If one ever had to come up with an award for "Clueless Industry of the Millennium," the music industry would win by a landslide. What with the US' RIAA suing homeless people and now the UK's Music Business Group attempting to tax iPods, it's shocking that these jokers get paid at all. It's like Cirque de Soleil. Without the Soleil.
The MBG, conveniently overlooking decades of vinyl-to-cassette personal copying, declares:
We acknowledge that consumers clearly want to format shift and also place enormous value on the transferability of music. Music fans clearly deserve legal clarity in this area as well as the freedom to enjoy any music they have legitimately obtained.
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The music industry seems to be taking one step forward, and then promptly taking one thousand steps backward. In Universal Music Group v. Augusto, Universal Music Group (UMG) is suing someone for putting its promotional CDs for sale on eBay, seriously altering the standard view of what First Sale doctrine means.
At issue here is who owns the promo CDs. Universal argues strenuously that it never transferred ownership when it sent them out and that the discs are merely "licensed" to those who receive them. Each disc includes text that makes clear that "this CD is the property of the record company and is licensed to the intended recipient for personal use only." According to Universal...
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For years the music industry has fought the idea that music should be free. Today, it has decided to play along.
In a sign that the music labels are finally desperate enough to experiment with new models of distribution and monetization, more and more bands and their labels are following in the footsteps of Radiohead to discover that "free" can pay.
... Read moreNow a host of new services, with the backing of major labels, are promising to revolutionise how music is distributed by offering millions of tracks, from much-hyped wannabes to established acts such as U2, for nothing.
Competing for attention at the Midem trade show, the services promise a global jukebox, paying for the free music by attracting advertising. Meanwhile, some acts are queueing up to swap their deals with labels for agreements with big advertisers which would further blur the line between bands and brands.
Ask Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead, whether the band's foray into a "pay what you want" model for music was successful and he'll tell you, as he told David Byne (Talking Heads) in this Wired interview:
In terms of digital income, we've made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever--in terms of anything on the Net. And that's nuts. It's partly due to the fact that EMI wasn't giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff.
Sounds great, except that he's comparing "more money" to "zero money." Apparently the music companies don't pay new bands (or old?) squat for digital sales (read: iTunes) of their music. I can't fathom why. I suppose because they don't have to.
But where the interview becomes useful and interesting is when Yorke talks through the relevance of this new model for new bands. Teaser: it's not.
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