Music piracy: solved!

It turns out that the answer to music piracy is simple: a logo!

Various download sites have unveiled a new “MP3: 100% Compatible” logo that – according to them – won’t just emphasise the cross-platform nature of MP3s, but will also help in the fight against piracy.

I love The Inquirer’s take on it:

You can now be safe in the knowledge that any MP3 files you download fron the INQ are safe and legal. Honest. Look we’ve got a logo and everything.

These download sites have a little more in mind than educating on MP3 compatibility – the trade body behind this initiative highlighted how this would identify legal download sites to consumers. Of course anyone brazen enough to offer millions of pounds worth of other people’s copyrighted music and movies would be in really big trouble if they were daring enough to copy and paste a logo onto a website (like we just did for example).

Nokia’s “Comes With Music” translated for the UK

Thanks to the ever-entertaining No Rock’n'Roll Fun:

Comes Without Music But You Can Pay For Music If You Like. Just Not Too Many Tunes, Eh? Don’t Go Mad Or Anything. Two Songs A Week.

“RealPlayer: like the Black Death, but made of software”

Feeling ranty? Techradar’s just uploaded “48 things we hate about tech“, which enabled yours truly to cheer himself up by being nasty about things. Any I’ve missed?

Could shutting down Pandora open Pandora’s box?

An interesting post on Broadstuff about Pandora, the web-radio service whose extremely high royalty payments may force it out of business:

it’s clear that Pandora and its ilk will live – it’s far too good to lose – [so] it will just go to the P2P freenet if this practice continues, thus hurting the Industry even more in the medium term. If ever there is a case study of a short sighted tactic to shoot yourself in the foot strategically, this is it.

The problem is that Pandora doesn’t pay the same royalties as other forms of radio, as the Washington Post reports:

Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.

Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures.

Cory Doctorow on the file sharing crackdown

An interesting and typically inflammatory piece from Mr Doctorow in the Guardian:

The original Napster had a fine proposition: they would charge their users for signing onto their network and write a cheque for as-many-billions-as-you-like to the record industry every quarter… The record industry sued them into a smoking hole instead… [here is] the tried-and-true answer to the problem of copyright-disrupting technology:

* acknowledge that it’s going to happen;

* find a place to collect a toll;

* charge a fee that’s low enough to get buy-in from the majority;

* ignore the penny-ante fee evaders;

* sue the blistering crap out of the big-time fee-evaders.

Four things I learnt on the internet today

“The success of an anti-piracy campaign is measured in the number of hours it buys before the digital dam breaks” and 38 hours is considered a success. The LA Times on attempts to prevent fanboys watching camcorder copies of The Dark Knight.

The crackdown on file sharing may be bad news for people who don’t file share. “…service gets worse as you wait in a queue wondering why your broadband has gone down, while the 50 people in front of you all have perfectly functional internet connections but are wondering if a lawyer is going to show up at their door.” Charles Arthur on the possible consequences of anti-P2P letters.

Apple’s PR strategy is hurting its share price. “Apple, on the other hand, has had stellar financials, huge hit products, and massive growth sales for all its product lines. With those results you would expect Apple to outperform Microsoft.” Comment by Ian Betteridge on Dan Lyons’ post about Apple share prices.

Caffeine is self-regulating and works almost instantly. “Women generally metabolize caffeine faster than men. Smokers process it twice as quickly as nonsmokers do. Women taking birth-control pills metabolize it at perhaps one-third the rate that women not on the Pill do. Asians may do so more slowly than people of other races.” NY Magazine on the wonders of caffeine (via Metafilter).

Ad-supported music can’t work

An interesting post on Silicon Alley Insider about the business model for advertising-funded music:

The basic economics: A song lasts 3.5 minutes. The majors have been asking for a penny each time one gets played. Let’s say the site shows a new ad every time the song changes. To break even the site needs to sell one ad per song at the rate of 1 penny a song, which gives you an effective CPM (‘eCPM’) of $10.

A $10 eCPM isn’t feasible. Sites don’t earn that kind of rate with 100% sell-through. And even if it were feasible, it leaves no room for the rest of the business.

…Sites that try to comply with label requests repel users and soon go out of business.

Almost everybody pirates music. Most of them would pay for it

Interesting numbers from a British Music Rights-funded study of 14-to-24-year-olds’ music consumption:

A full 95% said they’d copied music in some way or another at one time or another.

And 80% would pay for a legal subscription-based music service that would allow them to discover, swap and recommend music.

BMR’s Feargal Sharkey – yep, him from The Undertones – states the obvious.

First and foremost, it is quite clear that this young and tech-savvy demographic is as crazy about and engaged with music as any previous generation. Contrary to popular belief, they are also prepared to pay for it too. But only if offered the services they want. That message comes through loud and clear.

But the BPI’s rather weird response to a piece by BBC journalist Bill Thompson suggests that the message isn’t being heard by the record companies. No Rock ‘n’ Roll Fun does a typically excellent fisking of their press release, which [IMO] is a rather nasty attack by the BPI that, by design or by accident, misses the point of the original piece (which XRRF links to as well).

[BPI: Music companies are radically re-inventing their business models in response to changes in how music fans want to access music online.] Music companies have been forced to reinvent their business models faced with a changed world – but not in a way they can take any pride in, as they did everything to avoid getting to that point. And they’re still not trying to respond to how fans want to access music – unlimited, everywhere, for a fair price – as they’re still hobbling files, striking exclusive deals, locking formats, trying to find ways to gouge customers. Has any fan ever said “hey, you know what I really want? A music collection that I have to pay for every month or it’ll just disappear?” I suspect not.

What we have here is a situation where copyright owners simply aren’t meeting consumer demand, because they’re stuck in the mindset of what works for them, not the consumers. The internet gives the consumers the power, and the challenge for the music business is to find a way to make money from giving people what they want.

The best example of old-style music business attitudes I can think of is U2 manager Paul McGuinness, who pronounced Radiohead’s In Rainbows a failure because it was being pirated. Never mind that it generated a storm of publicity or that the album reached number one in the album charts; the fact that the free download ended up on torrents did Radiohead a favour. Delivering huge numbers of direct downloads isn’t cheap, and everybody who torrented In Rainbows saved Radiohead a few pennies on their server bills. So by torrenting the album, the pirates saved Radiohead money. Bloody pirates!

Blame Canada

Oh, for crying out loud.

OTTAWA – The federal government is secretly negotiating an agreement to revamp international copyright laws which could make the information on Canadian iPods, laptop computers or other personal electronic devices illegal and greatly increase the difficulty of travelling with such devices.

…Called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the new plan would see Canada join other countries, including the United States and members of the European Union, to form an international coalition against copyright infringement.

…The deal would create a international regulator that could turn border guards and other public security personnel into copyright police. The security officials would be charged with checking laptops, iPods and even cellular phones for content that “infringes” on copyright laws, such as ripped CDs and movies.

The guards would also be responsible for determining what is infringing content and what is not.

The agreement proposes any content that may have been copied from a DVD or digital video recorder would be open for scrutiny by officials – even if the content was copied legally.

As Jerry Sadowitz memorably put it: “moose-fuckers!”

Digital music: still shit

Record labels are losing their battle with digital piracy as the number of people who regularly download songs legally falls back, research will claim today.

That’s in the UK where, by an incredible coincidence, the overwhelming majority of digital music is still sold with DRM.

Elsewhere in the Guardian, in a piece by Tim Anderson:

“The industry has finally been able to get some hard data about how removing DRM restrictions from legitimately purchased tracks affects piracy,” says Bill Rosenplatt, DRM specialist and president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies. “The statistics show that there’s no effect on piracy.”

So if people aren’t downloading legally, what are they doing? Surprise!

While 28% of music fans have paid to download music from a legal download store such as iTunes or 7 Digital, just as many have tried downloading from an illegal filesharing site.

Tellingly, 22% have carried on sharing files illegally, but only 14% have continued to download tracks from legal sites.

As ever, you can use a single album to demonstrate the problem. Let’s take Madonna’s Hard Candy, the Deluxe version with three remixes tacked on the end.

• Full quality CD version from Tesco, Amazon etc (without remixes) – £8.93 to £8.99
• DRMed, standard quality iTunes with a digital booklet – £9.99
• DRMed, unknown bitrate WMAs from Tesco Digital – £10.97
• DRM-free, 256Kbps MP3s from 7 Digital with a digital booklet – £10.99
• DRM-free, 320Kbps MP3s from torrents with scans of the CD artwork – nowt

True, the CD version doesn’t include the remixes – or “filler”, as it probably should be called – but given that digital is much cheaper to produce than the physical version, charging eleven quid for a download with a couple of extra mixes makes me want to torrent the Madonna album out of sheer spite. And I don’t even like Madonna.

In the UK, digital music is all over the place. Most music is still protected WMA (Windows) or AAC (iTunes), and while unprotected music is beginning to go mainstream it’s far from perfect. iTunes Plus is still being conspiciously ignored by most of the labels. Tesco now offers MP3s (of unspecified bitrate), but its selection runs to just 40 albums, most of them older than the universe. Play.com has a better selection at £6.99 for unprotected albums (of variable quality – most are 320Kbps, but some are 192), but there are huge gaps in the catalogue and £6.99 is still rather expensive for something whose manufacturing cost is essentially zero. Nice to see Half Man Half Biscuit in there, mind you.

If digital music was some new-fangled technology then the current mess would be forgivable, but it’s nine years since Napster demonstrated the power of P2P for distributing music, eight years since AllofMP3.com suggested an alternative, and seven years since the birth of Bittorrent and iTunes.

So why on earth is digital music still a mess? Former A&R man John Niven may have the answer.

Today you can walk into Asda or Tesco and pick up an LP for seven or eight quid. Back in the mid- to late nineties a new release routinely cost £12 to £15 – nearly £30 in today’s money. Factor in manufacturing costs of a few pence per unit and a royalty rate to the artist of about a quid and you’re have a profit margin to make Third World sweatshop owners wince.

It seemed that the artificially inflated good times would roll for ever.