…to pocket the royalties. The BBC reports that a group of people, including a number of DJs, are accused of buying three-quarters of a million dollars worth of music they themselves posted to Amazon and iTunes, earning themselves royalties of more than three hundred thousand dollars.
You have to admire their creativity, even if the execution is somewhat lacking. As David St. Hubbins says, “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.”
As you may have heard, eMusic inked a contract with Sony to make the label’s back catalog available for download (with a moving wall of two years), including albums by Bruce Springsteen, Modest Mouse and, um, Michael Jackson. I don’t have an MBA from Harvard, and I’m not a self-described ‘Internet (insert buzzword) guru’. But I can’t imagine that any business strategy that starts by alienating your most loyal customers is the way to go, and that’s exactly what eMusic did. Not in the nebulous, ‘the cool kids won’t like it’ way (which they may also have done), but in the real, live ‘hits you in the wallet’ way, as long-term subscribers are losing their grandfathered-in plans at the end of July and getting fewer tracks for the same price; in my own case, dropping from 50 downloads a month to 30. Needless to say, people are unhappy.
So after that fairly shaky start, what’s going to happen? At this point, eMusic is the place to go to easily find obscure indie songs; it’s always my first stop when I hear about a band for the first time. While the pricing structure facilitates this – it’s easy to give new bands a chance – I’ve mostly just been happy that they have ever-increasing amounts of cool stuff (like my most recent find, the Haligonian band Plumtree, who wrote the song that was the inspiration for Scott Pilgrim). But if the idea is to attract a vast new audience by adding Sony’s back catalog, they are differentiating themself not on what they sell, but how much they sell it for; Amazon currently lists over 500 Bruce Springsteen MP3s, for example, which surely includes most of his releases. eMusic only makes economic sense if you are a very consistent downloader. If you are just an occasional purchaser, it makes more sense to just buy MP3s à la carte. This suggests that their shiny new subscriber base would be sensitive to anything that closes the gap between eMusic pricing and ‘regular’ pricing, such as iTunes dropping their prices further. As well, if streaming services continue to improve, casual listeners will have less incentive to download. I guess that’s a risk that eMusic decided was worth taking, and I hope it pays off, especially since they are probably going to start by losing customers.
MP3: Plumtree – Scott Pilgrim [buy]
Catching up on the miscellany of music and tech happenings around the Interwebs…
‘Pirates’ are the biggest music buyers. A new study out of a business school in Norway suggests that people who downloaded music off P2P services bought ten times more music legally (downloads and CDs) than their non-P2P-using counterparts. This corroborates a 2006 Canadian study that found the same thing. Needless to say, record companies are disputing the findings. [via Ars Technica]
New turntable outputs MP3s directly to USB. Vinyl-lovers, rejoice! Denon’s new DP-200USB turntable (pictured) outputs MP3s directly to a USB thumbdrive, and the included software analyses the first 15 seconds of each song to match against the Gracenote database and automatically get the metadata. [via Cool Hunting]
How to find music on Twitter: If you’re a dedicated Twitter user and music lover, Wired has a terrific roundup of all the different music services that interface with the microblogging service. But I think the single best piece of advice is this, “[O]nce you find a like-minded fan on the network, you can follow their feed.”
Help build better music recommenders by rating playlists! Luke Barrington, a researcher at UCSD, is soliciting the help of people like you to evaluate playlists generating by a variety of means (like artist similarity vs tag similarity). You’re presented with a ‘seed song’ and two short playlists which you can listen to, and then you can decide which one fits the initial song better. It’s fun and you get help scientists out. Take the survey here. [via Music Machinery]
22 000 words of EULA to put an iTunes song on your iPhone. I saw this in a tweet by Cory Doctorow (“Informed consent my ass.”), and did a bit of digging. Jason Schultz is the director of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, and was at the Federal Trade Commission’s conference on DRM in Seattle last week. A deputy director of the FTC warned the industry that they need to stop hiding restrictions in the unreadable fine print of end-user licensing agreements.
One of the reasons I’m not a huge fan of iTunes is because of the discrepancy between how they treat music for the purpose of the consumer and the artist. Regular iTunes music is ‘licensed,’ not sold, to consumers – that’s why you can’t play it on unauthorized computers (this doesn’t apply to the DRM-free iTunes Plus). However, from the point of view of the royalties they pay to artists and labels, they are considered to be a distributor – iTunes pays the same royalty rate as Wal-Mart (about 12%), and not the higher royalty rate that is normally paid for music that is licensed from the label.
This discrepancy got put to the test last week, albeit in an indirect way. Mark and Jeff Bass, of F.B.T. Productions, worked on some early Eminem albums, including The Real Slim Shady. Last week, they went to court in Los Angeles, suing Interscope (a division of Universal) for unpaid royalties. Their argument was that iTunes and other digital music services were the equivalent of manufacturers, receiving a digital ‘master’ and making copies for distribution. Rather than the 12% royalty, therefore, the artists should be receiving a royalty of 50% – the basis for the argument that they were underpaid.
Well, the jury didn’t buy it. They sided with Interscope and the argument that digital downloads are the modern equivalent of the 45, and that artists should be compensated at the lower rate.
More details at Ars Technica and the LA Times.
MP3: Eminem – My Name Is [buy]
Adding to our collection of new models for music, here are a pair of subscription models for premium content:
iTunes has finally figured out that they can do better than just give you a digital album for $10. Depeche Mode is the first band to offer the new iTunes pass: for $18.99, you get a download of their new album, Sounds of the Universe, together with a bunch of bonus tracks, remixes and videos over the course of the next few months. At the moment, the new single, “Wrong,” is available for download, and there is also a remix of “Oh Well” exclusively for pass subscribers.
In a similar vein, Freezepop offers their ‘Premium Updates‘ subscription. For $2.99/month, you not only get access to exclusive songs and videos, but you also get updates including, ‘wacky hijinks,’ ‘what we ate for dinner,’ ‘exciting tour stories,’ and ‘pictures of our pets.’ It seems like a good combination of relationship-building and revenue generation – I wonder how it’s working out?
MP3: Depeche Mode – Personal Jesus (Dsico feat. Adrian Roberts Cover)
Here’s yet another new concept in music distribution. Toronto-based electronic artist Deadmau5 released an album’s worth of tracks with an iPhone application that lets you remix them. You can pick two of the ten included tracks, and then mix them together using a small set of effects (loop, filter, flange, delay). You can even scratch. The one thing you don’t get to do (or have to do – how you feel about it depends on your perspective and experience) is beat-matching—the two tracks are automagically synched, and while you can speed up or slow down the bpm, the tempi for both tracks change simultaneously. While the app does an interesting end-run around iTunes pricing restrictions (it’s only $2.99), it’s mostly just ridiculously fun to play with.
MP3: Deadmau5 – Slip [buy]
It’s official – Apple announced today that it will no longer use digital rights management on songs from iTunes, taking effect before the end of the quarter. This goes hand-in-hand with a change in the pricing structure, with song prices ranging from 69 cents to $1.29. In case you’ve ever wondered why z=z only linked to eMusic, Beatport, and Amazon – this was why. I still listen to CDs that I bought twenty years ago, and Apple had no interest in making sure I can do this with their protected songs – why should they care, after all, since I’ve already paid them? So I’m delighted to see Apple take this move away from the dark side.
Reuters article: link
(thanks to Scott for the heads-up!)
[trivia note: Propellerheads’ “Take California” was the first song used to advertise the iPod, way back in 2001.]
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