TheWayoftheWeb

Apologies for the title, which references Feargal Sharkey’s 80’s pop hit - I couldn’t face linking to it, so I went with the most famous track from his days with The Undertones.

Much better than reading his thoughts on stopping music piracy reported by the BBC, where his thoughts as Chief Executive of umbrella organisation Music UK made me wonder if he’d had a Teenage Kick to the head at some point.

“Who would have ever predicted five years ago that there would have been such a thing as iTunes, which now has an 80% global share of all downloads,”

Well, since MP3s became widely available in the early-to-mid 1990s, I’d have said it was pretty obvious it would become a dominant force in changing music distribution. And having witnessed how record companies responded (e.g. Jammie Thomas), I’d have also put my life savings on a tech company becoming the dominant solution.

“The music industry is often having to wait and see what works,”

No it isn’t. The music industry is choosing to wait and see what works because it’s scared of innovating and changing in the face of losing the reason for existing - physical distribution. Radiohead weren’t waiting to see what works, and neither were Nine Inch Nails.

“At some point, our song writers and musicians have to be treated with enough respect that they can at least carry on with some basic quality of life that will allow them to carry on creating and performing year after year.”

I’d suggest reading Kevin Kelly’s excellent post on how artists can exist with financial success in The Long Tail - 1000 True Fans. I’d also ask when respect started directly relating to being paid a living wage? And why my respect for a musician should be risked by a record company getting my Internet Service Provider to cut me off from what I consider a basic living requirement in the modern age?

Just like a Good Heart is Hard to Find, so is respect, because it is something which is earned - not an entitlement by releasing a record. If an artist earns my respect for their talent, then I’m happy to pay money directly to them - by going to their gigs, buying their T-shirts, buying their cds and constantly mentioning them. Like this chap for example.

And for some further reading, here’s my previous posts on the music industry: Behind the Music, More fuel for the record company bonfire, and Record companies are really screwed.

If the record industry wants to survive in one form or another, there are plenty of people who could lead it forward. Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, or even someone with some professional musical experience as well as the vision needed, Jonathan MacDonald. Christ, offer me enough money, unlimited downloads and some gig tickets and I’ll come and sort it out for you. It’s pretty simple.

1. The current model will not be saved. Use the remaining profits to find the new model.
2. The size and power of record companies will never be the same. You screwed up by waiting this long. Get over it. I lost sympathy for you as a child when I read about how Stax was bludgeoned out of existence in the 1970s. Record companies will be much smaller, with fewer employees, and they’ll need to work harder. Like everyone else.
3. Innovate like crazy. Use the money you still have to throw 1000 quick and easy ideas out there. Give music away. Create better opportunities around live events and merchandise. Use ways to reach the truly passionate fans.
4. Embrace people that are pirating and sharing your music. They’re doing the same job John Peel did when he played an E.P made by The Undertones just as they were about to split up, and made them famous. If I found someone who was sharing music from artists with 1000s of people worldwide, I’d make him Head of Distribution!
5. Start hooking up with the people doing cool stuff without you - and hope you can bring something to the party to let you join. SliceThePie, Amie Street, Sellaband, Sonoma Wireworks, Blip FM, TheNextBigSound.

If I can find these sites as a music fan with a tenuous relationship to the music industry, what on earth are the people in your offices doing with their time?

If there’s one industry that is poised on the precipice of destruction in a time of financial crisis, I’d predict it’s record companies that are about to imitate the myth of lemming suicide.

Good Morning Lemmings! (pic by Snowrunner - CC Licence)

I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I’m not the only one, as Jamie Burke’s presentation shows (hat tip to Dave Cushman). Or the sometimes profane and provocative Bob Lefsetz, found via Seth Godin.

But the biggest proof that the record industry is a blinkered carthorse in an electronic age comes from Doug Morris, the CEO of Universal Music Group, who have a 32% market share of the legally provided recorded music sector (Notice how specific I have to be for clarity!). From an original interview in Billboard, Rafat Ali wrote about the comedy highlight on the Paid Content blog.

Now, to be fair, Doug does make some sense, and even promotes the fact that a good product is essential:

“There are certain rules in the business that never change. Now, you get people who enter the business at later stages in their lives who never believe that. They believe that if you get a record played a lot, it’ll sell more . . . it’s all nonsense. If you get a hit record played three times, it’s like it lights up, it’s like magic.”

And considering his success so far, that’s a pretty good endorsement of getting a good product out there for people to pick up and run with. But then it goes horribly, horribly wrong:

On RIAA lawsuits:

“It was an act to try and publicize that this is stealing and this is wrong. That’s one way to look at it. Did it work? I don’t know. Maybe it stopped some people from stealing, maybe it didn’t . . . Did they deserve to get caught? Probably. People don’t like policemen. I understand that. And maybe they’re right. But when you see all the stores close and you lose half your employees and you can’t sign bands to record them because people are stealing, we do things to try and stop it. You have a lot of people who think that things should be free. I don’t know how they think we should produce it for free, but there’s a lot of people who aren’t logical.”

If you want to know how a free business model works, speak to Chris Anderson! And then it gets worse…

“What I take seriously is the fact that we’re people who create art. Whether you like our art or not, it’s what we do. My whole point of view is this problem we’re in, which is caused by technology, will be solved by technology. Some genius on the other side will figure out how to stop the piracy that seems very logical to me.”

I’m not sure how good you have to be at business for it to become ‘art’, but I’m fairly sure the creators of art in the music industry are generally musicians, producers, video directors, graphic designers etc. I’m also sure I haven’t seen an Excel spreadsheet on display, even in the Tate Modern.

The only possible way that technology might be able to have a serious effect on digital piracy is if it’s supported by a totalitarian government and an army of state workers monitoring everything you do online *ahem* China *ahem*.

For anecdotal evidence, somewhere in my possession is a bootlegged cassette, a pirated vinyl LP, and my favourite, a pirated triple CD boxset with a hastily printed booklet inside! Strangely I don’t have any illegal MP3s that I know of, because I made the conscious decision to support bands that make them available legally for free, and to listen to the rest via Last.fm or similar alternative.

This ‘War on Piracy’ will be about as effective as the ‘War on Drugs’ and the ‘War on Speeding’. So not particularly effective at all. Mainly because it’s not going to have an effect on the mass populace who are shaping the entertainment industry in the way they want it to be usable for them - and the mechanisms to do this have become far, far more accessible and easy to use than in the 20th Century.

That’s why free music is provided by Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead (for remixes), Marillion, Everclear, etc. (I’m not including bands making freebies available for a limited time, like the Charlatans. Or the 1000s of great individual bands and musicians just making stuff free.

In fact, as I tenously looked for historical examples to make myself seem more intelligent, the Prohibition sprang to mind.

• It gave rise to gangsters including Al Capone, who had 10,000 outlets in Chicago alone. And we have a booming business in sites offering illegal downloads, alongside P2P software.
• Cost of enforcing Prohibition was high. By the same token, the cost of protecting the Recording Industry (i.e. record companies) is high enough to need increased royalty rates, targetting online radio by jacking the rates as high as possible.
• The benefits on Prohibition were always debated. Some doctors even prescribed alcohol for certain ailments. By the same token, the merits of targetting individual downloaders are an often-argued topic.
• Prohibition became increasingly unpopular during The Great Depression and was repealed in 1933. At a time of economic crisis and personal expenditure on entertainment evaporating, could this be the end?

There’s a future for musicians - the ones that create everything.

There’s a future for music producers, video directors, graphic designers, make-up artists, recording engineers, lighting engineers, music shops, guitar builders, etc, etc. All the people who provide tools, or add value within the music creation and distribution process - although some might find their options are reduced.

There’s a future for music distributors and influencers - Magazines (phew!), Radio, TV. And Internet Radio, Online Video, Blogs, Forums, Fan sites, Fanzines, Official sites, MP3 providers.

What I can’t work out is how the value that Record Companies offered (Up front money effectively ‘loaned’ to artists, and contacts at broadcast media) are now essential, or even important.

Can anyone help explain it to me?

(Funnily enough, I’ve been listening to great music during writing this. All on Last.fm!)

It’s been interesting following recent events concerning Digg, especially considering my previous posts outlining the personal and idealogical problems I have with Digg, and the alternative ways available to get crowd sourced news.

I just read a great summary post by David Chen on Mashable, ‘Digg’s recent bans and the limits of crowdsourcing‘ which is a comprehensive look at what David calls ‘building a flawed system’, and the lessons learned - as well as looking at why Digg has banned top users, and how the business strategy is changing.

It reminded me of something I’d noticed recently. Here’s a graph from Compete, comparing Digg (blue line), with an alternative social content site, Mixx.com (red line).

Now, while it’s obvious that Digg is massively ahead at the moment, it appears to have levelled off significantly - and at the same time, notice how Mixx has grown around the same time as the Digg banhammer started making an appearance?

Now look at Mixx in detail:

Anyone else see something kickstarting some growth around Apri/May 2008?

Hmmmm.

Two things spring to mind. One is that Digg has vocally supported the community, and allowed top users a longstanding reign over the rest of the site - which means changing things, particularly without a clear warning, is always going to lead to problems - the question will be how big the problems will become?

And secondly, so many web services which seem to embrace, support and provide a Web 2.0, social media type approach, actually fall down on the Customer Service which is preached by those using them. I’ve always found Digg support to be incredibly varied, but always anonoymous. And the fall back is always on ‘the best for Digg users’ without ever explicitly saying what that means.

Other social news aggregations and voting sites like Reddit have also seen some growth, although in Reddit’s case, it may be down to other factors, such as opening up their service to Open Source installations.

But the fact that the high profile, long term devotees of Digg could be powering the rise in a close rival (in terms of the type of service provided) could prove to be a very interesting case study - if the very people Digg banned turn out to be able to power the rise of a challenge.

This all came from two articles by two of my Twitter connections, starting with Charles Arthur writing on the Guardian website about the need for television companies to come to terms with filesharing. In it, he suggested TV media firms could make low quality versions of their shows available as they are broadcast as a way to encourage people to download a high resolution version.

Peeebeee (Peter Bowyer) examined the link Charles had made between music and TV companies and the effect downloads are having, and suggested that the way the music industry can monetise is not necessarily applicable (low quality freebie for driving high quality purchases), mainly because music will be replayed over and over.. .

It’s taken me a while to respond because I wanted to add something to the conversation, and try to hypothesize how I’d monetise online television. (If you think it’s taking me a while, try asking Google about Youtube!) And although I don’t work in television (Aside from the sadly discontinued MCN Daily…*shudders*), my day job consists of working out how it can be possible to fund a large magazine and website company from engaging community.

My theory is that the answer is more obvious than you’d think, because it’s something that film companies have already done, when they sold us on DVDs. Aside from allowing us to posture about the quality on our widescreen television, and pause without burning through a tape, DVDs convinced many people to part with money for the value of the extras which were included - even for films they might already own on video.

So expand the same theory to online. I may already be able to watch a film or TV programme via filesharing or a legitimate streaming channel, but what could be added to a package which would make it worth parting with a small amount of money? Could you include DVD-style extras and outtakes? Could you also include background information? How about putting complete series together online, or the works of a particular writer, director or actor. Which could then be sold on DVD, and as a complete download?

And what about also including all the related links, reading material, and even User Created Content?

Now I could find a lot of this via a fair bit of web searching, but that takes time and effort - and increasingly the exponential growth of material online means people are looking for ways to filter content, and aggregate it efficiently, and are willing to pay for it. As Steve Jobs once pointed out, finding a copy of a song via filesharing can translate into working for less than minimum wage - fine for time-rich teenagers, but not for anyone feeling time-starved.

And providing best-of reading material for certain content would be a incredibly useful for information rich shows. Ironically, while my partner has been watching Hollywood films on DVD over the last two weekends, I’ve had the time to watch the inspirational ‘Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams’ by Randy Pausch, and also ‘An anthropological introduction to Youtube‘ by Michael Wesch.

Both times the Youtube video was an hour or more long, which is fine for me, but would be better in DVD format for the non ‘digital natives’ I’d love to shave them with. They both refer to people, places, and reference works which might be useful to have in digital and print form. Both lecturers have previous work which would be useful to have included (not just videos, but written articles and academic works etc). And neither of those works is likely to even appear on a mainstream (Say Freeview for the sake of argument) TV channel in the UK, where we have to make do with a short internet show once a week on the BBC, and the occasional programme discussing the risks of online networks.

Essentially, any content which doesn’t require high budgets and production values is already legally uploaded and available on Youtube. Anything that does incur a huge cost is losing part of it’s audience to filesharing, or is being served online in ways that can be frustrating (You can’t watch a show on BBC iPlayer after seven days, and that’s about the best of the bunch). None of it is giving me a reason to pay a couple of pounds to get extra value, as opposed to the imported DVD boxsets I own, signed by the director, and containing material I wouldn’t have otherwise seen at the time without a lot of hunting around.

It’s not about criminalizing fans who fileshare and promote your product. It’s about making use of the advantages of being large scale content creators and giving those fans reasons why it makes sense for them to spend an amount to invest. iTunes isn’t the best music store in the history of the world, but if you’ve got an iPod it’s easy to go there and spend a few pounds/dollars, rather than sorting out filesharing software and downloads. Despite access to films online, and the Xbox film service permanently attached to my HDTV, I still subscribe to Lovefilm, because it’s easier to get films delivered than order them online legally, due to the shocking state of broadband speeds outside major cities in the UK. And that’s what has cut my DVD purchasing, way more than availability online.

Give me a reason to pay for TV and film which justifies itself in terms of making my life easier, and giving me more than enough value to justify it to myself, and it won’t just be me who will be tempted…

NB: And actually, artists are already pioneering this in the music industry. Just look at the $1619420 Trent Reznor made from the recent Ghosts album.