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.
Universal Music Group, the largest of the four big music labels, has become the second major to offer DRM-free MP3 downloads.
EMI was first to take the plunge, selling DRM-free files first on Apple's iTunes (in the AAC audio format) and later offering MP3s through a variety of other services via a deal with MediaNet.
Unlike EMI, the Universal deal is only a five-month trial, and the company hasn't announced any such deal with Apple--not surprising, given the two companies' recent history. In fact, nobody should see this as an act of kindness on Universal's part. Rather, it's part of an effort to create more competition in the download market, since having one company (Apple) dominate digital distribution is bad for content owners. Most consumers don't know or care about DRM, but they do want to play the music they've paid for on any device they own. This deal lets Universal sell songs for the most popular digital player in the world, the iPod, without being bound to iTunes.
With two big labels abandoning DRM for downloads, can Sony/BMG and Warner be far behind? Sony in particular has a long history of consumer-unfriendliness when it comes to music and technology, but offering its full catalog as DRM-free downloads would be a nice step toward repairing any lingering bad trust. And Warner Music looks like it could use a bit of help--selling unrestricted MP3 files as broadly as possible might help them out of the doldrums.
An interesting sidenote: the AP reports that the Universal announcement gave some unexpected publicity to a forthcoming digital music service called gBox. I'm not sure how gBox expects to compete with all the other music stores out there (not to mention iTunes), but apparently Universal is buying some search advertising on Google that will direct users toward the service. One unique angle: users will be able to post wishlists of songs for others to buy them as gifts. It sounds similar to Amazon's Wish List feature today, which will almost certainly be extended to Amazon's forthcoming music download store. If you've got Windows and use Internet Explorer, you can check out the beta.
Online community Imeem launched in August 2005, and although I wasn't familiar with the service at the time, it sounds like a blend of several popular features: social networking, instant messaging, blogging and photo sharing. At some point, the company added a feature that would let users create playlists from their personal music collections, then stream these playlists to other users. By spring 2007, the service claimed 16 million active users.
The concept was a bit like MySpace.com, and like that site, Imeem eventually drew a copyright infringement lawsuit from a major record label--Warner Music Group, in this case.
Imeem quickly responded by licensing more than 3 million tracks from various independent labels and publishers, and signing a deal with Snocap to help run a new ad-funded service.
Created by original Napster founder Shawn Fanning, Snocap provides a technology platform to track usage of particular songs so that the owners of those songs can be fairly compensated. It's a nuts-and-bolts kind of business, which is a good place to be in the music industry today: nobody knows exactly how the next-generation music business is going to look, but most agree that it'll involve digital files being exchanged over some kind of network, and somebody needs to track all those exchanges if there's going to be any music industry, rather than a billion independent artists all trying to chase their own narrow slice of action.
A couple of days ago, Warner agreed to drop its lawsuit against Imeem and offer its catalog in exchange for a cut of advertising revenues.
Could this be the model that finally causes legal content-sharing sites to take off? It's not enough for the record industry to build yet another file-sharing network, then wait for customers to show up.
To compete with the "darknet," new services have to offer something singularly interesting, such as ease of use, attractive social-networking features, or integration with existing products and services (which seems to be an approach that's working for iLike). If that's the case, these services will build an userbase until they finally cross the threshold where one or more major content owners recognize them, at which point they'll have to take the necessary steps to get legal. Sort of a completion-backward principle for online music.
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