Digital Noise: Music and Tech

That's tomorrow, Saturday, Apr. 19. Your day to celebrate the old way of buying music, where you got into your car and drove to a local store and talked to the clerk and sifted through the racks and maybe experienced the delight of finding an old CD you'd forgotten about, heavily discounted or expensive and rare. Or maybe you heard a great tune spinning in the background and bought it, like I did with The Monochrome Set's Strange Boutique and PiL's Second Edition and Wilco's amazing live CD (their best album, in my opinion), Kicking Television.

Daddy, what's a record store?

(Credit: Record Store Day)

Anyway, a lot of stores are having special events--for example, Seattle institution Silver Platters, which started selling CDs (and Laserdiscs!) back in the early 80s when vinyl was still the norm, is having live music all day long. So if you love music, throw your local record store a bone and buy a disc or two.

MySpace is essential for independent artists. Every band I've played with in the last five years has had a MySpace page, and it completely changed how we did things compared with the pre-Internet days. Getting gigs, maintaining mailing lists, fliering--all of those formerly labor-intensive tasks could be accomplished by sitting in front of a computer. One group I played with got 90 percent of our gigs through other bands on our friends list. Another had a couple dozen teenage fans who'd come to every all-ages show when they read about it on our MySpace page. (We were all in our late 30s and 40s and had no idea that ska would appeal to that demographic.)

A truly killer MySpace music service would let users buy downloads and merchandise from any act on the site.

(Credit: MySpace)

But there was always a major gap: if we wanted to sell downloads, CDs, or anything else, we had to guide fans to another site or service, such as our own home page with a PayPal account or CDBaby.

Today, MySpace announced a deal with three of the four majors (EMI is sitting out for now) to offer DRM-free MP3 downloads, ringtones, and merchandise through the artist pages on MySpace. This is long overdue: the music industry needs to go where their fans already are, and with 30 million people regularly listening to music on the site, it's a mystery why the labels haven't tried to reach these folks before now.

But major label acts are a small part of the MySpace experience. The only reason you ask The Police or Death Cab to be your "friend" is to show off your impeccable taste to your real friends, the individuals and small-time artists who you're actually connected with. These are the folks who leave individualized comments on your page and send you instant messages, and their gigs appear right alongside Radiohead's on your home page. MySpace is the ultimate long tail site for musicians, where bar bands and small-town heroes can appear in the same context as the biggest bands in the world.

So I'm not sure that MySpace Music will be a game-changer. Fans of big bands already know where to buy merchandise--the band's Web site, or Amazon's CD section, or iTunes, or their local retail store. Sure, big fans who count major-label acts among their "friends" might now stay within MySpace to buy new songs from these bands, and some MySpace users might discover (and buy music from) new acts via friends of friends. But a lot of fans don't know (or care much about) the difference between major and independent artists, and might wonder why only some acts make their wares available for purchase. The inconsistency will be confusing, and drive users back to the traditional music-buying sites (or free file-trading services, which aren't going away).

The real game-changer comes when MySpace offers a full e-commerce store--downloads, CD sales, the works--to every artist with a musician's page on the site. That way, users would never have to leave the site to buy any music they heard on the site. The challenge would be building the infrastructure, but once things like billing and provisioning downloads are in place for the majors, it might not be much harder to set up a CDBaby-like system for everybody else.

Sony BMG and Warner are both reported to be considering subscription-based music services.

The major labels are finally said to be consdering building "celestial jukeboxes," but lack of cooperation could make these services play like a broken record.

(Credit: Frederic Pasteleurs, Wikimedia Commons)

Earlier this week, the AP quoted Sony BMG CEO Rolf Schmidt-Holtz discussing a subscription-based service that would offer unlimited downloads of all songs in the Sony BMG catalog for 6 to 8 euro. The downloads would be transferrable to all portable devices, including Apple's iPod. DRM would presumably play a part, so that content would be disabled on a device if you stopped paying the subscription.

Warner is taking a different approach, proposing that consumers be charged a monthly fee by their ISP--maybe five bucks--for the right to download as much music as they want from a massive industry-run database. As Conde Nast Portfolio reported yesterday, Warner has given former Geffen Digital head Jim Griffin a three-year contract to develop this strategy. Not mentioned in the article: since Time Warner owns the number-three and number-five U.S. ISPs, AOL and Road Runner, the company has a built-in audience of more than 17 million users to jumpstart any such service.

It's nice to see the major labels thinking about "celestial jukebox" models of distribution more than 8 years after they were first proposed, but as usual, the labels still don't seem to be able to acknowledge their competition--unlimited free downloads from file-trading networks and random Web sites.

If the Sony BMG service contains only music from Sony BMG, as is suggested in the AP report, it's dead on arrival. Nobody is going to pay a dime for a catalog containing 1/4th of the major labels' output and nothing from independent artists.

I personally think Warner's hit upon the only reasonable compromise between copyright-owners and end-users: bundle a very low monthly fee into some other product and allow--or better yet, encourage--anybody who buys that product to download all the music they want. A mandatory fee would inspire an outcry, but ISPs could solve that by making the "unlimited music" option part of their higher-priced packages--bundle it with more bandwidth, for example. But this can't be a balkanized plan with only Warner content, or it'll fail just as badly as the Sony BMG service.

If the labels each want to build their own celestial jukeboxes, at least they could have a partnership that lets membership in one service transfer to the other services--like ATM cards today.

A few days after I criticized Sony BMG for missing the point of DRM-free music--it's about convenience, which isn't served by forcing customers to walk into stores and buy cards and redeem them online--they proved me wrong by agreeing to release their catalog for sale on Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store. That means you'll be able to buy and download just about any song from Amazon and play it on any software or device. Let's hear it for universal playback, a mere ten years after the first MP3 player went on sale.

Amazon's MP3 store will sell songs from all four major labels.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

Subscription services like Rhapsody and Microsoft's Zune Pass will probably hold out for a little while before agreeing to limit download numbers (like eMusic), and Apple might need to go back to the negotiating table with the labels to secure DRM-free AAC files from all of them.

Now comes the real question: will Amazon (or anybody else) be able to mount a challenge to iTunes, or will integration between iTunes and the iPod/iPhone/iWhatever trump the convenience of universal playback for downloads? There's room for innovation, as iTunes has some gaps--music recommendations and community participation stand out--but competitors will have to be careful to avoid unnecessary complexity if they hope to fill these gaps. That's been the appeal of iTunes since the beginning: simplicity.

Before I get into some of my CES floor finds, I had to comment on the strange announcement from Sony BMG this morning. As previously rumored, Sony will indeed join the other three major labels in selling DRM-free MP3 files to consumers. But wait! First, customers will have to walk into a retailer, plunk down $12.99 for a Platinum Pass card, then redeem a code from the back of the card on Sony's MusicPass.com Web site. And the music itself is being trickled out, starting with only 37 albums. (Press release is here if you want the gory details.)

I'm sure Sony's retail partners love the idea--gift cards draw customers into stores where they buy other products, and of course Sony is imagining that some of those might be Sony products. The only problem is that unprotected MP3s are already available for free on file-trading networks, on CDs borrowed from friends and ripped, on flash drives swapped among friends, and in countless other ways. The other three majors seem to have realized that if they want to compete against free, they have to make purchases as convenient as possible. But apparently Sony's still living in another era.

Looks like the first (and easiest) of my 2008 predictions is more or less coming true by the end of March. According to a story in today's Business Week, unnamed sources at Sony BMG have said that the company will sell at least some songs without DRM by the end of the first quarter. We've heard this rumor before: apparently Sony BMG will participate in a promotion sponsored by Pepsi in which soda buyers get free MP3 downloads from Amazon's music store.

This would be a remarkable turnaround for a company that didn't even let its portable players play MP3s until Sept. 2004--helping Apple's iPod gain a huge lead--and once upon a time surreptitiously installed copy-protection software on users' computers (that incident was the beginning of the end of DRM, in my opinion).

So what changed Sony's mind? According to Business Week, the company has quietly been experimenting with DRM-free files for artists that sell less than 100,000 downloads, and at least one such artist got "mainstream exposure." In other words, as independent musicians have known for a long time, people who download and trade files are the biggest music fans and actually buy more music than non-file-traders. Make your music readily available to those people, and you have a better chance of building a career.