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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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.
I love covering music software because the pace of evolution is so fast. I guess everybody's looking for the next billion-dollar business (after iTunes) to help replace declining CD sales.
Last week, I blogged about Spotify, a free and legal music player that offers a massive library of music on demand. Unfortunately, Spotify's library has some big gaps because of legal disputes with rights-holders, and it's not available in the U.S.
A couple days later, software developer David Nelson contacted me about Muziic, a company he started with his dad--he's 15(!) and has gone from public high school to online private high school to pursue this project. After checking it out for a few days, I think it's got just as much of a chance of revolutionizing how we listen to music as Spotify does.
Great selection, but black-on-black doesn't get high marks in most usability tests.
Like Spotify, Muziic offers a free downloadable piece of client software with an iTunes-like interface and offers on-demand access to millions of streaming songs. Unlike Spotify, I had no problem finding huge catalogs from artists that are notoriously prickly about posting their music online, including Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and Radiohead. It also did a great job with all of my more obscure test cases.
How did an unknown company run by a 15-year-old and his dad pull off this incredible licensing coup? Easy--they've basically built a customized front-end to YouTube. Any song that's been uploaded to YouTube is available in Muziic, including a lot of music that isn't available on most commercial services, like the full Pink Floyd's performance at Live 8 and Led Zeppelin's one-off performance in 2007.
Unfortunately, a dispute between Warner Music and YouTube earlier this year means that a lot of recordings owned by Warner are no longer available. But in a lot of cases, users have filled the gaps with (probably unauthorized) recordings from the artists--so while I can't get my favorite studio recordings from Neil Young or the Flaming Lips, there are dozens live nuggets from each of them.
With any luck, Warner and Google (YouTube's parent company) will resolve their dispute and these gaps will be filled. In the meantime, the Nelsons can work on some of the fit-and-finish problems I found with Muziic. The Web site doesn't render properly in Firefox 3.0. The high-quality audio option didn't work for me--I think it's supposed to render YouTube's default Flash audio into AAC on the fly, but the description doesn't make much sense so I can't really tell. (The default audio sounded fine anyway--at least no worse than MP3, which of course isn't so great.) They could use some professional design help--I couldn't maximize the player to fill the screen, there's a lot of unused space in the margins, and the black on black toolbar sliders are awfully hard to use for those of us who have no patience to download different skins.
Overall, though, this is a pretty interesting and impressive piece of work. Muziic also offers an encoder that apparently lets you upgrade your MP3s before uploading them to YouTube--I didn't test this as I'm more interested in listening than sharing, but I'll give it a look later this week and let you know what I think. More important, Muziic (and Spotify) are finally showing the world how compelling a free, legal, on-demand music service can be--nearly a decade after Napster introduced us to the concept.
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On Saturday, Warner Music pulled all videos involving its music from YouTube after failing to reach a licensing deal with the Google-owned video site. (More accurately, it asked YouTube to pull them, and YouTube was forced by law to comply.)
Now, Silicon Alley Insider reports that Warner and the other three majors--Universal, Sony, and EMI--may be in talks to create their own YouTube competitor.
Before you scoff, recall the lesson of Hulu. First announced in late 2007 by NBC Universal and News Corp, Hulu was originally scorned as the "clown company"--everybody assumed that these old media dinosaurs wouldn't be able to figure out how to offer users a clean Web experience, and that users would never sit through advertisements. A year later, it's getting about a quarter as many unique viewers as YouTube--and with much less content and no presence outside the U.S. AP just picked it as its Web site of the year.
A label-sponsored video site may be a similar winner, if they design it for ease of use and are able to negotiate all the rights to post the content we really want. (Like videos of the one-off Zeppelin reunion last year, which were pulled from YouTube almost as quickly as they appeared.)
There may not be a ton of demand for watching music videos on the Web, but think of all the user-generated videos featuring major-label music. The big problem is that nobody really knows how to sell advertising against online video yet, but look ahead five years, and this is a good bet.
R.E.M. fans (like me!) and music-biz folks interested in exploring new ways to use the Web should check out the two-part series on Hypebot.com about the band's online campaign for its latest album, Accelerate.
The posts are written by Ethan Kaplan, the Warner Bros. vice president of technology who worked with the band to design a technology-intensive publicity campaign.
Highlights include:
• Ninetynights.com, which included exclusive short videos of the recording process.
• REMDublin.com, which evolved into a wiki-style collaboration between fans and resulted in fan-created videos scoring top-popularity spots on YouTube.
• Two dedicated URLs for the band's first two videos from the album.
• Sites devoted to meticulously tracking news about the album and the progress of the tour.
All good stuff, and the Ninetynights.com site did spark my awareness that a new R.E.M. album was coming out. But Kaplan failed to answer the main question. As he wrote, "After a string of disappointing releases (one artistically, all three commercially), the band decided to regroup and refocus...."
So did the Web campaign help sales?
Well, Accelerate did sell 115,500 copies in the U.S. during its debut week in April. And by July 30, it was up more than 300,000, according to SoundScan. That's already more than the 232,000 U.S. sales of its execrable last album, Around the Sun, and close to the 415,000 of its underrated 2001 album, Reveal.
But how much of that has been due to the Web campaign, and how much of that is due to the fact that Accelerate didn't totally suck?
On a related note, I read a long but excellent blog posting from a longtime musician that basically says: forget about the business; music's power has nothing to do with unit sales and marketing models.
It's required reading if you're spent more time thinking about In Rainbows pay-what-you-like download model than listening to the actual record.
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.
Back in the old days (like 2007), the marketing strategy for new albums included a prerelease "rolling thunder" PR campaign. First came a single, followed shortly by the video.
Then a few chosen reviewers would get early copies with "NOT FOR RESALE" imprinted across the front, allowing them to have their reviews ready slightly before or on the release date. Retail outlets would receive promotional matter, like cardboard cutouts of the band standing in front of the album cover. A few warm-up shows would feature songs from the record. Meanwhile, somebody--a reviewer, a disgruntled record company employee--would leak the entire album to file-trading services.
Jack White and Warner Bros. have decided to dispense with all this for the upcoming release of the Raconteurs' new album, Consolers of the Lonely. Today, the band announced that the entire album will be released simultaneously online, on CD, and on vinyl next Tuesday. No advance singles, no reviewers' copies, and perhaps not even a video at release (they just finished shooting it).
The band would have waited even longer, but knew that the news of the album's imminent release would have slipped out, and didn't want this quick-release strategy to be seen as a reaction.
And why not? Radio stations hardly play this kind of rock 'n' roll anymore, and fans don't need reviewers to tell them what to think: the huge Jack White fans will buy it regardless, and more casual fans probably would have formed their opinion after sampling the leaked version anyway. This way, the band saves promotional money and the release date might actually be cause for excitement, rather than the jaded "oh, I downloaded that months ago" response that greets most album releases today.
I picked this book up while traveling yesterday, read a few pages in the bookstore, bought it, and have blazed through the first 150 pages in little more than a day. It's one of the funniest and most entertaining books about music, culture, and business that I've ever read.
Like a lot of suburban white boys of a certain age, Dan Kennedy dreamed about being a rock star in his youth, but reality eventually intervened and he got a corporate gig. Only in this case, the corporation was Atlantic Records--Led Zeppelin's record label, as he points out. Or rather, the corporation was AOL Time Warner (this was 2002, before they dropped the "AOL").
What follows is a hilarious and often scathing look at big money rock and roll. For example, if Jewel sings a song about not selling out, then sells it to Schick to promote a new razor, is she a clever ironist or a sellout? Under what circumstances is it acceptable for a hip-hop artist to smoke pot in a conference room? Does the ability to make eye contact in a meaningful way with everybody in a room really guarantee you a seven-figure salary, or is it merely your hair and the fact that you haven't cut it since you discovered Rush?
The best sequence, though, is where Kennedy discovers Limewire and comes up with an idea to help Warner capitalize on the digital era: digital-only contracts for recording artists, with lower up-front payments and first right of refusal for other types of recordings, such as CDs. His boss thinks his idea's good enough that he's called to present it to various corporate heads in New York and--via teleconference--Los Angeles.
Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for us readers, his idea is eviscerated by a woman he calls Angry New Media Chick and her sidekick, Loud Man. As Kennedy puts it, "They both make great money, and it seems like anytime they think they're going to have to do more than maintain the company Web site they start screaming dot-com words that the senior vice president co-people don't understand." (Example: "Impossible! Back-end architecture! Cookies and lasers! Server-side technology!") He continues, "And they've got an awesome corner on things, since we're talking about a place where anybody above middle management has to yell to their assistants for help with something as technical as, say, an e-mail attachment."
I would have thought he was exaggerating before I read the Wired interview with Doug Morris in November.
At any rate, if you want to know why EMI is laying off 2,000 people this month and have a laugh at the same time, Rock On has just come out in paperback.
Amazon's digital music store, Amazon MP3, is now offering songs administered by Warner Music in the DRM-free MP3 format. This gives the store 2.9 million tracks, and leaves Sony/BMG as the last major label holdout. Not bad, considering Amazon MP3 launched only in September and is technically still in beta.
Amazon also said that 2007 was its best holiday season since it opened in 1994--and it wasn't just a strong economy, as other retailers reported a generally weak season. But I don't know if Amazon's effectively using its traffic to promote its digital offering: when you run a search for an artist at the Amazon home page, audio CDs tend to dominate the search results, with downloads coming quite far down the first page.
