Label:Life

We love this at Label:Life, if it’s true that it is.

Over the last three years the TOTC claim that they have been downloading various newly released music, overdubbing new parts to the track in various guises such as news instruments and additional production techniques AND then re-seeding them back to the torrent sites as the same track.

They even claim that these modified tunes have found there way onto radio stations as well as millions of peoples music collections. Their manifesto states that they dislike the the majors pretty much as everyone else does in the online world…

Attempting to police and punish “illegal downloaders” with lawsuits and fines is misguided and, in our opinion, a waste of time. This model treats the music fans as criminals. That’s an insane business model. But we expect nothing less than insanity from large, crumbling corporations. We do not know how the music industry will change in the next few years and we don’t know how a method will arise to ensure that musicians are properly paid for their recorded work. We have no solutions.

While we think that this is quite possibly a hoax, it’s a fantastic one.

As soon as one thinks about it, a nagging feeling in the back of your mind makes you doubt any tunes that you may have downloaded in the last three years…

Real or not, they could be onto something here… I’m sure some enterprising company could scour the p2p networks and torrent sites for newly released/pre-released music, download them, slap an advert in their somewhere and re-upload…

Check out their manifesto here

Microsoft says that it has signed an exclusive deal to acquire Musiwave, who’s customer s includeO2, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange, Telus, Telefonica, amongst a myriad of others.

Musiwave provides music services to operators including full track downloads, ringtones, truetones, ringback tones, etc. the pull for Microsoft is obvious here, giving them a direct relationship with many labels and operators directly and therefore indirectly millions of consumers through branded portals.

the acquisition would bring together Musiwave’s relationships with music labels, device makers and operators with Microsoft products and services including Windows Mobile, Zune, MSN and Windows Live.

For every clever trick that Google pulls such as the newly announced Android platform, Microsoft just seems to steam in with its brute force attack. Although this one, I think is very shrewd on their part which is something of a rarity for MS lately.

More at Computerworld

This has to be the surprise release of the day. Industry Canada, part of the Canadian Federal government has released a paper – The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada – after studying the relationship of P2P file sharing and music sales. The results are to some of us; not that surprising, but clarification and decent data at last is significant.

I think a quote from the summary of the paper speaks far more than my rambling commentary ever could.

The primary objective of this paper is to determine the effects of P2P file-sharing on purchases of CDs and electronically-delivered music tracks, using representative
survey data from the Canadian population.

In the aggregate, we are unable to discover any direct relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchases in Canada. The analysis of the entire Canadian population does not uncover either a positive or negative relationship between the number of files downloaded from P2P networks and CDs purchased. That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file-sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole. These inferences are based on the results obtained from estimation of the negative binomial models (Table 4.1 and Appendix 4).

However, our analysis of the Canadian P2P file-sharing subpopulation suggests that there is a strong positive relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file-sharing increases CD purchasing. We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year (based on estimates obtained from the negative binomial model in Table 4.3). Furthermore, we find indirect evidence of the ‘market creation’ effect of P2P file-sharing in the positive coefficient on the variable ‘Not available elsewhere’ (Table 4.3).

The full paper can be found here – The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada

It seems that Nokia’s Mosh is causing problems for it’s music store offering

Warner, which is the third largest music company behind Sony and Universal, is preventing Nokia from selling its music in the Nokia music store as a protest against the illegal trading of its releases in Mosh; Nokias content uploading and sharing platform.

This appears to me as a bit of a paradox for Warner. On the one hand they are creating negative PR for themselves by bad mouthing Nokia and to a certain extent the fans themselves (the traders) whilst on the other hand they need to appear to be protecting their IP to their shareholders and artists, sounds familiar.

Nokia meanwhile are laughing either way. The profit they make on selling music I suspect is minimal and like Apple the whole content thing to them is a way to sell more handsets. The only possible outcome here for Nokia is a win. Either way, many more people are going to hear about Mosh (have you?) and now you as a consumer are more likely to get Warner tracks on Mosh than through the Nokia store. Smashing, thanks Warner for letting us know.

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.

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.

More>

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…

Steve Jobs on Tuesday issued a press release/essay/blog post, whatever it is, stating the three choices that Apple has in the future for furthering the adoption of digital music.

Jobs offers up three scenarios:

• Carry on as we are, with multiple propriety formats, with consumers as the losers
• Open up FairPlay to 3rd parties, with Apple and the consumer as losers

• Remove DRM from the mix. Everyone’s a winner

  Bizarrely the option least expected, option three, Jobs seems most enthusiastic about.

  This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

  This is a bold statement by the head of Apple, with over a billion downloads from Itunes, all protected by their propriety FairPlay DRM, it seems unfathomable that Apple would really drop DRM when they already pretty much own the market, whether labels wanted them to or not. However what with Yahoo offering DRM free tracks and the buzz at Midem for dropping DRM, the pressure may be more on the labels themselves, and Jobs could be just paving the way for them. It’ll be interesting to watch the fallout from this article from all the different corners, RIAA, Majors, Microsoft(Zune), et al.

  Read the full article.

We missed reporting this last week, as we at L:L already use Emusic, and we’re based in the UK, so it’s quite easy to forget that it hasn’t launched yet..!

What’s there to say about Emusic ... No DRM, over 1,000,000 tracks, £8.99 a month for 40 tracks, (although I preferred it when it charged me in dollars).

If you like music, and you’re not bothered about the Top 10, then Emusic is for you. The only problem that L:L has with them, just like most other digital music shops, they only allow you to preview the first 30 seconds of a track, which for dance music is almost useless. Groovegate is the only shop that we’ve found so far that deals with this problem and love them for it we do.