After reading to the end of this Boston Globe article about this weekend's Million DJ March in Washington D.C., I was confused. What are DJs protesting?
One DJ interviewed in the article mentions that he had to fight with a club owner to get paid, and that DJs aren't required to fill out W-2 tax forms. I've got news for him: unless you're a union musician with an airtight contract, being ripped off is an unfortunately frequent part of the performing experience. It's supply and demand--there are more musicians and DJs willing to perform than there are events, venues, and fans.
The official Million DJ March Web site has a post entitled "Why?" (no permalink; scroll to the bottom of the page) that isn't much help either, saying that "there are very few laws protecting this art form as a craft and career" and referring ominously to "self-sufficient machines" that threaten the DJ's career. Robots with turntables? No, probably just MP3 players plugged into the house sound system--no human required.
Digging a little deeper, it looks like the march will be a combination of outdoor party (live DJ performances) and seminar, with speeches and panels on subjects ranging from financial planning to the legal crackdown on mixtapes. I think this last point gets to the nut of the problem, and what the march is really about: the record industry quietly relies on mixtapes to publicize new hip-hop artists, at even as it's seizing thousands of "illegal" CDs and arresting their creators on racketeering charges. The labels can't have it both ways, and apparently the DJ community's going to start making itself heard.
Speaking of mixtapes, last week the online mixtape service Muxtape shut down while it discusses licensing issues with the RIAA. Blogger yewknee.com has an pair of videos in which Muxtape founder Justin Ouellette discusses the legality of third-party online music sharing sites. No answers, but an interesting discussion nonetheless.
(Lead from music-business blog Coolfer.)
Fuzz, a new online music service launched today, tries to recapture some of the teenage excitement of making a mixtape and update it for the online era.
Unfortunately, like some other new online music services, Fuzz suffers from an unclear mission. In this case, it's trying to serve two audiences at once: music fans and musicians.
From a fan's perspective, the biggest draw seems to be an easy way to share music with your friends. After signing up and signing in, you start by clicking the "Deckorator" on the right side of the home page. This launches a Flash application that lets you upload any MP3 from your computer and organize these uploads into a playlist. The playlists are posted in a public forum, but the real draw is the Mixtape Creator, which essentially packages your playlist as a virtual mixtape, complete with canned cover art (you can also create your own). The tape then appears on your profile page, and you can also embed it on any personal Web page or send e-mail to guide your friends to that mixtape.
As an artist, you can create a profile page with 1GB of storage on which you can advertise gigs, invite fans to sign up for your e-mail list, and upload your music to give away or sell. (Fuzz keeps $0.30 cents per transaction, and lets you set your price, although $0.99 per song is the default.) It's sort of like MySpace with digital distribution.
The trouble is, the two goals aren't in perfect alignment. In its effort to attract artists, Fuzz devotes quite a lot of real estate to its artists and their wares. But there aren't a lot of artists signed up yet, which makes it look like a fairly limited online music store. This buries the real draw for users: the ability to create and share custom playlists, including music that users have already bought. If I were in charge of Fuzz's business strategy, I'd start by weighing the site more heavily to users, try and draw a large userbase to create and exchange virtual mixtapes, and then use this large userbase to draw more artists in.
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