Digital Noise: Music and Tech

Grooveshark, my favorite free music streaming service, made an important announcement earlier today: the company has settled a lawsuit brought against it by EMI, one of the big four record labels, and has licensed EMI's catalog.

The company is still negotiating terms with other copyright holders, but to my knowledge EMI was the only one that had sued Grooveshark. So with this legal uncertainty out of the way, I can more confidently recommend Grooveshark's $3-a-month premium service, which offers early access to new features (the latest update includes better organization of search results and a slider to move you to particular parts of a song). If other licensing deals follow, Apple might finally approve Grooveshark's planned iPhone app, offering on-demand streams from Grooveshark's massive user-sourced music library.

You know that old maxim about something being too good to be true? I wondered how my new favorite on-demand music-streaming service, Grooveshark, was able to avoid the record industry lawsuits that plagued its predecessors, such as Seeqpod and Imeem.

Is EMI's lawsuit just a negotiating tactic?

Turns out, it isn't immune. Grooveshark contacted me earlier this week to let me know that its negotiations with EMI were on the verge of breaking down. (You can read Grooveshark's official statement here.)

Yesterday evening, Peter Kafka at All Things Digital uncovered the fact that EMI had actually sued Grooveshark back in May--talk about tough negotiation tactics!

As much as I love Grooveshark's service, I have some sympathy for the labels. It seems that a lot of digital-music start-ups operate under the maxim that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission--they create the technology, launch the service, then count on the licensing details being worked out later.

Although I think that the labels have been incredibly short-sighted about the move to digital music, particularly on-demand streaming, they can't sit back and let every new digital-music start-up dictate its own terms--it's not fair to copyright owners, nor to online-music companies like Rhapsody, Pandora, and (now) Imeem, who are playing by the rules and probably paying higher royalties.

Hopefully, this lawsuit is just a negotiating tactic, and Grooveshark will emerge with the kind of business arrangement that Imeem was able to strike with Warner.

So far, EMI's threat doesn't appear to have had any effect on the service: I was still able to find songs from EMI artists like The Beatles, Radiohead, and--of course--the Sex Pistols.

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Last week, producer Danger Mouse (best known as half of Gnarls Barkley) finally released his new album, a collaboration with noise-pop artist Sparklehorse called "The Long Dark Night of the Soul." The catch: because of an ongoing legal battle with record label EMI, the "album" isn't an album at all, but rather a blank CD-R with artwork created by movie producer David Lynch. If you're interested in supporting the cause, you can order the CD-R with a poster ($10) or full book of artwork ($50) here.

But how do you get the music? NPR has an exclusive first listen, and the album's also available on YouTube (for now). But turning these streams into music files that you could burn onto the CD-R used to require a desktop application like Audacity.

Not now. Farkie is a Web site that offers the ability to rip the audio from YouTube videos into a variety of file types, including WAV, AVI, and MP3, as well as save entire videos as QuickTime (MOV), Windows Media (WMV), or Flash Video (FLV) files. It's a little clunky: you have to enter the URL of the YouTube video into the address bar on Farkie, then select the proper element from the results--it helps to uncheck all the boxes except "media" so you'll see only audio and video files. Then you have to wait while Farkie converts the stream to your chosen file type on its servers. Finally, you have to right-click to download the file from Farkie to your hard drive. It's not fast, but it's free and it works.

In theory, it should be able to convert streams from other sites as well, but I had trouble with the NPR link because it's an embedded Flash application and Farkie could only find the JavaScript files used to launch the application and various other side-links; it couldn't find the underlying media files. But there's plenty of material on YouTube to fill your hard drive.

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Last year, I wrote about EMI's new Web portal, and speculated that the record company might use it as an aggregator site for EMI artists. Indeed, that's one feature of the site, but there's actually some other interesting stuff on there as well, including a discovery engine that lets you enter a popular artist and then finds EMI artists that sound similar. But my favorite aspect of the site is the "feedback community"--let's call it an online market research group--called SoundCheck.

Cool idea, unless you're using Firefox.

I signed up a couple weeks ago, and about once a week EMI sends me a link via e-mail to a new survey. The first one was rather generic, although it included three sound samples of the same singer with drastically different backing music--standard rock, soft piano ballad, and electro/disco. But this week, they surveyed me about a Dutch performer named Sabrina Starke, who I'd never heard before and sort of liked--her music has an early '60s soul feel like Amy Winehouse, but her voice is purer (and less original). I got to test my preconceived stereotypes (they showed me a picture and asked what I thought she'd sound like), then vote on two videos. If you like to express your opinion about music--and who doesn't?--it's a lot of fun, and you might be helping one of the major labels make some decisions that actually lead to more good music being released.

My one complaint: the sound samples on SoundCheck don't work in Firefox 3, which forced me to use IE8 on my PC. (I didn't test it in Safari or Chrome.) I e-mailed them twice about this issue and got no reply. EMI needs to take a look at the market share numbers--there's no reason to exclude such a large chunk of its potential audience.

TechCrunch broke the story Tuesday that Seeqpod, a Web search engine for music files, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company is facing lawsuits from record company Warner and EMI because even though it doesn't post any material itself--it's just a search engine--it makes no effort to filter out copyrighted material.

Another one bites the dust.

So far, the site itself still up and running, but my absolute favorite name-it-and-play-it service, Songerize, which uses Seeqpod as its back end, appears to be broken. The labels have been targeting independent developers who use Seeqpod's API, so I wonder if the heat got to be too much for whoever was running Songerize. Seeqpod's troubles could also affect plenty of other sites, including Bandloop, an excellent and relatively new live music listing service that I wrote about in January.

If Songerize is indeed gone forever, you can turn to Imeem (although it has business troubles of its own) or, if you're lucky enough to be in a supported geographic region, Spotify. Other services also offer a limited number of streams for free--Lala.com gives you 50 before charging you $0.10 apiece, and Rhapsody lets you stream 25 songs a month without a paid subscription.

Every one of them knew that as time went by, they'd get a little bit older and a little bit slower.

This news is over a month old, but somehow I missed it until the intrepid Penn Jillette tweeted about it Sunday (never say Twitter's useless). Here's the scene: Beatles. 1968. That'd be the long-hair bearded Beatles. "White Album" recording session. John's recording a slowed-down version of their recent hit single "Revolution," the B-side to the umpteen-million selling "Hey Jude." Being in a particular state of mind, he stretches it out for 10 minutes, then adds some scary horror music plus Yoko spoken-word weirdness at the end. Later, John or the rest of the band or George Martin or other mysterious powers decide that they'll add some overdubs to John's take and cut it off after about four minutes and record a new ending. (I believe the weird triple hit after the last chorus--every other time, it's a double hit--signals the beginning of the new end.) That's "Revolution 1." Then, John will add his own nine-minute musique concrete freakout to the end of the album. He uses some of the bits from the end of the old "Revolution 1." That becomes "Revolution 9," perhaps the most-skipped song of the CD era.

A month ago, somebody leaked the original track, which to "White Album" fans, comprises a sort of holy grail connecting the two Revolutions, which otherwise bear no similarity except their names. EMI has been issuing takedown notices as fast as it can, but as of 10 a.m. Monday you could still hear it on YouTube, and download it (right click-save as) from a source called Rawkblog.net. I'm purposely not linking to either source to give this remarkable track a bit more life, but google "Revolution 1 Take 20," then click on the YouTube and Rawkblog.net links and you'll get it. (Warning: some of the other links to the download connect you to pop-up-infested sites that may make your computer very unhappy.)

Now if somebody would just leak the seven-hour version of "Helter Skelter"...

Update, 3/24: An SXSW organizer contacted me to let me know that the show included 14 panelists from major labels, as well as 20 panelists from independent labels. The truth remains that I didn't see, hear, or meet any--but of course I couldn't attend every panel. I've corrected the post accordingly.

Almost a year ago, I posted about how two executives from major Web companies had taken new positions related to digital music: Douglas Merrill left Google to become EMI's president of digital operations, and Ian Rogers left Yahoo Music to become the CEO of Topspin, a then-new company specializing in direct-to-fan marketing.

And I won't forget to put roses on your grave.

(Credit: Kurt Steuber via Wikimedia Commons)

A year later, Merrill's gone, following Guy Hands out the door. (Hands was the CEO of private-equity firm Terra Firma, which bought EMI in 2007.) I'm not sure what he did there, but imagine he was behind the portal site that EMI launched last year...to no effect whatsoever.

Contrast that with Topspin, which oversaw successful launches of several albums and was just at SXSW to announce a major update to its automated marketing platform.

Sure, EMI's taking in far more revenue than Topspin--it's still got The Beatles' catalog, after all, and Topspin's just a start-up--but look at the momentum, the level of excitement, the bottom line. There's no comparison.

At SXSW, the conventional wisdom from every panel I attended, every business meeting I had, and every artist and fan I spoke with, was that the major labels are technological dinosaurs with no chance of survival. I didn't meet a single major label employee in the entire four days I was there, though at the Guitar Hero-Metallica event, the PR coordinator spent a long time explaining to a TV crew that all interview requests had to be approved by the band's label. Ah, the good old major labels we know and love--barriers, not enablers.

(Aside: as much as Metallica may represent the old record industry, its SXSW set absolutely slayed, consisting almost exclusively of pre-Black Album material, and so fast and tight and loud and awesome in the original sense of the word that it seemed like it--and we--were all 17 again. Pitchfork's take is absolutely right; it's not fair to compare them with any of the other bands at SXSW. Long may they rock, with or without the recording industry as we know it.)

I'm rambling, but keep looking. U2's second-week sales dropped 75 percent--nobody cares. Sony hired Rick Rubin to come up with a digital strategy, but nothing's happening (although Rubin remains a successful producer).

The RIAA seems to serve no purpose except to sue customers and try to get damages that are many thousands of times the value of the product infringed. Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. took home a $3 million bonus after his company lost $35 million and earned his spot on the CEO wall of shame.

Established artists are going independent as soon as their contracts expire--the latest is Counting Crows--and reporting, again and again, how much better they can do without a label.

A year ago, there were still some arguments for the necessity of major labels to handle marketing, promotion, and other tasks. Not anymore. The conventional wisdom now: if you're interested in the music business, and you want to change the world and make lots of money, go anywhere else.

If you're a musician, and you want your music to be heard, go anywhere else. If you're an investor looking for a business with a lot of upside, go anywhere else.

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According to the Financial Times, music label EMI is planning to launch its own music portal to sell songs and videos, and offer some free content as well.

My first reaction was similar to that of the anonymous music executive quoted in the FT article: dead on arrival. Listeners don't know and don't care about labels; they want to buy all their music in one place, and so on.

But surely EMI's digital team, led by former Googler Douglas Merrill, is smart enough to realize that it can't take on Apple's iTunes with a label-specific store.

I suspect that this is more of a cross-marketing play instead. Users will google an EMI artist like--just to pick an example at random--A Perfect Circle. Instead of directing them to a boring alphabetical list with a link to the band's MySpace page, users could land on a label-owned page with actual songs and videos and CDs, both free and for sale. Once there, EMI might intelligently discern that a fan who likes A Perfect Circle might also like Korn and Iron Maiden, two other metal bands with recordings on EMI, and offer those recordings for sale as well.

And now, just because I haven't linked to it in a while, here's the Sex Pistols.

Money from Beatles record sales helped fund the invention of the CT scan (also known as CAT scan), a medical tool used to take three dimensional photographs of the insides of people's bodies.

As recounted on the blog Epidemix, the story starts with Godfrey Hounsfield, a researcher at EMI back in the 1950s. Although it's a (somewhat struggling) major record label today, EMI--which stands for Electrical and Musical Industries*--was once an industrial research company. Hounsfield did some pioneering work on computers, helping to build the first all-transistor computer, but the division wasn't profitable for EMI and the company sold its computer business in 1962...right when it signed The Beatles. His standing was good enough with the company that they let him conduct independent research with funding from the Beatles' string of massive successes in the 1960s. He went on to invent the CT scanner, which EMI first released in 1972, and shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for medicine for his invention.

I was aware of EMI's scientific legacy from a class I took on audio production: the company's Abbey Road studios (where the Beatles recorded) were legendarily cutting-edge, and an EMI scientist, Alan Blumlein, invented a microphone technique for stereo recording that's still used today. By the end of the 1990s, however, EMI had sold its technology businesses, and today it's exclusively a label and publisher.

*Corrected from "Electrical and Musical Equipment" which indeed would have made the acronym "EME." Whoops.