Category: Music

Hard feelings about words said

Interesting times. Following Steve Job’s Heartbeat post, Edgar Bronfman, the head of Warner Music, is reported to have made scathing comments about Jobs’ vision of a DRM-free world. Here’s a quote:

“The notion that music does not deserve the same protections as software, television, films, video games, or other intellectual property, simply because there is an unprotected legacy product available in the physical world is completely without logic or merit.”

That, on a day when Warner Music announced a 74% drop in first-quarter net income. Interesting.

At the same time, EMI announced that they were considering ditching DRM completely, and going for protection-free MP3s; it appears they are assessing the value of upfront guarantees from online retailers, having been delighted with their DRM free experiments involving Norah Jones amongst others.

Two firms. Two firms in markets similar enough for them to consider merging not that long ago. Two firms with diametrically opposed views on a key strategic issues. I wonder what would have happened if the merger had gone ahead…..

Makes me think of the old Paul Simon song….

There’s been some hard feelings here
About some words that were said
There’s been some hard feelings here
And what is more
There’s been a bloody purple nose
And some bloody purple clothes
That were messing up the lobby floor
It’s just apartment house rules
So all you ‘partment fools
Remember : one man’s ceiling
is another man’s floor
Remember: one man’s ceiling
is another man’s floor

Paul Simon, One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor

The divide is going to get that stark, floors and ceilings. Interesting how the Apple suit between the Beatles and Jobs gets sorted out shortly before this kerfuffle. And you know something? I thought I heard Beatle music during the last MacWorld Stevenote…..

Musing about Digital McCarthyism and Digital Nonviolence

While researching aspects of the lives of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, I was reminded of the works of Richard B Gregg. While I had come across Gregg while reading Economics, I hadn’t appreciated quite how influential he’d been on King, or for that matter just how dedicated he’d been in seeking to understand Gandhi. If you don’t know about Gregg, do take a look at his Wikipedia entry.

I’m currently reading a 1938 Gregg pamphlet titled What is The Matter With Money? It’s a reprint from the Modern Review for May and June 1938. In it, Gregg spends a lot of time looking at trust, and some of the things he says jell with me.
I quote from Gregg:

…A money economy makes security depend on individual selfish acquisitiveness instead of on trust. Trust grows when men serve first and foremost the community and the common purpose. There has sometimes been an element of service and community purpose in the making of private fortunes, but it has not often been predominant. Money splits up community security and plays upon men’s fears, — fears of the future and of each other’s motives, fears that compel them to compete with one another to a harmful degree.

Gregg concludes the paragraph with an interesting assertion:

Money has worked on us so long that it is now hampering the further development of science, art and technology.

At reboot last year I spoke about the things that had to die before we can regain some of the things we’ve lost, in keeping with the conference theme of renaissance and rebirth. [Hey Thomas, what’s happening with reboot this year?]
Gregg’s words have served to remind me that concepts like identity and trust are fundamental parts of community and not individuality; culture too is a community concept, be it about arts or sciences or even forms of expression; community itself is a construct of relationships at multiple levels. Maybe the reason why much of what is now termed IPR (and its cater-cousin DRM) is abhorrent to me is that these things focus on the individual and not the community.

I am all for making sure that creativity is rewarded, in fact I believe that any form of real value generation should be rewarded; but not at the price of stifling the growth of culture and of community. This, I believe, is at the heart of what Larry Lessig speaks of, what Rishab Aiyer Ghosh speaks of, what Jerry Garcia believed in, what opensource communities believe in, what democratised innovation is about.

Culture and community before cash.

I recently bought a book by Gregg called The Power Of Nonviolence. When describing the book, the bookseller noted that it [the particular copy I was buying] was signed by Gregg; unusually, the recipient’s name had been erased and carefully at that; the bookseller surmised that it may have had to do with fears about McCarthyism.

You know something? At the rate we’re going, the battles about IPR and DRM are going to get uglier, to a point where we’re going to see something none of us wants. Digital McCarthyism. What we’re seeing in the software and music and film spaces already begins to feel like that.

We need to find a better way to work it out. And it makes me wonder. What’s the digital equivalent of Gandhian Nonviolence?

7 seconds of fame: a parable for our times

There’s a lovely little story going around, about a band called 7 seconds of love.

Ninja KittenThey’re very today, they even have a myspace site;
They’re very yesterday, they play ska;
They’re very tomorrow, they’re unsigned.

Somehow a 2005 hit of theirs got copied lock stock and barrel. Seriously plagiarised. Not just the tune, but the characters and costumes in the video as well.

They were not happy. They complained to the head office of the company that did the plagiarising. And the company gracefully apologised and settled out of court. The band gave some of the proceeds to charity, and said they would spend the rest on themselves.

So far so good. What makes this a parable for our times?

The plagiarism apparently took place in Argentina, where the theme and the tune were used for a TV ad.

So how did the band find out? Fans of theirs, fans they didn’t know they had, left comments on the YouTube clip.

Wow.

Linus’s Law in operation. Given enough eyeballs……

[An aside: Their music might not be to everyone’s taste, but do take a look at their web site. Why? Here’s an extract from their “bio”

At the dawn of the new millennium a revolution was underway which would change the world for ever.

Joel and Alex Veitch from rathergood.com were men on a mission. Men wild-eyed with the crazed pursuit of their obsession. Men who loved the moon, U-Boats and Zeppelins. But above all else, men who loved kittens. Kittens.. OF ROCK!

Their mission to subjugate the world to the utopian kitteny vision of the future was well underway, but there was one ingredient missing. And that missing ingredient was…… the unstoppable, unbelievable power of rocksteady skanking ska punk pop beats.

Unbeknownst to them, at the same time four battle-hardened, bloodied and weary gaijin Warriors Of Rock staggered from Japan to the shores of Great Britain. Exactly like the Seven Samurai, but with less Samurais.

And less swords

And more musical instruments. (And also they weren’t actually Japanese like the 7 Samurai were)……

Nuff said.

Continuing the ramble in open spaces amidst walled gardens

Cory pointed me towards this article in the New York Times, headlined Record Labels Contemplate Unrestricted Digital Music. [An aside: The retarded hippie in me just cannot comprehend the use of the word “contemplate” in a context where “navel” and “lint” are absent…]

Where was I? Oh yes, the New York Times article. Here are a few snippets from there:

Publicly, music company executives say their systems for limiting copies are a way to fairly compensate artists and other copyright holders who contribute to the creation of music.

But privately, there are signs of a new appreciation in the industry for unrestricted copies, which could be sold as singles or through subscription services or made freely available on Internet sites that support advertising.

The EMI Group said last week that it would offer free streaming music on Baidu.com, the leading Web site and search engine in China, where 90 percent of music is pirated. EMI and Baidu also agreed to explore developing advertising-supported music download services. This summer EMI licensed its recording to Qtrax, an ad-supported music distribution service.

I think there are two things here worth observing:

One, ad-based selling of singles is not as outrageous as it sounds. Ad-based selling of anything doesn’t sound that outrageous. Just look at Google. There is something Because-Of-Rather-Than-With about it that makes the model attractive. I can get something for free or at a reduced price, if I rent my eyeballs out. [In fact that is what I expected the iPhone to do; like any other handset, I can get it free or subsidised from a lock-in provider, or I can pay the unsubsidised price. But what do I know?]
Two, look at what happened when Sabeer Bhatia launched Hotmail, or when Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis let Skype loose. The revenue lock inherent in a particular business model just went and exited stage left, followed by a bear. But the new business model made money. In a strange kind of way, maybe that’s what Because-of-Rather-Than-With is about. Making money differently.

Someone will do this. I’m not sure “content owners”, or for that matter Wall Street, really understand the power behind today’s groundswell of opinion against bad DRM and bad IPR. Those walls will crumble. I love my Macs, I love my iPods, but I will not love them forever. iTunes will have to change. I will keep buying iPods because I want to, but from now on only if I don’t have to.

A related issue. I’m sad to miss the VRM meeting I had hoped to attend: doctor’s orders… I wish the participants every success. I think that what Doc and gang are working on is absolutely crucial, and in the current context it made me wonder about something:

If marketing as we knew it doesn’t exist any more, and if trusted recommendations are the new marketing…… Every one of us has so much “advertising consumption capacity”, and it all gets converted into iBalls or something like that. We start our lives with so much iBalls each. I spend my iBalls as I feel like: buy music, watch movies, read articles,  whatever. Sometimes I run out, I can buy spare iBalls from my next door neighbour. Or sell them.

It’s just capacity trading. But as human beings in markets, having Cluetrain conversations. Today’s been a Cluetrain day for me, for a variety of reasons.

Just a thought.

Gaps in the market, in the open spaces amidst walled gardens

You may have figured out that I was born and raised in Calcutta. Lived there from 1957 to 1980. For much of that time, the roads there were less than perfect. So much so we used to joke that, when confronted with a particularly poor road, the smart way to drive was to stay in the potholes, avoiding the little bits of road that loomed up every now and then.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Which is why, when we have walled-garden approaches to digital music sales, people find a way to operate in the open spaces. Take a look at this article in today’s Wired News, where Josh Madell, one of the co-owners of Other Music, gets interviewed by Eliot Van Buskirk.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Madell: We will be selling high-quality files without DRM copy protection (our music is encoded at 320 Kbps rather than 192, the iTunes model, so the sound will be much better). All our pricing is not set yet, but we will definitely have to be a little more expensive than iTunes — probably $10.99 per album rather than $9.99. I hope we can more than make up for the price with our selection, service, knowledge, features and, of course, the quality files. As for the label deals, this business works on percentages; you split revenue with the label for sales, and typically labels make 65 to 70 percent of the retail price.

If you want to stay informed of their plans, here’s the link. In case you missed it, an earlier story about MP3s and DRM by the same author is also worth a read. Link.

And if you have no idea what kind of store Other Music is, then take a look at this video.