Future Of Music

From William Gibson, in Wired

"Today’s audience isn’t listening at all – it’s participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record,
the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The
record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very
nature of the digital.
Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process
generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?).
To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply comic.
The record industry, though it may not know it yet, has gone the way of
the record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the
mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two
centuries…

We seldom legislate new technologies into being. They emerge, and we
plunge with them into whatever vortices of change they generate. We
legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we
can, while our new technologies redefine us – as surely and perhaps as
terribly as we’ve been redefined by broadcast television."

Read God’s Little Toys

A study published today by UK research firm The Leading Question claims that people who share music files online also buy
four and a half times more music online than your average music
listener. Instead of tragically costing the industry
money, these people are apparently very interested in finding music online, and as a
result, buying more music from legitimate online channels.  Who’d of thunk?

"There’s a myth that all illegal downloaders are
mercenaries hell-bent on breaking the law in pursuit of free music. In
reality they are often hardcore fans who are extremely enthusiastic
about adopting paid-for services as long as they are suitably
compelling," said Paul Brindley, director of The Leading Question.

Perhaps the try before you buy theory of marketing is at work here afterall.  Or maybe these folks are just pre-disposed to transacting online.  But nevertheless, this study is one of many that confirms that there appears to be no direct correlation between filesharing and declining music sales.  Record companies should face the truth head-on and find ways to make file sharing work for everyone, as we suggest in the book.

The Digital Age and The Future of Music.

It’s no secret that the music industry is challenged on multiple fronts. Now that we’re in the digital age, how can they change their outlook? Celia Hirschman, KCRW’s music industry commentator, speaks with Gerd Leonhard, co-author of The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution.

Listen to the Interview (Real)

Winamp Creator Justin Frankel has built a collaborative online jamming environment for musicians. Frankel’s new project, Ninjam, allows musicians to jam and record over the internet.  A high speed connection is required, but the latency of the internet still persists as a problem.  But turning a strength into a weakness, Ninjam records each musician on a central server, then plays the collective tune back a measure later.  Frankel does have plans to upgrade server architecture to a more distributed model, but for now, this is just an alpha release.  Check it out.

Ninjam.com

Sales down almost eight percent in first half of 2005

Gloom returned to the record business in the first half of 2005, as album sales dropped 7.6 percent compared with the same period last year, despite blockbusters from 50 Cent, Mariah Carey and Coldplay.

In 2004, a two percent rise in sales from the previous year encouraged many that, after a three-year slump, the record industry might be on the road to recovery. But now the gains look more like a blip than a turnaround. "Everybody involved in the music industry
is concerned, because there’s a problem and it doesn’t seem like it’s being fixed," says the Firm’s Daniel Field, manager of Audioslave and Weezer, who hit Number One and Two, respectively, on the pop charts in early summer. "You walk into a record store and you can just feel it."

Read the Rolling Stone article.

The US Senate has recently turned its attention to online music licensing. The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property initiated the discussions Tuesday. At root is whether the current licensing framework for digital services is fair and clear enough to promote entry and growth. Rob Glaser of RealNetworks argued that there are inequalities which need to be addressed. "By clarifying and simplifying the compulsory composition mechanical license and the statutory sound recording performance license, this Subcommittee and the Congress will provide RealNetworks and the entire online music industry with business and legal certainty and dramatically reduced complexity," argued Glaser.  Music publishers have recently been showing greater interest in some sort of unified licensing scheme on account of the detrimental effect it would have on piracy and illegal downloads.

Read the  story at Digital Music News.

Check out this very cool web interface for a mobile music service.

YES.

The new names in digital music are familiar, but they specialize in commercial music. Everyone knows Apple Computer as the company that is now moving more iPods than Macs. Former peer-to-peer bad boy Napster is now the lobotomized pimp of commercial music subscription services….

The broadband migration continues. Bandwidth and servers get
perpetually cheaper, yet the market seems to think that the only money
to be made in digital music is in pitching popular tracks for a buck or
less, or coming up with some portable aural smorgasbord solution of
commercial tunes. In a word, strategy is primitive.

That’s why I believe that, years from now, the major labels won’t be
the same batch of old-school vinyl pushers you see today. As ludicrous
as it may seem, I think that the real power brokers in the music
industry will be Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

Read more from Rick Aristotle and the Motley Fool

From The Future of Music book

There is no direct proof that file sharing itself is hurting the music
industry. Record companies are touting this single-bullet theory to
explain away all the ingrained problems of an antiquated business
reaching the end of its life cycle. Indeed, one can argue that file
sharing is the cheapest form of music marketing there ever was.

Danny Goldberg, Chairman and CEO of Artemis Records, said, "I
don’t think there was any more downloaded song than 50 Cent’s [in
2003], and yet it sold nine million albums. So there were nine million
households that felt, despite the fact that they had seen the video,
despite the fact that they could get it online, that they wanted to
hear the full statement that 50 Cent was making."

File sharing should not be equated with the type of piracy that
is affecting the music industry on a global scale. Traditionally, in
the music business, piracy refers to the activities of organized
criminals who manufacture illegal copies of CDs, DVDs, tapes, and
records, then photocopy the covers and sell the illicit product on the
street for a steep profit. Pirates in many countries run pressing
plants that churn out CDs by the millions without paying the mechanical
reproduction licenses and mechanical license fees to the owner of the
master recordings. The International Federation of the Phonographic
Industry estimates that the number of illegally copied and/or
manufactured CDs increased 14 percent in 2002 and an additional 4.3
percent in 2003, to 1.1 billion units; and worldwide, 35 percent of all
CDs sold are illegal copies. It is estimated that the value of the
pirated music sold amounts to $4.6 billion, and these figures don’t
even include online file sharing or recording of audio streams. In 2002
the global recorded music market declined 7 percent to $32 billion, and
another 7.6 percent in 2003. Leaving file sharing out of the equation,
CD piracy as defined above, could account for the majority of the
decline in CD sales all by itself.

Read more from chapter 3 of the Future of Music here