So, does the ‘massive downloader’ scenario I outlined in the previous post account for all download traffic? Of course not.
My own torrenting experience has been almost exclusively to get digital copies of music I own physical hard copies of. For me, torrenting wasn’t a replacement for buying music, rather it was a replacement for buying a USB turntable to legally convert my vinyl collection to MP3… or actually, borrowing one – I hope the BPI wouldn’t be in favour of people buying unnecessary hardware for limited use. Continue reading “What’s A Download Worth Pt II: Recovery and Discovery”
Following on from the BPI and their mad statistic that £200 MILLION is lost in UK music revenue due to ‘illegal downloading’, (their head of public affairs attempted to defend the notion, based on ‘research’ they’d done at the all party meeting last week. Balls.) I thought it’d be worth talking about what a download is worth.
Because, clearly, a collection of bytes on a harddrive isn’t, in and of itself, worth anything. It’s also not ‘taken’ from a central repository of bytes that gets smaller as it is dipped into. In fact, every time a new person downloads it, more ‘product’ is able to exist. If bands were in a situation where for every CD they gave away, they were given another 2 CDs to give away, they’d give everything away, because CD ownership is a tangible, measurable thing, and having 100,000 CDs out there, and not have lost a penny to make it happen, would be awesome.
You may or may not have noticed that at the bottom of the Bandcamp page for each of my albums and tracks, instead of the little copyright symbol, there’s a ‘Creative Commons’ license note, with a symbol and the phrase ‘some rights reserved’.
Creative Commons licensing is a way of putting a legal framework around allowing people the share/remix/reuse your work for non-profit/non-commercial purposes while maintaining your right to license for-profit usage as you always have done. So if you want to give a copy of one of my albums you downloaded to a friend, it’s perfectly legal to do so. Continue reading “Thoughts On Creative Commons Licensing”
” Warner chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr said: “Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed.
“The ‘get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price’ strategy is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future.” “
Now, that’s not a lot to go on, so please bear that in mind as I write.
However, here are a few mistakes that seem apparent from Warner’s position as expressed in the article.
‘Listen to all the music you want for free’ is not the same as ‘get all the music you want for free’ – streaming ≠ownership, and portability is a chargeable commodity. Hence the reason I describe Spotify Lite as on-demand radio.
‘Net positive for the industry’ is an utterly spurious metric. Why should any one way of accessing music be ‘net positive for the industry?’ especially one that is an awesome discovery platform that costs neither side much at all. Spotify is all about discovery. And people can only be fans and therefor financially invested in music they listen to. If getting them to listen is free, the world is a much better place than it was when advertising dollars ruled the discovery game.
Warner are talking about Warner, not as Carl Morris pointed out on Twitter, what is best for artists, genres or regions. If streaming services could be proved to be having a detrimental effect on a particular artist’s career, then pulling their music from the service would perhaps be a decision worth discussing. Blanket judgements for an entire media empire – without considering how many artists are themselves active supporters of streaming as a concept, and who are able to directly attribute an increase in new listeners to the ability of their fans to share links to free streams with their friends – are worse than useless. They’re reckless.
There’s no mention here of whether or not sales have dropped across the board out of line with any projections of how the curve would be without streaming services. If streaming is a discovery mechanism, then the revenue would naturally be found elsewhere, as we saw with the Lady GaGa story of small payouts from Spotify, but still being able to sell 20 MILLION paid downloads in the same time-period.
People paying a tenner for Spotify is no better or worse for the industry than them paying a tenner to eMusic to buy the things they’ve found using Spotify, or spending ten quid a month on CDs or other downloads. And lets not forget that statistically, those who spend £120 a year on music are a pretty small minority of music consumers. They always have been. A tenner a month is a lot for yer average listener to fork out to rent some streams (if you stop paying, all the content and stored playlists you’ve created on your mobile device is lost. Any downloads happening via the Spotify interface are happening at 79p a track, via 7digital (more big industry stupidity – make them cheaper, you eejits!)
When I listen to music, whether free or paid, I’m not thinking about ‘the industry’. I’m not supporting ‘the industry’ when I buy music, I’m giving it to artists in exchange for them being awesome. Awesomeness is something I’m willing to put a cash value on. As are lots of people.
Discovery is something that benefits the person being discovered at least as much as the one doing the discovery – that’s the foundational principle of advertising, and is why record labels pay for adverts. They’re even willing to illegally pay for airtime.
Here, Warner are being retrogressive, making blanket decisions based on ‘the industry’ not artists, have no idea what streaming services actually provide to their users, and don’t appear considered how awesome free discovery mechanisms are for everyone along the chain outside of their old industry metrics that placed cash (from both sides) in front of the discovery process.
Another Major Label FAIL.
Meanwhile, here’s some awesome music you can have for free, or pay for if you want to thank Ben Walker for his awesomeness:
No, she’s not saying file-sharing is OK. She’s now saying that it’s only bad if you DON’T charge for it. Yup, she’d rather you bought bootleg copies of her album from the crim in your local market than got it from a friend who bought it legitimately.
Right, so “Lord” Mandelson has announced that the Government is indeed going to go ahead with their unenforceable nonsensical plans to “cripple the internet bandwidth of persistent file sharers“. Here’s a few highlights of the plans:
the cut-off is a ‘last resort‘, used if people don’t comply with requests.
the cost of monitoring will be “shared between ISPs and content providers” – that means that the labels that are already incapable of making money for the musicians signed to them are now going to fund this Wile E. Coyote-esque plan to catch people sharing files.
The ‘trade-off’ is that copyright ‘law’ will be rejigged so that now – WOW – “someone who has bought a CD would be able to copy it to their iPod or share it with family members without acting unlawfully.” (does he not remember listening to tapes made from his mum’s record collection in the car in the 80s??) Continue reading “"Piracy" And The 3 Strikes Law – A Few Thoughts From A Working Musician”
I know, I’m a week late writing about Lily Allen and her attempts to back Peter Mandelson’s campaign to have ‘persistent file sharers’ internet connections taken away. (and in the meantime, she’s taken down her anti-file sharing blog, and allegedly quit music!)
There have been a lot of responses to this, many of them suggesting that Lily (and her brothers in arms James Blunt and Gary Barlow) don’t make music worth buying so they deserve to have it pirated…
So let’s deal with that first. Your (or my) impression of the ‘worth’ of Lily Allen’s music has no bearing whatsoever on whether she’s talking sense or not. She could be John Coltrane saying this, or she could be the Reynolds Girls. It makes no odds.
So, does the ‘massive downloader’ scenario I outlined in the previous post account for all download traffic? Of course not.
