File sharers spend big

Pet Shop Boys via last.fm

Does it come as a surprise to ANYONE the recent news that the most prolific music file sharers are also the most prolific spenders?

In a recent BBC news report on file sharing which discusses a recent survey conducted by MORI, it states that the average file sharer also spends an average of £77 a year on paid for music.


Is that it? In my music buying heyday, I used to trot off to Berwick Street and spend around £80 EVERY Saturday. I had some awesome stuff to show for it too - promos, bootlegs, rare deleted releases.

However, this really rings true for me. Most people who have a passing interest in anything maintain just a moderate level of interest. If you're not a diehard U2 fan, are you really going to take the time to find and visit file sharing sites, when iTunes is right there?

The problem with legit outlets like iTunes is they still don't have all the variations of a release that a fan might want. Take the Voxigen remix of "I wouldn't normally do this kind of thing" by Pet Shop Boys. I scoured the shops for months searching for this. The CD this was on was only released in Holland, and to acquire it would cost me around £40 (if I could ever find it). Of this £40, neither the label nor the band would see a penny of this. This remix has yet to show up on any legit download site.

This new news about file sharer spending further muddies the water of the cut and dry scenario bodies like the RIAA are advertising, mainly file sharing is theft, thus must be punished. I believe that enough people who actually know what they're talking about (and I don't include the RIAA) will agree that the best way to discover new music is via services like file sharing, free downloads and - more and more - streaming services like Spotify.




With services like Spotify and We7 now replacing the need for ownership with access, the question of piracy and file sharing could soon be a thing of the past if only they could get their catalogues in order. With issues like international licensing still an issue, this won't be resolved any time soon.

Satirical solution to deal with the music situation

With the current state of the music industry firmly divided into two camps - "free is good" and "free is bad" - CrunchGear has come up with a novel solution to the whole problem - ban music!

Spurred on by the music industry's increasingly asisine ideas (like charging royalties on 30 second samples), CrunchGear has said enough is enough and put their foot down.

Under their plan, anyone making music - even humming in the shower - will face punishment of death. Of course, this solution would free up loads of time, no more useless lawsuits, no more blogs like this espousing how much stupider the music industry can get, and no overpaid music stars being caught doing something that someone of their role model status shouldn't be doing.

It's a brazen suggestion to say the least, but I think the ideal solution is to get people into higher positions in the music industry who aren't retirement age and who's plan doesn't revolve around "make it how it used to be and we'll be fine".

As we know, it'll never be as it used to be again and that SHOULD be a good thing!

Free is good for business as well

Image via CrunchBase

Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails dabbled with it, and now Wired's Chris Anderson is expounding the benefits of free, as the new model economy that is taking the world by storm and making people who know how to play the game very rich.

For those in the dark, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails both released albums and offered them free, allowing people to pay what they thought it was worth. The reasoning being, the bands had new material to tour and would make more from concert tickets and merchandising trinkets than the paltry sum the record label would give them in royalties.

For the most part this worked, although more from a news perspective than an economic perspective, but the seeds were nonetheless sown.

Now Anderson has taken this idea and run the whole nine yards with it, surmising that free is the new economy for more than just music. However, in a book excerpt from the latest issue of Wired magazine, he talks at length about how musicians, not stuck in the machinations of the past, could actually use the new economy to their advantage.

His anecdote about the Brazilian band Banda Calypso is case in point. A band that has had all their albums pirated, yet make enough money from merch and live performances to actually own a jet!

We're seeing the move away from pure record labels already. Live Nation are turning into more promoter / labels, offering stars a 360 package that includes concerts, music releases, and merchandising.

I think, however, with the rise of the web, we can take even Live Nation out of the equation. Giving people for free something that is easily obtainable will never replace the value of the rarity and that's where seeing a band in concert will always make a musician a nice chunk of coin.

Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor has recently come out in defence of Anderson's position, saying that bands needs to try harder to make something rare that fans actually want to buy. Reznor himself offered NIN's album "Ghosts I-IV" in a variety of formats, with a free download being the cheapest option and a $300 ultra rare deluxe boxset being the top of the line.

Free is here to stay thanks to the ubiquity of digital, but there's be a place for the physical format for some time to come and thanks to "free" the physical format is getting a hell of a lot cooler to own.

Ownership versus access again

The guardian ran a report today saying (Reader's Digest version here) that piracy is down, streaming is up and everyone is happy.

Now this good news is the result of interviewing 1,000 people (out of the 59 million or so in the UK) and extrapolating an awful lot from what they found (as any good survey does).

The article raves on about services like Spotify and You Tube solving a music lover's needs without needing to resort to illegal P2P. This isn't 100% of the story, as the article also mentions the illegal download shift could also come as people copy each others' existing MP3s, rip CDs, etc.

THE ASININE TRUTH

TechDirt takes the article a little further and delves - rightly so - a little deeper into the asinine mechanics of the record labels. The shift from piracy to streaming is good for everyone. That's a given. Why, then are the labels trying to screw these legit services into extinction by demanding sky high licensing fees?

"This is how the legacy industry kills anything even remotely positive. The second that the industry sees anything that's working, it suddenly smothers it by demanding to get a bigger and bigger cut."

It's been an issue I've had troubles with for ages. Sure they want their money, but if the choice is NO money due to piracy, or reduced income from the likes of You Tube and Spotify, it seems like a no brainer.

The PRS here in the UK has already forced You Tube's hand and they have in turn banned UK viewers from watching music videos. Spotify's financial woes are also becoming more and more apparent as are Pandora in the US, who were recently saved by a lowering of the per song fee they're forced to pay.

The labels continue to wage an argument akin to "well these are the rates we'd get if a consumer bought a CD or it was played on commercial radio". They don't seem to get the argument is between piracy (no income) and legit streaming (some income).

One day this industry will wake up, realise that the consumer fuels the market, will cower to their demands and the world will be a better place. Until that time, they'll argue they're a business and need to make money and then complain when they go bust.

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£1.92 million for 24 songs

In what can only be called absurd, music pirate Jammie Thomas-Rasset this week was found guilty, during a re-trial, of music piracy... or more to the point, having songs available for others to download on Kazaa.

Normally, a judgement would be found in replacement value plus cost. So 24 songs, that's about $20, plus a couple of grand in costs. Nope, the RIAA pushed for a much more lenient $80,000 per song, amassing a whopping $1.92 million in damages.

The smack in the face here isn't against Thomas-Rasset, it's against the artists she pirated. You think they've ever seen anything CLOSE to $80,000 for the song they had pirated? Nope. You think they'll see any of the $80,000 per song the RIAA is claiming in damages? Nope. Basically, these 24 songs have facilitated the RIAA to claim an absurd amount of money from someone who couldn't feasibilty pay it off, so they can do what with it?

Update: Apparently Capitol Records were in on the suit with the RIAA. Of course, Capitol's artists - who receive a pittance in songwriting and mechanical royalties will never see a penny of this.

According to an AP report, EFF's Fred von Lohmann believes the verdict may hurt the recording industry, bolstering the argument that the copyright system is broken if it can impose such huge penalties for noncommercial activity.

I understand that breaking the law is wrong and you must pay, but shouldn't you pay against those you wronged, not some shadowy out of touch with reality organisation that doesn't seem to act on behalf on anyone but themselves?

This is just another lit pitchfork in the "down with the RIAA" movement. Good going guys.

Big day in eye-patch land

There's a couple of things in the news today music-wise and they're at polar ends of the spectrum.

Firstly, indie label !K7 have decided not only to release CDs without copy protection, but to tout the fact on the CDs and on their website. Rightly so they claim, "Copy protection kills customer relationships."

Their website furthers this by stating, "That's why, from now on, !K7 releases will carry a new logo: 'NO copy protection - respect the music."

To be fair, indie labels have had an easier time of the whole industry downturn, mainly because they haven't been releasing karaoke-winners as their priority releases. It's also due to the niche nature of the indie label, and the fact that they appeal to actual music fans (who NEED to own the vinyl or CD) more than the Woolworth-buying public that lives on "Now That's What I Call Music" compilations because they can't remember song titles.

The other news is that the BPI is meeting today to announce how they're going to screw music fans out of more money legally. Basically it involves suing anyone who's downloaded, uploaded, whistled, etc. their favourite tunes.

Deflating the BPI's bubble ever so slightly, the NME article contains quotes from lead Franz Ferdinand Alex Kapranos who claims that song swapping and P2P were instrumental in getting Franz Ferdinand the level of popularity they enjoy now. Oops.

"File-sharing is something that has really helped us as a band in getting established. When Franz Ferdinand played a gig in New York for the first time, a lot of people there already knew our songs and were singing along.

"For us it has been global word of mouth that has helped our progress, not hindered it. I don't think it is damaging musicians at all. Downloading music is as revolutionary an invention as the gramophone and I'm all for it."

Oh well, the BPI knows best. Just like the RIAA. Just make sure you're sons and daughters are locked up and kept away from the PC, because chances are they haven't taken 3-4 years of law courses yet, so won't realise that downloading the theme to "The Magic Roundabout" will result in mum and dad losing the house.

-- Link: BBC

Whose blame is it anyway?

Image via Wikipedia

In an interview recently, Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant was complaining that the most annoying thing about internet piracy was that it ceased making the release of music - singles especially - an event.

While I agree that the term "release date" doesn't mean a damn thing these days, I would argue that, in the case of singles, the blame for them not being "events" should lay solely with record labels.

Back in the good ole days, a single would go to radio around the same time it went to the shops. The single would thus begin it's upward chart trajectory. Take "Relax" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood which went from the basement parking lot of the charts, all the way up to Number 1, staying there for weeks.

The single was released in October 1983 and didn't hit the top of the chart until January 1984! In June 1984, it found itself at number 2 just behind "Two Tribes". This is a single with a chart live of well over EIGHT months.

These days, a single goes to radio up to two months before it hits the shops. By the time you have the chance to buy it, you're bored of it. I guess one could argue that the day a single goes to radio is "event day", but I would counter-argue this is about as detrimental to the shelf-life of music as downloading pre-releases is.

Just another side of the coin.

Yes, Delete Entry Telstar lays bla

Telstar Records have finally gone bust. Personally, I thought this happened months ago, but all the papers (The Times, Sun, etc.) are reporting it as if it happened today.

Funnily enough, in events that mirror the demise of Factory, it seems the label's fate has been sealed by disasterous attempts to get Posh Spice's career off the ground, with much spent on studio time for failed recordings and horrendous costs on marketing and the like. This is similar to the worrying moneypit of the Happy Mondays that eventually led to Factory calling it a day, almost 12 years ago.

The funny thing about the whole Telstar debacle is where Chairman Neil Palmer is actually placing the blame. In an article in the Sun, after paragraphs outlining the fatally costly mistake that was the Posh Spice incident, it then goes on the state, "Chairman Neil Palmer blamed illegal internet downloading and lack of radio support for British artists."

Illegal downloads? Telstar never released any of the ill-fated Posh material, how can it be downloaded at all?

It beggars belief that the scapegoat of piracy is still being trotted out to cover a myriad of sins, mainly bad judgement at the top. Tony Wilson took his hits in stride and admitted that getting the Mondays to record in Barbados was a bad thing. He didn't have the scapegoat of music fans hungry for material to blame, and to his credit, I don't think he would have had he had the change.

Neil Palmer, you are a petty man.

SuperAudio prices

With labels bitching about piracy, I'm just wondering why the obvious unpirate-able format (SACD) is still so expensive. Searching for a copy of Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden or Colour of Spring is bringing back results of nearly £17 per disc. Compare this to the CD-only version for around £6.99 and you start to see a problem.

I can rip, copy, download, etc. the CD, but listening to the SACD layer in an SACD player brings a whole new level to the sonic soundscape. I have 101 by Depeche Mode on SACD and the 5.1 surround makes you feel like you're there and the stereo SACD layer on Roxy Music's Avalon makes the CD layer sounds like a gritty MP3.

Of course, there's a number of punters out there who don't care about sound - they're happy with a JS 128kps MP3. To them, I say, get a pair of ears. To the audiophiles (or burgeoning audiophiles) I say, let us band together and get the dumb labels off their asses and lower the prices. They could shift loads of units and the format is still relatively unpirateable... which means (for many reasons) I won't be spending £17 any time soon.

Some SACDs you might like