry will listen to this rally… We all know that there’s no money in selling music directly anymore, it’s just that the only people who lose out are the labels… They will resist, they will react, they will lose… The new labels, the artists, the pro-active ones; they move with the times, they see what is happening around them. They know that they need to survive and feed their families but they also see that their music is as entertaining as ever and they understand the new media world.

They build fan bases, fan loyalty and interact with their fans in a way that the fans want to make an exchange with them. Radiohead are one of the pioneers taking this forward and although we’ve seen Prince have a go lately too, Radiohead seem to be on the edge. They’re opening up new fans – have they been watching Nintendo who’ve very famously of late managed to open up the games market to masses of new fans…

Testimony today in Capitol Records, et al v. Jammie Thomas quickly and inadvertently turned to the topic of fair use when Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, was called to the stand to testify. Pariser said that file-sharing is extremely damaging to the music industry and that record labels are particularly affected. In doing so, she advocated a view of copyright that would turn many honest people into thieves.

Pariser noted that music labels make no money on touring, radio, or merchandise, which leaves the company particularly exposed to the negative effects of file-sharing. “It’s my personal belief that Sony BMG is half the size now as it was in 2000,” she said, thanks to piracy. In Pariser’s view, “when people steal, when they take music without compensation, we are harmed.”

[Probably a good time for the big boys re-evaluate their business models then…]

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The European Commission gave Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG unconditional clearance Wednesday to combine their music units — concluding that the deal, originally approved in 2004, was not monopolistic.
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But regulators said firmly that their original conclusion was correct and they had mountains of new evidence to prove that the two companies would not damage the music scene by shrinking the number of major music companies from five to four.

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An attorney for six major music companies urged a federal jury Thursday to find a Minnesota woman liable for damages for illegally downloading and sharing music online, activity he said has gnawed at the industry’s bottom line.

Record companies have filed some 26,000 lawsuits since 2003 claiming their music’s been misused, but the case against Jammie Thomas, a mother of two from Brainerd, is the first to go to trial. Many other defendants settled by paying the record companies a few thousand dollars.

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