Continuing the weblog, with occasional discussion and outbreaks of bitter argument, about news relating to the deconstruction of the music business: with side forays, to steal polygon's description, into "intellectual property, freedom of expression, electronic media, corporate control, and evolving technology." This quarter we have a major news story, the introduction of Sen. Hollings' proposed Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), formerly known as the SSSCA. Dicussion on that proposal is in Agora item 13 ( item:agora41,13 ). This item is linked between the Spring Agora conference and the Music conference. All previous versions of this item can be found in the music2 and music3 conferences.165 responses total.
You didn't steal polygon's description. Haven't you been paying attention to anything Russ (or polygon, for that matter) has said? You can't steal intellectual property. ;} (Just finding that particular word choice ironic, is all...)
I've taken a week or so off from this, and items have piled up a bit... To start this quarter, we have two pieces of Genuine Napster News. They might be close to the last pieces of Genuine Napster News, too. http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,51301,00.html "Dead Napster Gets Deader" The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the injunction of trial court judge Marilyn Patel which demands perfection from Napster in barring the exchange of copyrighted material through its (old) free service. So Old Free Napster remains shutdown, probably forever. At some level this ruling was not terribly relevant, because Napster had never resumed operating. Nowhere have I found a legal explanation for what appears to be a reversal by the Ninth Circuit. Judge Patel originally ordered Napster to stop all infringements through its service in summer 2000, and at that time the Ninth Circuit overruled her with an order laying out what Napster could reasonably be expected to do, and what the obligations of the copyright holders were. A year later, Judge Patel came out with an order which sounds to me just like the summer 2000 order, and this time the appeals court upheld it. Beats me. In the second Napster story, which I have temporarily lost the citation for, Napster announced that its plans to launch its for-pay service are now on a long-term hold: one story said nine months, one story said indefinitely. Napster's executive said the problem is their inability to negotiate license arrangements with all five major labels. ----- Wired and Cnet also cover a stunning reversal against the copyright industry in the Kazaa case. A Dutch appeals court ruled that the Kazaa company could not be held responsible for the copyright infringements of its users when they swap files. The ruling comes a little late for the Kazaa operation, which sold all of its assets to a mysterious Australian buyer earlier this year. http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,51380,00.html http://news.com.com/2100-1023-870396.html
Two stories on the proposed new royalties for Internet radio broadcasts, and the expectation that they will wipe out the independent webcasters and hand complete control of this function to the major labels: http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/local/2922047.htm "Proposed royalty rates could bankrupt Webcasters" http://salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/26/web_radio/index.html "Web radio's last stand" The Salon story interviews a web radio operator who says that under the new Digital Millenium Copyright Act rules, his royalty payments will go from $1000 per year to about $1000 per day. "We just want to be treated as over-the-air broadcasters are treated," he says. To recapitulate for those who came in late: The DMCA created a new "digital performance right" for web streaming operations -- this royalty is only to be paid by Internet radio operations, not by "conventional" broadcasters. And the Copyright office proposal would set this rate so high that only the largest corporations could afford it -- probably just the major record companies, who would be paying themselves. The result is that by law, we are strangling what should be a tool for cultural diversity.
Yup.
<dies>
From slashdot: CBDTPA Finds A Champion In the House: Wired is reporting that House member Adam Schiff of Burbank is seeking a co-sponsor for his House version of Hollings' CBDTPA. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51400,00.html http://slashdot.org/yro/02/03/28/2137253.shtml?tid=103
oops, i'm replicating an earlier entry in the other "stupid government behaviour" item.
Re #3: Will this apply to regular radio stations that simulcast online, too? In other words, will they be double-billed? I remember a while back an organization that represents TV stations tried to get a bill considered that would have banned anyone from streaming more than 30 minutes of continuous video over the Internet. It was promptly heavily opposed by their own constituancy -- many small TV stations were just starting to benefit from simulcasting on the Internet, which gave them a bigger audience than they could get otherwise.
IIRC, radio stations which broadcast over the air get a 50% break on the new digital performance rights royalties for their Internet simulcasts.
I thought the record companies (CD companies?) liked to have radio stations broadcasting their music because it resulted in more sales. And that they would even pay them to do so.
Okay. Record companies aren't really worried about theft of property
through services like Napster or internet radio; they're quite good at bean
counting and even the most elementary statistical analysis shows that, like
radio play, Napster had a noticeably positive effect on record sales. What's
happening here is that record companies want to OWN the Napster business.
By regulating it and making it difficult, if not impossible, to get into the
business, they create an industry where they can be the only players.
The intellectual property argument is for political spin control.
The old online journal NewMediaMusic had one of their best pieces
on this subject, maybe about a year ago. Unfortunately I did not save
a copy and their site is now gone.
In the record company business model which is now rapidly breaking,
the record company would work like the dickens to get free temporary
copies delivered to customers over the radio, with the expectation
that this would motivate purchases of tangible, permanent copies.
(The effort to get those temporary copies out onto the radio waves
has become so expensive that industry execs cite it as a major
reason that major-label releases have to sell 500,000 copies to
break even now.)
Now, map that old business model to the Internet world.
The delivery of the free radio samples:
ship digital bits to user's computer.
The delivery of the paid-for copy:
ship digital bits to user's computer.
The difference between the marketing function (free radio) and the
sales function has vanished. Uh-oh... thus we come to
the SSSCA-type proposals to cripple all computers to create
artificial distinctions between groups of bits, and restrict
the manipulation and processing of those bits accordingly:
essentially, to outlaw the general purpose, Turing-machine computer.
While writing resp:12 I had a wisp of another idea. The major labels say they have to spend an obscene, and rising, amount of money promoting their releases to radio. Why should this be so? Well, in the last couple of years we have had the rise of the Clear Channel radio "pigopoly." But more generally: the major labels are having to spend more to try and get Release X to stand out from the pack, because there are so many releases. There is, in short, an oversupply of music. Market theory tells us that some things are supposed to happen in response to an oversupply: prices are to decline until the less efficient producers are forced out of the market. One wonders when the market forces start to kick in. Articles published in the wake of the music industry sales reports for 2001 said the decline in sales would probably lead to a decline in prices, but we have not seen it yet.
That's not going to happen. Follow the money. There's way too much
money at stake in computing.
Re #9: In the case of the dual-casting station which currently pays $1000 a year to BMI and ASCAP, instead of paying $1000 a day for the compulsory webcasting license they would only have to pay $500 a day. That's only 180 times what they pay now. Whatta bargain... You can bet that there will not be any webcasting by student radio stations if this is not radically scaled back. Non-profits will be pretty much removed from the market too.
I've come across some mention of a lower rate for non-profit organizations, but I can't remember all the details.
re #15 Why Russ it sounds like you are calling for goverment regulation of the record companies? I think the genuis of the market knew everything, could it be that life is more conplicated than that?
Here's a story from about ten weeks ago about the DataPlay discs: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-864058.html "Small discs to feature big artists" DataPlay discs are "about the size of a quarter and can hold 5 to 11 hours of music, or three to five albums." (Those are really, really long albums...) Leading independent label Zomba, home to Britney & N'Sync, has signed a deal to start using the format for new releases, joining major companies Universal, EMI and BMG. The hope of the recording industry is that they can convince consumers to switch to DataPlay discs, which include digital rights management, so the unprotected CD can be withdrawn from market. "Blank discs will cost between $5 and $12." (*coff, coff*)
i've put this item off until i could thoroughly divulge into it and i must admit it all seemed confusing and inevitable what with tv and the entertainment industry being how it is already. but until i read *this* article: http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,51274,00.html i wasn't nearly as angry. maybe they should should control the english language so that every word i'm typing here comes with a fee. (#11 was very well put by jazz)
Wired News is now reporting that Senator Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee (which for some reason has jurisdiction over the SSSCA / CBDTPA) is opposed to the measure and has stated his intention to prevent it from reaching a vote this year. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51425,00.html However, the bill (or one like it) is still proceeding in the House and if Leahy's opposition should falter or fail the bill is still a danger. It's still important to contact your elected representatives to let them know that you're strongly opposed to this legislation.
Tsk, mcnally's resp:20 belongs in the Agora item on the CBDTPA, not in the Agora/Music "napster" item. :) But it's mildly encouraging news anyway.
there's a CBDTPA item?!
Yes, spring Agora, item 13, is discussing the CBDTPA. ( item:agora41,13 ) I can usually find enough about the music industry and other copyright topics to keep this one busy.
it's all closely related though -- hard to talk about one without fondling the other just a bit...
Fondling bits is expressly forbidden by the CBDTPA.
The DataPlay maneuver will proabably go over about as well as consumer
copy-protected DAT; the industry really had to learn that it isn't quite
smart enough to predict the format consumers will choose, and if they were,
their meddling with rights management will delay it's entry to past the
critical few months where the format would have been chosen, anyways.
That's kind of a salvation to Napster users; hacker kids, like 'em
or hate 'em, are always going to be smarter about subverting data security
than professionals are about instituting it. Instituting is by nature a
harder job, and professionals are often more in business than obsessed.
The DataPlay people have a website at http://www.dataplay.com. You can buy clothes and bags with their logo imprinted, and there is a promise that blank media and recording/playback machines will soon be available. Some of the promotional material on their web site actively touts the DataPlay resistance to file sharing, so I don't think this site was intended to market to end users. :) One of the aspects they are happiest about is that DataPlay discs can be given away or sold with content "locked up" so the holder of the disc cannot get it unless additional payment is made.
How long d'ya think that'll take to reverse engineer?
so if my friend comes over and i play a cd for him, and he likes it and i let him borrow it for a while, am i in trouble?
Re #17: Record companies don't seem to be part of a free market. Sales of CDs have been falling for months now and the price has oddly remained the same. The "unseen hand" doesn't seem to be doing its job. Re #26: That sounds like the DIVX "pay for play" model. You'll note that DIVX was extremely unsuccessful.
Unless the DataPlay discs have some sort of per-disk uniquification (using a long enough key), I don't think it will last very long. There's already an active market in subverting satellite TV encryption systems, which are apparently based on a shared symmetric key.
In the Napster legal case: Judge Patel has given Napster *TEN MONTHS* for the discovery procedure, in which Napster gets to look in the record companies' paperwork for evidence that they were abusing their copyrights. This was reported by the L.A.Times. This drags the Napster case out into January 2003, at least. http://www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Music-X!ArticleDetail-5461 3,00.html (warning, URL is wrapped) ----- http://news.com.com/2100-1023-872765.html "Small Webcasters Campaign for Survival" This is a good article from Cnet, with some numbers. Quote: > Negotiations over the actual rates for the new royalties proved > bitter, ultimately winding up in front of the U.S. Copyright Office's > arbitration panel. Record labels proposed a per-song rate that > was about 100 times what the big Webcasters' trade association -- > led by companies such as America Online, MTV and RealNetworks -- > said was feasible. The arbitration panel's proposed rates > split that difference. ... > The fees, once passed, will add a large new expense to Webcasters' > bottom line. To date, they've only had to pay the same songwriters' > fees that regular radio stations pay -- about 4 percent of their > revenues. The rates are so unmanageable that everyone outside of the record business agrees it kills all independent webcasting. Some large companies are joining the effort to change the rules. Arbitron, the ratings firm, wrote to Congress: > ...a Webcaster that reached as many people as a big radio station > in New York would have to pay more than $30 million a year in > royalties alone. That would make it almost impossible to survive, > Arbitron said. Small webcasters and their fans are organizing to lobby Congress to revise the rules, since they have no standing at this point in the Copyright Office procedures.
The dead tree edition of USA Today has an overview story about home copying in their business section today. Little new, but a few interesting snippets: "The public is almost evenly divided on whether Internet users have the right to swap music from CDs online, according to a CNN/USA TODAY/ Gallup poll: 43% say it should be legal, 46% say illegal, with 11% undecided." "((CD)) Sales this year are worse. Total units are down another 12% vs. the first three months of 2001." (KRJ adds: Total units were down 10% in 2001, but a big chunk of that represented the industry's decision to wind down CD single production, which is why the dollar value only went down 6% or so. If that 12% decline for 2002 to date is mostly album sales, then the companies are getting walloped much worse than last year.) Band manager Miles Copeland says banks are turning down music companies for loans. Pam Horowitz, president of NARM (music retailing trade group) says: "Do we still have a competitively priced product?... DVD sales have exploded, and it's a product where the price has come down while the price of CDs has gone up. If our only response as an industry is to stop copying of CDs, we may be missing a consumer message." A few other people in the article mention the usual argument that consumers are buying less music because most of what the companies are flogging right now is crap. (A big point of support for that position came from a similar article in the Miami Herald about a week ago, which reported again that rock concert attendance is also down. A falloff in the business of live music indicates that the public's attention is shifting away from music.)
Good column today by Jon Carroll on the morality of the proposed restrictions. It's at http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/carroll/ - click on "04/11/2002 Jolly new threat to our freedoms" Direct access at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? file=/chronicle/archive/2002/04/11/DD240137.DTL
April 6 Billboard, browsed at Borders, has a big lead story: "Losses Mount for Music Industry Digital Services": which seems to be mostly about Pressplay and Musicnet. Apparently the losses are mounting to a point where the parent corporations are getting concerned. I wasn't willing to spend $7 to take it home with me, and Billboard does not put the juicy business news on the web site. I forgot to note if there was any clue as to the number of paying customers for the official services.
I've forgotten again-- these are the for-pay sites?
"Music-for-rent" would be a more accurate description. :) ----- A Washington Post writer gets a beta-test version of actual DataPlay hardware and pre-recorded music disc. The reviewer thinks the technology might have some potential for replacing flash memory in digital cameras, "but I can't figure out why anybody would want to buy music this way. The CD works just fine as is." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42176-2002Apr13.html
Interestingly enough, I think equalizing forces may be at work here. I seem to have no problem getting big hits from the KaZaA et al community. But every now and then, there is a song that millions of users don't seem to be fond of and don't have online to share. I was looking for Jazzie Redd's "I Am A Dope Fiend," which was a little hip-hop tune back in the early 1990's (perhaps 1990-1991) and was remade in 2000. Apparently, I will need to order the single or the CD/album it comes from to get it. Ironically, might that mean that hard-to-find music might actually get more real sales?
Very nice overview article from the Chicago Tribune on the consolidation in the radio business, and spillover effects into the record industry and Internet radio. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0204140469apr14.story?coll= chi-n ews-hed "Rocking radio's world" Quotes: > Since 1996, Arbitron surveys show that the > average time spent listening to radio by consumers > 12 and older has dropped 9 percent. In the > last two years, listenership has dropped more than > 7 percent, Arbitron says. The young > especially are tuning out: Teen-age listeners are > down 11 percent, and people between the ages > of 18 and 24 have declined 10 percent. ... > Playlists at stations across the country > continue to shrink, with only about 20 songs a week > played with any regularity, most from the best-funded > major labels. Many commercial stations say > they play only records approved by their audience > through extensive market-testing, but this > practice has led to a numbing sameness of programming, > with many of the same records played > in the same formats from Miami to Seattle. In one week > recently, the 40 biggest modern-rock > stations in the country opened a total of 16 > slots for new records, and the 45 biggest top-40 > stations added a total of 20. That means that > even though more than 30,000 CDs are released > annually, the vast majority of the songs played > at these stations is the same week after week, a > pool of a few dozen artists who are also seen > extensively on video networks such as MTV and > VH1. The quotes from the Clear Channel execs, about how they are only there to serve the public, are particularly nauseating. The article also reports that (KRJ paraphrasing) the RIAA is starting to wake up to the idea that destroying the fledgling Web radio business would be a bad move, in terms of choking off promotional opportunities for record companies.
Meanwhile the New York Times has an article this week about the band Wilco ( http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/arts/music/21PARE.html ) and their new album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Deemed unsuitable by Reprise, a part of the Time-Warner-AOL media megacorp, the album was rejected. The band, unhappy with their label support anyway and unwilling to be forced into the alt-country niche in which Reprise had successfully promoted their 1996 album "Being There" fought for and obtained control over the recordings.. They shopped the completed album around and eventually placed it with Nonesuch, another part of the Time-Warner-AOL media megacorp.. Go figure.
In fact, there was a cute line in the article -- unfortunately, I don't have it with me -- about how all the music company mergers allowed them to play one branch of Time-Warner against another. It sounds like they were basically going and asking dad when mom had already said no. Funny that those mergers might actually have made it possible for this album to come out.
I think it's more likely that the mega-mergers make it increasingly difficult for such albums to be released by marginalizing or frequently eliminating the smaller labels which will take chances on music that doesn't exactly fit into a recognized format, but in this case it does sound like the band benefitted from the fact that the acquired labels still retain some degree of independence/individuality.
Well, right. That's why I thought it was so ... ironic? Am I allowed to call this irony?
The Boston Globe has the usual piece on the distress of the music business: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/111/living/Burned_+.shtml Nothing really new here except one pair of sales statistics: > It's also notable *where* the people who still buy music are buying it. > Chains like Tower and Virgin are down 8 to 9 percent, according to > SoundScan, while mass merchants such as Wal-Mart and Target (that is, > stores that sell many other products besides CDs) are up 6 percent. > That has a negative impact on the selection of music in record > stores, because obviously, those retailers focus on the faster-selling > hit-making acts, rather than exposing a lot of new, lesser-known > CDs that sell fewer copies and take up space. Tower and Virgin seem to be at $19 for top-line releases that aren't on sale. What do Wal-Mart and Target charge? I never go there. But I smell a price revolt.
Also interesting, Salon has a piece today centered around the struggle of Joshua (?) Byrd, a music professor at a small college, to get Sony to pay royalties on two obscure albums he released in the 1960s (and on their much more recent CD reissues.) He claims that despite the fact that his works remain in print (suggesting that they must be selling to someone, though I can't imagine who..) Sony pays him no royalties and won't even acknowledge his requests for sales figures. The story makes it seem that this is common practice in the music industry but unless you've got as much money on the line as the Dixie Chicks did when they sued Sony that it's rarely economically feasible to collect from a stonewalling record company. I apologize for not digging up the URL but I've got nine or ten different batch MP3 encodes going right now (part of the Great Leap Backwards) and my CPU is thrashing so badly that using Mozilla to find the article would probably take 10 minutes of staring at half-rendered screens..
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Large-scale outlets have always been cheaper than Tower, Virgin, and company. Back when Tower existed in the downtown Ann Arbor area (which continues to disintegrate, I might add, and I'm a lot younger than you folk who know what it was like when it was *really* good), I'd usually browse, perhaps purchase an item or two that was harder to find, and do my actual CD buying at a place like Best Buy. Best Buy's cd selection actually used to be better and more appealing, in my opinion. Anyway, I saw little point in actually spending money there when the same stuff was considerably more affordable elsewhere. I'm surprised this is even newsworthy. :)
Of course large-scale outlets are cheaper than smaller stores. The smaller stores usually find a niche getting more unusual recordings and such. For example, a used tape and CD store earned most of its money through orders of boxed sets.
Indeed. Tower and Virgin are not niche stores, though.
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/newsarticle.asp?nid=15817&afl=mnew > "Retail Hopes Ride on Nelly, Korn" > > "Slumping industry puts faith in blockbuster summer releases" > > Record stores are looking to summer releases from > the likes of Nelly, Korn and Eminem to help recover > from a dismal first quarter of 2002, when album > sales dropped nearly TEN PERCENT compared with last > year. ((emphasis KRJ))
Mike in resp:41 on Wilco's move from the Reprise imprint to the Nonesuch imprint, both within the AOL Time Warner empire: > ...but in this case it does > sound like the band benefitted from the fact that the acquired labels > still retain some degree of independence/individuality ... except that neither Reprise nor Nonesuch were ever independent labels; both were Warner Bros. divisions since their creation. Reprise was originally started so Frank Sinatra could have his own label, IIRC, and for many years it was where Warner stuck many of its prestige/quirky artists, most notably Neil Young, who I think saved the label from being killed off when it was floundering some years back. Nonesuch was founded as Warner's classical division in the early 1960s and it had a glorious history; in the last ten years or so the brand has been repositioned as a world music/serious art label, with a lot of licensing of European issues (artists such as Radio Tarifa, Oumou Sangare, Ali Farka Toure, Youssou N'Dour). More recently Nonesuch has picked up Emmylou Harris after the main Warners label discarded her following the WRECKING BALL album. Label "branding" is a fascinating concept... but it's really drifting here, isn't it?
I thought Nonesuch was mostly folk, not classical.
Nonesuch did a lot of folk music of other cultures under their "Explorer" series -- what would be called World Music today, though that term was many years in the future -- but classical music was why they were founded. See the many obituaries for Teresa Sterne, the record executive who built the label, which turn up on Google under "nonesuch records teresa sterne".
re #50: Wow.. I simply can't imagine dumping Emmylou right after
"Wrecking Ball." Not only was it a terrific album but it was a
great critical success and has to have been her best seller in years..
Truly the record industry makes no sense to me..
Regarding Wilco, I was listening to NPR on the way back from a very
nice day hike in the Cascades yesterday and they had an interview with
Jeff Tweedy. I was struck by a couple of thoughts on the matter..
a) If I were a really cynical schemer, the kind who no doubt
thrives in the music industry, what could be a better way
to get lots of free publicity and scads of indie cred for
an artist I managed than to arrange for them to be dropped
by the big bad evil oppressive record company and have them
be picked up by the true-to-artistic-vision risk-taking
prestige label, especially when both are exactly the same
company?
I actually doubt that the decision was as calculated as all
that but it does seem to work out well both for Wilco *and*
for Warner. Even if this particular instance wasn't planned
from the get-go, it wouldn't surprise me if someone eventually
pulls a similar trick, especially if sales of "Yankee Hotel
Foxtrot" are at all good..
b) Either Jeff Tweedy has sinister hypnotic control over record
critics or he has the best publicist in the music world.
Every time I read an article or a review about one of his
albums it's filled with comparisons that make me want to rush
out and buy it and every time I actually sit down and listen
to a Wilco or Uncle Tupelo album I wind up losing interest
and turning it off before it's even halfway done. What am I
missing here?
I can't help with (b); I kinda liked Uncle Tupelo but have never warmed to Wilco, and after their first collaboration with Billy Bragg I gave up completely. I sort of liked Son Volt better (the other descendant band from Uncle Tupelo) but I eventually lost track of them too.
Re #53: I know what you mean. The snippets of Wilco's stuff I've heard remind me a little of Guided By Voices' early albums, but it doesn't hook me in the same way.
Too many "Uncle" bands: Uncle Banzai, Uncle Gizmo, Uncle Tupelo ... I no longer remember which is which.
So you're saying Uncle?
Uncle Tupelo started out as alt-country and kinda drifted. The other two, uh, didn't. Unless Uncle Gizmo isn't who I think they are, in which case all bets are off.
resp:56 :: You forgot Bob's Your Uncle, a late-1980s band from Vancouver.
Let's not forget U.N.K.L.E. (Actually, doing an All Music Guide search on artist names starting with "uncle" reveals more than fifty results, 90% of whom I've never heard of..)
Detroit's own Uncle Kracker (Kid Rock's DJ, also has a solo CD)
U.N.K.L.E. IS GOOD.
Re Nonesuch, uptopic: Despite its early interest in world music, Nonesuch was a classical label, and in the 60s and 70s it was a prime source for interesting stuff out of the mainstream classical labels' lines. I have warm memories of their recordings of early Haydn symphonies by some group called "The Little Orchestra of London" - this was long before Antal Dorati began his massive project to record them systematically for Decca - and for many other things ranging from Telemann suites, through Bernard Herrmann's surprisingly graceful version of Raff's Leonore Symphony (Nonesuch would indeed touch the heavy symphonic repertoire, if it was obscure enough) to Ives's Concord Sonata, not to forget those wonderful Morris & Bolcom recordings of late 19th century American popular songs. Nonesuch was not originally a Warner subsidiary. It was Elektra's classical and world music label. Warner later bought it up and killed it off.
Oops, I forgot that Nonesuch was originally Elektra's imprint, and that Warner didn't always own Elektra. But Warner got Elektra early in the consolidation game -- early 1970s, maybe? By the time I started paying attention it was the WEA conglomerate, for Warner-Elektra-Atlantic.
Whenever Warner may have bought Elektra, they didn't start putting their name on the Nonesuch albums until about 1980 or so, when they redesigned the label and killed off the distinctive, delightfully primitivist early Nonesuch cover art, as well as the original logo (the decorative lower-case n).
OK, enough drift. Did anyone run into the US webcast protest/shutdown on May 1? According to news reports in many online sources, many US webcasters shutdown their normal operations: either they were completely silent or else they ran announcements on how the proposed Internet broadcast royalties would wipe them out. The protest generated a lot of news coverage, at least, and there have been some suggestions that they are getting some traction in Congress with their argument that the proposed royalty rates would shut down almost the entire industry, because the royalty rates are vastly in excess of the commercial webcaster's gross revenues, and way above anything hobbyists can afford. Not to mention the problems in complying with the planned rule that *every connection* from *every listener* be reported to the copyright industry.
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Lots of noise about digital TV issues, and no clarity at all,
except a general sense that the copyright industry appears intent
on stealthily imposing absolute, totalitarian control on viewer's
use of television.
The best summary seems to be the EFF's weblog at
http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org/
The Newsbytes imprint of the Washington Post reported a story that
the copyright industry and the hardware industry had reached agreement
on technology to control user's ability to manipulate digital TV
signals, and the two industries were asking Congress to pass
legislation enforcing the agreement. No details were specified.
However, Philips (the electronics firm) seems to be in fairly
serious disagreement with the alleged consensus.
One of the EFF entries discusses the copyright industry's proposal
for forcing technologies and devices off the market if they are
found, after they have been widely distributed, to be insufficiently
protective of copyright.
http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org/archives/000061.html
Also, sending any high quality video to a computer is to be
strictly forbidden.
-----
Meanwhile, Slashdot passes along this one, from the San Jose
Mercury News:
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/3186191.htm
In the copyright suit by the TV industry against the Replay TV 4000
digital video recorder, well, I'll just quote it:
> A federal magistrate in Los Angeles has ordered SonicBlue to spy
> on thousands of digital video recorder users -- monitoring every
> show they record, every commercial they skip and every program they
> send electronically to a friend.
>
> Central District Court Magistrate Charles F. Eick told SonicBlue to
> gather ``all available information'' about how consumers use the
> Santa Clara company's latest generation ReplayTV 4000 video
> recorders, and turn the information over to the film studios and
> television networks suing it for contributing to copyright
> infringement.
...
> The plaintiffs asked SonicBlue to turn over information on how
> individuals use the recording devices. SonicBlue said it does not
> track that information. The magistrate, who is supervising discovery,
> ordered the company to write software in the next 60 days that
> would record every ``click'' from every customer's remote control.
!
Well, that's it. I'm definately not buying a PVR. I think the *worst* thing they could do to digital TV is impose DRM on it. Think about it. One of the big problems HDTV is facing is a lack of consumer interest. People just aren't buying into it in large numbers. If you start telling people they can't record their favorite shows, they're going to stay away in droves and it will become the next DIVX, except with a whole lot more development money down the drain.
Yep.
I heard about the webcast protest/shutdown. Consequently I did not attempt to listen to any webcasting that day. I'm pretty much off listening to web music anyway. It's most handy when I'm doing boring stuff at work, but the boring stuff I'm doing eats my processing power, or something, and the web music is constantly stopping to rebuffer. This is particularly true if the boring stuff I have to do involves web searching, and yet we've got a huge pipeline here. Thinking of bringing in my CD-Walkman instead. That SonicBlue item is just stunningly awful. Insert rant here; and yes, I think this is part of the same privacy invasion that's leading to useless intrusive security measures.
Was this webcasting strike US only?
Yes, because the proposed copyright royalty only affects US webcasters.
(At least, I have not heard about any proposals to try and levy it
on, say, the BBC.)
-----
Slashdot has a roundup of a couple of stories.
First, Vivendi Universal is talking about trying to make the upcoming
Eminem CD copy-prevented on all editions worldwide; previous
copy-prevention efforts have been limited to one geographic region,
mostly to test consumer response. Reuters story from May 1 is at:
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-896391.html
And a followup on the band Wilco and their new album
"Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," which was discussed above in resp:39 for about
ten responses. Their old label Reprise cut Wilco loose rather than
release an album Reprise saw as uncommercial; Wilco also, according
to an article in The New Republic, made the album available for
online downloads while they were between record deals:
http://thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=online&s=edlund041502
Anyway, first week sales figures are in, and Reprise looks clueless
for dumping Wilco, and the band looks like a genius for offering the
album on the net:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/trib/20020502/lo/wilco_defies_experts_as_fo
xtrot_gallops_1.html
In tabular form:
title first week sales billboard chart #
1999 SUMMERTEETH 19,000 around #80
2002 YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT 55,573 #13
First week sales almost three times as great as the previous album,
despite the tracks having been available for Internet download for weeks
or months.
Possibly relevant screed by Philip Shropshire on Locus, claims that 1) file sharing and downloading have only increased since Napster was shut down; but 2) free online copies of written fiction have apparently been observed to increase sales. http://www.locusmag.com/2002/Reviews/ShropshireOnEllison.html
I hope this goes through, but given all the money stacked against it I doubt it has a chance. http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,52298,00.html WASHINGTON -- Rep. Rick Boucher is finally ready to try and dismantle a key part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, said last July that he wanted to amend the DMCA to permit certain "fair uses" of digital content, such as backing up an audio CD by bypassing copy protection technology. In an interview on Thursday, Boucher said he now has sufficient support -- from the tech industry, librarians, and Internet activists -- to feel comfortable introducing his bill "in the next month." "If I had introduced it six months ago, you wouldn't have seen this kind of support," said Boucher. As soon as it's introduced, Boucher's proposal seems certain to be targeted for defeat by content lobbyists including Hollywood, the recording industry and the publishing industry. Boucher plans to rewrite section 1201 of the DMCA, which says, "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." It doesn't require that the person bypassing the scheme is doing it to infringe on someone's copyright. Boucher believes that people should be allowed to circumvent technological protection for research, criticism or fair use purposes, such as reading an encrypted e-book on another computer.
Wired points to an excellent Wall Street Journal/MSNBC story on the backstage industry maneuvering that led to the music industry's own download service, MusicNet. http://www.msnbc.com/news/748564.asp?0si=- The story says MusicNet has "roughly 40,000" subscribers. Its owners are trying to come up with Version 2.
In the early days of radio, the record companies tried to prevent the radio stations from broadcasting their music on the theory that nobody would buy the records if they could hear them on the radio. Then they discovered it was worth their while not to charge, but to PAY, the radio stations to play their music. I don't understand how it would not equally benefit CD companies to let their CDs be webcast.
It's not about whether they can benefit, it's about whether they can wring money out of people for the privilage. They're not in the business of letting people do for free what they might be able to charge them for.
And it's equally about the record companies being able to control what gets played..
This quote from a current Business Week magazine interview with Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig is directly relevant: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_19/b3782610.htm > Q: The current debate over Web radio is a good example. New fees > that the U.S. copyright office has mandated threaten to put small > Webcasters out of business. > > A: Web radio is a perfect example. In the course of its testimony > before the CARP hearings [the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel, > the government group responsible for setting compulsory license fee > for Webcasters] the RIAA argued that higher rates would reduce the > number of competitors to four or five big players. That's their model: > To wipe out diversity and get back to a place where only a few people > control delivery. (The article, titled "The Dinosaurs are Taking Over," argues that the old-economy giants are moving in to control the Internet and squeeze out independent service, independent content, pretty much independent everything, and that in this power grab, Congress has been the willing servant of the corporate powers.)
I was looking for classical music webcasts and many of the stations are no longer in operation in the US. Europe still has plenty, then there is Hong Kong and Chile. Maybe people will start listening to more 'foreign' music of other genres and the US music companies will lose business before they realize what idiots they were.
Everyone's probably seen this one by now, but I'm putting this in here
for brighn anyway:
"TV exec says skipping the commercials is THEFT" :) :)
http://www.2600.com/news/display.shtml?id=1113
Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting,
had a wide-ranging interview about the TV business in CABLEWORLD
magazine. To a query about why digital TV recorders
such as the Replay 4000 are bad, Kellner responded:
"Because of the ad skips.... It's theft.
Your contract with the network when you get the
show is you're going to watch the spots.
Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis.
Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button
you're actually stealing the programming."
((I assume he means, "hit the fast-forward button"))
Kellner did allow that there was "a certain amount of tolerance" for
viewers going to the bathroom during commercials. How thoughtful!
2600 did include a link to the original article, but it has now been
moved into the pay section of inside.com. I did read enough of the
original interview, before it was restricted to paying users, to satisfy
myself that Mr. Kellner's views were not being distorted.
http://www.inside.com/product/product.asp?entity=CableWorld&pf_ID=7A2ACA71-
FAAD-41FC-A100-0B8A11C30373
-------
Slashdot pointed to the best followup I have seen:
http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=198
"Top Ten New Copyright Crimes"
which is a Letterman-style list...
"Number 9: Changing radio stations in the car when a commercial comes on."
-------
Slashdot finds a further followup from "Broadcast and Cable" in which
Kellner suggests that users should be charged $250 per year for the
privilege of skipping commercials.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/06/232213
http://www.tvinsite.com/broadcastingcable/index.asp?layout=story&doc_id=84804&display=breakingNews
In the Netherlands everyone pays a yearly fee for any radio they own which is hooked up to cable, and they all get to vote on what programming they want, and the amount of each type of programming is based on the vote. At least for the noncommercial tax-supported stations. There are pirate stations broadcasting from ships. I assume some of the for-pay cable TV stations are also commercial free, am I wrong? Requiring that one listen to ads in order to hear music makes as much sense as requiring college students to play football or vice versa.
Big entertainment business has become so insular that skipping commercials is now THEFT? I don't recall there being any contract signed for me to watch broadcast television, so this is news to me. Thank you, Ken, for your occasionally alarmist tracking of copyright issues which brings to my attention very real idiocy, and, in situations like this, outrageously humorous examples of the effects of frontal lobotomy.
For-pay cable channels are generally interuption-free. They generally run blurbs for other shows as fillers, which is a form of advertisement. AMC used to run on the same system, although they now seem to be evolving away from this.
Yeah, I have been bummed to find commercials on AMC. But I guess they have to make a buck just like everyone else. Personally, I would love to see everyone get a TiVo to skip the commercials because that really would make that advertising time less valuable which could mean that companies that advertise would look elsewhere. This would mean a big loss of revenue for the TV/cable networks, unless the "elsewhere" was product placement within the shows themselves. It would probably mean that they would have to be forpay services. I know that if I had to pay a few bucks for *each* channel I got, I wouldnt get very many. But it would be worth it not to have the commercials. If a lot of folks get TiVo, it could result in a loss in choices as probably some networks would find themselves unable to adapt to a new model. It *could* also result in lower quality programming but I like to think that it would be the lower quality stuff that would get lost if networks go under.
The entire point of cable in the first place was to be ad-free.
Now that AMC does commercials, I don't watch it anymore. Same goes for Bravo, with rare exceptions. Wouldn't wanna be guilty of stealing. :) Re #84: Yes, I remember that when "pay-TV" (which later evolved into cable) was first being discussed in the 1950s, one of the selling points was going be freedom from commercials. Um...
re #88: There was cable TV in Houghton, MI in the 1950's because there were no locally accessible TV stations there. The original point of cable was sharp reception and greater selection of programming.
The other end of it is the the local advertiser now has
a harder time than ever of getting their niche market into
the cable station slots.
I am sure some nightlife spot in Ann Arbor would love
to advertise only on Comedy Central's Insomniac. But no, instead
we get the ComCast self promotion ad instead. To me, it looks
like ComCast is not interested in the small order business.
Cable TV started as "community antenna television." (This is where the acronym CATV comes from.) They'd put an array of single-channel Yagis on top of some tall structure, pointed at the various local channels, then amplify the signals and feed them out to residents, to avoid the visual clutter of every house having its own outdoor TV antenna. Obviously that wasn't commercial free since it was just another way to get broadcast TV. Even today most cable systems, as part of the francise agreement, have to offer a cheap "basic service" level that mostly just provides area broadcast stations. They rarely advertise that fact and will often charge an arm and a leg to install it, but it usually exists.
Last I knew the local basic service here was $30/month, hardly cheap. It had suddenly gone up from $8.
92 - the acronym CATV has since been modified to be "Community Access TV", which may go by other names including Public Access, or Community Television.
Re #88: I thought the point was to be able to show naked people and use
naughty words.
Well, there's two origins of cable tv, and they tend to get confused. One is the provision of tv to back-country areas that get poor broadcast reception, and that's always been commercial, simply because it was a feed of broadcast stations. The other is cable-only channels, intended in the first place for urban customers, which came along around 1980, and that indeed was originally mostly commercial-free, the idea being that subscription fees to cable would pay the cost. So much for that notion. Kellner's remark about stealing is profoundly disturbing, for several reasons. First, as several people have pointed out, applied to print publications it would require that you read all the ads (and various corollaries about electronic media suggest that you'd have to start at the beginning and read the whole thing, read it only once, and you couldn't pass it on to somebody else). It also suggests you can't flip stations during commercials, either. Second, it flies in the face of the whole basis of advertising, in which the best ads are designed to actually attract attention and not just lecture to a captive audience, and more than that, in which ad rates are set with the specific understanding that there won't be 100% feed-through. Thirdly, if you can be required to watch the ads, you can also be required to buy the wonderful products being pitched.
A couple interesting tidbits about copy-protected CDs, from The Register: http://www.theregus.com/content/54/24940.html First, it turns out some CD copy protection schemes can be defeated with electrical tape or a Sharpie marker. The idea is to cover up enough of the outer, intentionally corrupt track that the computer will ignore it. Secondly, a new copy-protected CD release apparently does nasty things to the flat-screen iMacs. Not only does it fail to play, it locks up the computer and prevents it from rebooting properly as long as it's in the drive. (iMacs, you'll recall, will try to boot off CDs.) It also locks the CD tray, keeping you from remedying the situation by removing the disc again. I'm sure this wasn't intentional, but it's an example of what can happen when you start putting out intentionally non-standard discs.
Here's Apple's page about the problem: http://kbase.info.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/kbase.woa/wa/query?searchMod e=Ass isted&type=id&val=KC.106882 They suggest several ways to try getting the disc out, but admit you may have to take the machine in for service if it's a model that has no manual eject hole. They seem to be taking a pretty hard-line stance on these discs: "CD audio discs that incorporate copyright protection technologies do not adhere to published Compact Disc standards. Apple designs its CD drives to support media that conforms to such standards. Apple computers are not designed to support copyright protected media that do not conform to such standards. Therefore, any attempt to use non standard discs with Apple CD drives will be considered a misapplication of the product. Under the terms of Apple's One-Year Limited Warranty, AppleCare Protection Plan, or other AppleCare agreement any misapplication of the product is excluded from Apple's repair coverage. Because the Apple product is functioning correctly according to its design specifications, any fee assessed by an Apple Authorized Service Provider or Apple for repair service will not be Apple's responsibility." Think there's the possibility of a class-action lawsuit against Sony from people who have to pay Apple to have these discs extracted from their systems?
I'd hope so. The rumor is that putting a disc in actually damages the firmware somehow, though I don't know how that's possible.
I doubt it's that. It sounds to me like it just confuses everything enough that the drive can't eject the disc. I've heard of places having to strip down iMacs and physically remove the disc by hand, but I haven't heard anything about having to replace or reprogram the drives yet.
I applaud Apple's very hard-nosed, snotty response to the "nonstandard" copy-protected CDs, but I have to say that the problem equally lies in the Mac's equally bizarre and non-standard way of ejecting disks.
((One of the copy-prevention systems was rumored to screw up a Windows PC to the point where the CD-R driver software had to be reinstalled, but I cannot remember the details.)) ((Not having an emergency manual eject is a really, really dumb design decision, for reasons that should now be obvious...)) It's been suggested by someone I won't name (in case it's a really stupid idea) that copy-prevented CDs which crash computers could legally be equivalent to a malicious computer virus, and that there could be liability under the Michigan law which was used to prosecute the M-net vandal of two summers back. Hmm, should we draft a note to the Attorney General?
Not that it takes much to force system software to have to be reinstalled on a windows machine anyway...
I'd have to say that a cd-player that can't eject a cd that adheres to the physical standards for a cd is defective, or at least, has a faulty design. The manual eject button should only be necessary in cases where it's no longer possible to safely apply power to the drive (ie, the computer power supply is dead, the cd drive has somehow shorted ouet, etc.) If the computer crashes because of the defective cd, then I'd say the computer has other software or perhaps OS driver issues.
Wired and Cnet report that Napster Inc. took another step closer to the corporate graveyard on Tuesday: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,52532,00.html The Napster corporate board of directors is torn by a bitter feud between John Fanning, the uncle of program author Shawn Fanning, who provided the earliest funding, and representatives of the venture capitalist firm who provided the second round of Napster's funding. The Napster CEO Konrad Hilbers, who unofficially represents Napster's third funder, the Bertelsmann conglomerate (BMG), quit on Tuesday because the board would not approve selling Napster outright to Bertelsmann. Bertelsmann had the foresight to make its $85 million investment in Napster in the form of a loan; this means that in the looming bankruptcy, Bertelsmann is probably in the driver's seat and gets any Napster assets it wants anyway. Napster's employees have been given two choices: quit immediately and get severance pay, or else take unpaid leave for a week while the company desperately searches for another buyer. The company is just about out of operating funds.
Wired thinks Napster is finished and runs an obituary written by Brad King, their Internet music correspondent: http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,52540,00.html ----- The Kazaa music sharing operation has been suggesting that ISPs should pay a fee-per-user to the copyright industry, since the ISPs are making money selling high-speed connections to users who want to swap files. There's a tweak to the proposal suggesting that the money should go directly to artists, with nothing for the record company, and today's story in USA Today, referenced via Slashdot, says that Verizon is now supporting the idea. http://slashdot.org/articles/02/05/14/232237.shtml?tid=141
Can't say I like that idea much. I have high-speed access, but I don't use it to pirate music. Why should I be charged a fine just because they *assume* I'm breaking the law?
www.fatchucks.com points to a huge parade of Napster obituary stories. I'll single out this one from the Boston Globe for a few quotes: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/136/business/The_legacy_of_Napster+.shtml > 'Napster was absolutely a groundbreaking technology that changed the way > consumers listened to music, discovered music, and interacted with music,'' > said Stacey Herron, an entertainment and media analyst with Jupiter > Research in New York. ''Napster so fundamentally changed the way people > interacted with music that there's no turning back.'' Matt Bailey, of Redshift Research, a "consulting firm that covers the digital entertainment industry:" > ''If you take the three top free file-sharing > systems together - Kazaa, IMesh and > Gnutella - they had an average of 2.15 million > users logged on at any given time in > April,'' Bailey said. ''In February of last year, > when Napster was at its peak, there > were only 1.57 million simultaneous users on the system.'' ----- Also via fatchucks.com: Sony is trying to use the Scour technology to whip up a little P2P enthusiasm for a limited number of artists. The songs can only be played for 30 days, and only if you are a registered user: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-913534.html?tag=fd_top There's a really mean review of this "service" at: http://www.slyck.com/newsmay2002/051502a.html
Many stories report that Bertelsmann finally gets Napster. Bertelsmann pays $8 million to Napster's creditors in what one article described as a "prepackaged bankruptcy filing." This maneuver is also supposed to wipe out the potential billions in liability for any past copyright violations. (Bertelsmann had offered $20 million to buy Napster in February, an offer the board rejected. In the new deal the shareholders get nothing, so I imagine the shareholders will be quite displeased with the board for failing to sell when the investors could have recovered something.) In personnel terms; Shawn Fanning's uncle John, who tried to eject other members of the Napster board, is now off the board himself; Shawn Fanning is back on the team, as is BMG's man chief exec Konrad Hilbers; and in general it seems like the goal is to reassemble the Napster staff to the way it was prior to last week's meltdown.
Reported everywhere: The new webcast royalty rate proposed by the CARP panel has been turned down by the Librarian of Congress, who for some obscure DMCA reason has the final say on setting the rate. No news on what happens next for a month.
Cnet reports that the music industry is about ready to win two of its cases against P2P firms by draining their resources before trial: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-920557.html "Kazaa, Morpheus legal case collapsing" The original Kazaa BV corporation in the Netherlands has asked for "terms of surrender," having sold the Kazaa network to the somewhat mysterious Sharman Networks, based on a Pacific island. The RIAA accuses them of playing a shell game to move the P2P technology assets to a new corporate home. Streamcast Networks, the US operation under the Morpheus name, has run out of money to pay its lawyer, who has left the case.
Dreaming about what I'd do if I were Librarian of Congress ... Make Nicholson Baker pay all the royalties?
Plaintiff's briefs have been filed in Eldred v. Ashcroft. The list of supporting amici is just dazzling. See full details at the new web site: http://eldred.cc
Re 110,112: The Librarian of Congress is the deus ex machina of this whole story. I had no idea that the Librarian had this kind of power.
Isn't the Librarian also the Registrar of Copyrights, or something like that?
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(Side note: The Librarian of Congress, James Billington, was a history professor of mine back in my undergraduate days.)
The Register has an article about the Librarian of Congress decision here: http://www.theregus.com/content/6/25006.html It doesn't really include much that hasn't already been reported here, but they do have this interesting quote from Jamie Zawinski that sort of points out why this system isn't a good deal for artists anyway: "...regardless of what music you were playing, they take your money, keep most of it for themselves, and then divide the rest statistically based on the Billboard charts. That means that no matter what kind of obscure, underground music you played, 3/4ths of the extortion money you paid goes to whichever company owns N'Sync; and the rest goes to Michael Jackson (since he owns The Beatles' catalog); and all other artists (including the ones whose music you actually played) get nothing." Jamie has an interesting article on the hoops you have to jump through to webcast legally. Even without the RIAA royalties the rules are a lot stricter than they are for radio stations: http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/webcasting.html For example, to qualify for a compulsory license, webcasters can't announce songs ahead of time, play more than four songs by the same artist in a three-hour period, or play more than two consecutive tracks from the same album.
Cory Doctorow of the EFF wrote a good summary of the proposal to put tight controls on all analog->digital conversion equipment, such as soundcards and digital camcorders, and Slashdot used that to prompt a roundup of the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group. The goal is to make it impossible for anyone, anywhere, to make a digital copy of "watermarked" video or audio through analog inputs. The BPDG's work will be about as restrictive as Sen. Holling's CBDTPA/SSSCA proposal, but it's being sent in under the political radar as a minor technical thing. Slashdot also provides a link to a US Senate page on the subject. http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org/archives/000113.html http://slashdot.org/articles/02/05/23/2355237.shtml?tid=97
And a couple via the fatchucks.com clipping service: Vivendi Universal is offering an MP3 file for sale, for a buck: a song by Meshell Ndegeocello (and I don't think ZDnet spelled her name right). This is reported as possibly the first time that a major label has offered a plain vanilla unrestricted MP3 file for sale. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2110831,00.html The record companies call for a federal probe of radio payola issues, and for "a sweeping government review of radio industry consolidation." Clear Channel responds that there is no payola, and their grab in the industry "often has led to a more diverse array of formats in a single market." http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/05/23/radio.payola.reut/index.html
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A Detroit Free Press writer reviews the two satellite radio services, XM and Sirius. In contrast to what terrestrial radio has become, both satellite services are angling for serious music fans looking for both diversity and depth in their radio programming. The reviewer is positive about both services and says the choice between them will be largely a matter of personal taste. http://freep.com/money/tech/newman30_20020530.htm
...until they edge out terrestrial service the way cable tv has then start selling ads, and then start pushing crap...
right on.
Either that or they'll go out of business, and all the early-adopters will be stuck with expensive paperweights.
My money's on the latter..
Same here.
Me too...even if they don't *both* go out of business, I really think there's probably only room for *one* satellite radio company in the market. It's sort of another VHS vs. Beta fight. I'd feel better about it if there were some kind of standard, but these are both proprietary systems, so you're locking yourself in to one service or the other when you buy a radio. Personally, if I listened to the talk channels I'd miss hearing local news. And if I want to listen to a specific type of music, I have an MP3-CD player.
I think they're good ideas, and I think at least one of them will succeed. Back when they first came out, I read something about a receiver that would take both services, and I told myself I'd wait until that came out before I thought about buying into the service. I'm still pondering it.
I think if they fail, it will be because everyone expects them to fail, and we're all waiting for all our neighbors to buy them first.
Both are doomed. The moment it becomes a significant market there are a number of players ready to move into that segment that already have significant infrastructure in place to deliver such as service in addition to what they already deliver. For example, you already have 'web enabled' cellphones, it wouldn't be too difficult to offer 'music enabled' as well, indeed I'm surprised it hasn't happened already.
Listening to music on a cell-phone would be the utter triumph of low-fi.
The low speaker volume would be a bigger problem. Bad sound quality's never stopped people from listening to radio before.
Two (or is it three?) words: "Headphone jack".
D'oh. Of course.
Exactly.
Orinoco wrote: "Bad sound quality's never stopped people from listening to radio before." Yet more proof that I do not exist, I guess.
USA Today has an overview article on the struggles between the music business and music fans. File sharing only gets a small piece of the story. http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/2002/2002-06-05-cover-music-industry.htm
Based on previous discussion, it sounds like the 1980s all over again, with a contemporary twist. We're getting heavy into one-hit wonders again.
Via Slashdot: http://www.newyorkmag.com/page.cfm?page_id=6099 The essay by Michael Wolff argues that the music business of the future is going to look a lot more like the book business -- much less significant to the mass culture, and much, much less profitable. He suggests that rock and roll, which powered the growth of the music biz in the 1960s and 1970s, is spent as a cultural force, with nothing of equal impact to replace it. He also sees two ways that the Internet has sandbagged the industry: besides the file sharing and copying issue, there is the problem that the Internet has encouraged tastes to splinter into thousands of musical subcategories. This makes it much harder for the major music corporations to come up with the megahits which power their profits; it also means industry costs are way out line with the sales that can be expected for most discs, and they need to be drastically pruned. Translation: lots and lots of layoffs in the music business. In talking to music business people, Wolff reports that a grim fatalism is setting in. Recommended essay.
Good riddance to them, as fas as I'm concerned.
found it! The New York Magazine article referred to a Wall Street Journal
item; usually the WSJ stuff is not freely available, but this story
was made available as a cautionary tale for children... :)
http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/0502_mdia.htm
MCA Records spent about two
years preparing Carly
Hennessy for pop stardom,
and about $2.2 million to
make and market the
18-year-old singer's first pop
album, "Ultimate High."
But since "Ultimate High" was
released in stores nationwide
a few months ago, it has sold
only 378 copies-amounting to
about $4,900 at its suggested
retail price. ...
Wonderful story!
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#142 brings a tear to my eye. I'm proud of the American public.
I think musical tastes were well on the way to slintersville before the net became something a lot of people used.
Great interview/article about David Bowie in today's NYT: "The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing." "Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity," he added. "So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/09/arts/music/09PARE.html?todaysheadlines Sounds like (as usual) Bowie has been thinking a few years ahead of most people in the music business.
who is carly hennessy?
Carly Hennessy was given as an example in one of the articles Ken posted yesterday.
it's great to see people so optimistic. i can't wait, if they're right.
Re #147: That's *exactly* what I'd like everyone to ask about all the acts which the RIAA tries to manufacture via their hype machine. If I hadn't seen N'Sync plugged on T-shirts and sniped at by Foxtrot, I might still be ignorant of them. The nice thing about such creations of hype machines is that if everyone stops paying attention to them they soon cease to exist.
And a good thing, too, that musical tastes are splintering. Whenever I see a movie set, say, in the 1950s, it's always filled with the pop music of that era, and I think, "If I'd lived back then, I would have had to hear that crap all the time _whether I wanted to or not_." (I'm thinking to myself, I'm entitled to call it crap.) Of course, nowadays I have to hear hip-hop whether I want to or not, usually while I'm waiting at red lights in traffic, but at least I don't have to hear too much of it.
i'll happily take hip-hop over shit-pop.
Dunno if this is the right item, but I read yesterday that some ReplayTV users are suing Turner for saying that skipping the commercials is theft. I could probably find the URL if I tried.
It's not theft; you're not taking something that Turner's not giving
away for free. At worst, it's a breach of an unspoken contract.
It's the defamation of character the Turner is doing, to call it's veiwers "Theives".
"In a continuing effort to maintain their image as evil incarnate" is how a slashdot item on record company consideration of attempting to charge royalties on sales of used CDs. The referenced article can be found at: http://www.sduniontribune.com/news/business/20020614-9999_1b14usedcds.html
Re #146: France tried eliminating copyright, after the French revolution. It resulted in a major reduction in the amount of creative works produced there. I'd hope we won't make the same mistake.
might lead to an overall improvement in the quality of the works actually produced...
I'd expect a decrease in quality, personally. It's the people who are good at what they do who have the most to lose.
re #157: I've never heard that before. Do you know whether other factors (such as the loss of aristocratic patronage) were accounted for?
I don't know. I did find this reference with a web search, though it appears to be a college student's paper: http://216.239.35.100/search?q=cache:UnEL9Hlq8KwC:skipper.gseis.ucla.edu/st udents/dwalker/html/projects/documents/IS-200_Heirs_of_the_Enlightenment.rtf+fr ench+revolution+intellectual+property&hl=en&ie=UTF8 Sorry for the long URL, it's a Google-converted HTML version of a Rich Text document. "In freeing the presses, it appears that the National Assembly intended to break the monopolistic hold of the book guilds, allowing the great literary works of the Enlightenment to be printed and circulated freely, as well as allowing new works to be published without censorship. The result, however, was far different. Having essentially dissolved all copyright, pirating of new and older works became widespread. Although slanderous and libelous pamphlets circulated widely, the publication of books came to a virtual halt as both authors and publishers found that rampant pirating made the publishing of books economically unfeasible. Rather than foster creativity, the freedom of the presses stifled creativity."
Not that it proves anything, but French music had been in kind of the doldrums anyway through the later 18th century, and produced few masterpieces after Rameau's death in 1764 until Hector Berlioz came roaring in after the Restoration, in the late 1820s.
Slashdot points to a bunch of stuff about the Librarian of Congress' decision on webcasting royalty rates and record keeping requirements. The short version is that the proposed rates were cut in half -- the 50% discount for on-air radio broadcasters was eliminated, setting the rate at $0.0007 per listener per song. Mainstream media calls this a win for webcasters; Internet media says that half of vastly-more-than-total-revenues is still more than total revenues, and most independent webcasters in the USA are finished. To make things worse, everyone who has webcasted has to pay a bill for the four previous years' royalties, at this rate, and it's due this October. Many independent and student stations are expected to be bankrupted. Slashdot readers report that some online webcasters have already started to shut down. A few sympathetic congressmen are making noises. The RIAA is complaining that the rate set by the Librarian of Congress is too low.
Wait for legislation on this one, if enough congresspeople get pulled in. This isnt a final resolution by any means, and Congress has been looking increasingly suspicious of the RIAA lately.
((Metadiscussion: the "Napster" items are linked between Music
conference and each season's Agora. The Agora conference has now
rolled over to Summer; I'll start The Eleventh Napster Item in
a couple of days, so other folks have a chance to get things in
Agora first; sooner if there is any big news.))
You have several choices: