Have you seen the demo of Spotify on Android yet?
If not, check it out and listen really carefully. That sound you can hear in the distance is Steve Jobs swearing.
It looks like Android has found its killer app.
Category: Music
Gratuitous Girls Aloud references
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Spotify: Android’s killer app – and bad news for iTunes?
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Free costs money. Who’s going to pay for it? Er, you
We’re so used to the idea that everything online should be free that we don’t even think about it.
Of course the iPlayer should give us HD video for free. Of course Spotify should stream music for free. Websites? Free. News? Free. Video? Free. Software? Free.
There’s only one problem. Free costs money, and there isn’t enough of it.
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Is MP3HD the future of digital music?
MP3HD is a lossless format, which means it delivers a perfect digital copy of the original audio – but it manages to do it more efficiently than WAV or AIFF files, which can be massive…
We’ve been here before. Nearly eight years ago Thomson announced a new, higher quality kind of MP3 called MP3Pro.
Like MP3HD, it was backwards compatible, so your files would play on any MP3-supporting program or device; like MP3HD, it offered better sound quality by combining a high quality and low quality version in the same file. If your device didn’t support MP3Pro you’d get the low quality one; if it did, you’d get the high quality one. It was very clever, and with the exception of MusicMatch Radio, hardly anybody used it.
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PRS versus YouTube: what PRS For Music is telling its members
This was posted on Jockrock by Commander Keen. I haven’t seen the original.
Dear Member
You may have read the news stories this week about Google blocking access to ‘premium’ video content on YouTube in the UK as a result of their not agreeing a new licence with PRS for Music. Premium content appears to refer to music videos that are traditionally uploaded by record companies.
You may also have read that Google took this decision unilaterally, without any request from us to do so. Their licence with us had expired at the end of December 2008 and we were negotiating their new one. We do not usually ask anyone to remove content as long as good faith negotiations are taking place.
Immediately we heard news of Google’s decision to pull content from YouTube, and that they were talking to the press about it, we issued our own press statement. We expressed our outrage, shock and disappointment on behalf of UK consumers and on behalf of you, our members that Google should take this action.
Google’s decision must be seen as an attempt to influence commercial negotiation and the focus on ‘premium’ content as an attempt to cause disruption within the music industry again. This content may account for about 1% of YouTube music streams.
At the heart of Google’s precipitous action is the going rate for music. This is the rate set by the UK Copyright Tribunal in 2007. The Tribunal is the ultimate and independent arbiter of copyright dispute. Digital service providers pay a fraction of a penny per stream to the creator of the music.
Most of the major digital service providers are licensed by PRS for Music. And just recently we have signed deals with Amazon, Beatport, Nokia Comes With Music and Qtrax.
YouTube has signed-up to licences in very few countries around the world – we were one of the few. They have never before taken down content unless they have been forced to do so by copyright holders. Meanwhile, in the UK, consumer streams of YouTube ‘premium’ content have risen by almost 300% in the last year alone (up from 75m streams a quarter to nearly 300m streams a quarter). In total, Google want to pay 50% less than they paid before for that usage. Google think they paid too much last time. But their music usage, charged at the going rate, suggests they were significantly underpaying.
A further delay to our negotiation has been that Google is, at present, not giving us the data we need to calculate correct royalty payments to you. We ask them to make returns on their music use in the same way that every other major licensee does in order that we can properly analyse it, charge the right fee and then pay the copyright owners we represent. If there’s a stream of a track we don’t control, Google won’t pay us for that stream. Google would like to see our database in order to match it against theirs so they can calculate how much they owe us.
We look forward to continuing our negotiations with Google where we will be looking for them to pay an appropriate amount for the volume of music they use and the contribution that songwriters make to the success of their service.
In the meantime, please help us to help you. There are numerous Internet blogs hosting discussions on songwriter royalties. All too often, the voice of the composer and songwriter is lost in the midst of issues relating to the freedom of the Internet. Many blog posters misunderstand how royalties work and how you get paid. We should not forget that more than 90% of PRS for Music members receive less than £5,000 per year in royalties.
Wherever possible, please contribute fully to this online debate, putting the composer and songwriter point of view. Additionally, if you feel you could give your time, where needed, to talk or write to the media in support of PRS for Music and of the composer/songwriter community, please email us.
With best wishes
Steve Porter, Chief Executive, PRS for Music
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Techradar: YouTube versus PRS, and banishing software irritants
It’s Tuesday! First up: why the YouTube/PRS spat is bad news for musicians.
Ultimately, though, the spat is like watching two bald men fighting over a comb. On one side we have a multi-billion dollar corporation demanding that musicians pay the price for its inability to find a properly profitable business model; on the other we have a rights agency that appears to be stuck in a pre-internet age and can’t or won’t accept that online streaming simply doesn’t bring in the same amount of money as traditional broadcasting.
Also, 7 annoying apps you don’t have to put up with.
Printing, as Eddie Izzard once ranted, shouldn’t be hard. Control-P-Print! So why do printer manufacturers insist on installing applications for every conceivable task, such as programs that enable you to add gaudy picture frames?
Long-term readers will immediately spot that one of the nasties, Snap Shots, was briefly on this blog. I was young then, and crazy.
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YouTube starts blocking music videos in the UK over PRS dispute
PRS is now asking us to pay many, many times more for our licence than before. The costs are simply prohibitive for us – under PRS’s proposed terms we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback. In addition, PRS is unwilling to tell us what songs are included in the licence they can provide so that we can identify those works on YouTube – that’s like asking a consumer to buy a blank CD without knowing what musicians are on it.
We’re still working with PRS for Music in an effort to reach mutually acceptable terms for a new licence, but until we do so we will be blocking premium music videos in the UK that have been supplied or claimed by record labels.
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Bugger off and take your Beatles with you
A slightly inflammatory piece by me on Techradar: why the music industry doesn’t deserve government help.
Now, like General Motors, the record companies are hurting – and like General Motors, they want the government to save them. GM wants cash; the record companies want ISPs to act as their policemen, while the Digital Britain report suggests a broadband tax to create a new organisation to fight piracy and find new and exciting ways for DRM to annoy us.
Why doesn’t the government tell them to get stuffed?
The New Music Strategies blog linked in the article is well worth your time.
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Techradar Tuesday: don’t be a dumbass
Last.fm isn’t telling the RIAA that you’ve pirated the new U2 album. But you might be.
Why go to the hassle of trying to get data from websites when the users will hand it to you on a plate?
We’re sure that some of the people listening to the leaked album simply forgot that Last.fm tells other people what you’re listening to, but we’re also sure that a fair number of them were boasting. Look at me! I’ve got something I shouldn’t have! I am cool!
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The 4 of Us: come to Scotland, you bastards
The 4 of Us are playing a bunch of gigs in February to support their forthcoming live album, but they’re only doing Irish dates. Again. Bastardy bastardy bastard.
You can listen to one of the live tracks, Sunlight, here.
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Why Digital Britain dropped the “three strikes” policy
Good point from No Rock’n’Roll Fun:
Ed Stourton summarised the position of the Digital Britain report as seeing access to broadband as being on a par with access to power and water: an essential service for the way we live now. It’s impossible to see how you could square a belief that broadband is an essential service with arbitrary removal of that service on the whim of a record company.