Turtles all the way down

While I tend to support this sort of “power to the people” movement, I question whether low power FM is a cause worth the time.

The future of radio is in the unlimited bandwidth of the Internet. The limited number of channels supported by FM bandwidth will never give all listeners what they want. I think we’re all better off pushing for royalty-free for Internet broadcasting and the establishment of a great variety of Internet radio stations.

Terrestrial radio is dead. It’s time to let it lie and move on.

Today I signed up for DRM-free music download service mTraks. They claim to still be in beta but they’ve been up and running for about a year. The main reason I signed up is that a couple of really good labels are releasing their content to mTraks but not to eMusic.

Compared to eMusic, mTraks is more expensive (about $3-7 per album, in bulk) and is missing eMusic’s very convenient download manager. However, their selection and MP3 quality are both commendable, so we will see.

Last night I had my first property class. Aside from a bunch of stuff about animals and the “negative community,” the prof talked about one thing that’s close to home.

He said, and I’ll paraphrase, that property law governs scarce resources. If there is no scarcity, then property law is probably not applicable. Given the recent changes in the music industry, it seems as if property law probably no longer applies to it. There is no scarcity of the property of music, only abundance.

The scarcity is in my time to listen to it. This seems to be a simple, formal explanation of why the music industry ultimately had no choice but to change their distribution philosophy.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

So, real simple…for Christmas 2008 I want to be able to pay no more than $50 a month and download as much music as I want, from any artists that I want. Yes, I want flat-rate, all-you-can-eat, just like my Internet service and TV service. Furthermore, I want at least half of that money to go to the artists.

At least part of this is being seriously proposed by the Songwriters Association of Canada, for far less than I had even hoped for.

The Songwriters Association of Canada is proposing a $5-a-month licensing fee on every wireless and Internet account in the country, in exchange for unlimited access to all recorded music.

The deal would put $1 billion annually in the pockets of artists, publishers and record labels, according to the songwriters group. The money would be distributed to artists based on how frequently their music is swapped on-line; the more downloads, the more money the people responsible for the music would accrue. Big Champagne, a Los Angeles-based Internet monitoring service, says it can track file-swapping accurately enough to ensure that artists big and small would be compensated.

But there is one small catch…

Of course, it would require all the music labels to cooperate and make their vast back catalogs available on the Internet without any sort of copying restrictions. For this reason alone, it’s almost impossible to imagine this proposal ever gaining traction. The labels haven’t exhibited any sort of vision in dealing with the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital revolution; instead they agree only on their contempt of file-sharing.

If the downloads and file sharing of fringe artists can be tracked at least accurately enough for them to be compensated, then maybe this proposal has legs. Even if it doesn’t, at least there is movement in the right direction.

Major music label EMI has a new boss who is looking to change things around. Consider these statistics:

* Record companies lose money on 85 per cent of new artists, even before overheads
* More than 30 per cent of EMI’s artists have not produced an album. Many never will
* 200 of the 14,000 artists EMI deals with each year account for more than half its sales
* 7 per cent of EMI’s digital contracts account for 80 per cent of its digital revenues

Today, in for artists that are presumably distributed via CDs, 1.4% account for 50% of sales. Will that tail flatten if EMI goes all-digital? Hard to say. One thing is for sure - EMI runs a very inefficient business:

* Its marketing expenditure has been running about £60m over budget
* EMI scraps about 20 per cent of CDs produced, at an annual cost of £25m
* EMI spends £70m a year subsidising artists who will never make it any money.

They could do a lot with an extra £155m.

Wired reports on a new and annoying way of obtaining DRM-free music:

On Monday, for example, Sony BMG announced it will release a mishmash of 37 albums in the unrestricted MP3 format, confirming last week’s report that the label would ditch DRM. Under Sony’s new plan, consumers would purchase a credit-card-like ticket from Best Buy, Target, Fred’s, Winn-Dixie or other outlets. The cards will have a number that must be entered into the MusicPass site, where the full album can be downloaded.

If Sony just opened a DRM-free online store or released their catalog on iTunes, they would de-incentivize illegal copying. A big part of online media is ease of access and instant access. Making us have to drive to a store to buy a download ticket, then return home to download music is like having to go put a quarter in a pay phone before you make a call on your cell.

The biggest story of the year for 2007 is the falling down of the music industry. The music is doing just fine, perhaps better than ever, but the big labels are finally realizing that DRM is dead. Not only that, they are looking for alternatives to selling physical media. I doubt that they will find just one thing, but a combination of alternatives that keeps the business alive.

So, real simple…for Christmas 2008 I want to be able to pay no more than $50 a month and download as much music as I want, from any artists that I want. Yes, I want flat-rate, all-you-can-eat, just like my Internet service and TV service. Furthermore, I want at least half of that money to go to the artists.

Unlike peace in the Middle East, this goal is potentially achievable in 358 days.

Music is now priced by the song, or track, rather than by the album. I suspect that this pricing is going to incentivize artists and labels in one direction and consumers in another.

The days of 20-minute side long tracks are likely over. First of all, there are no more sides, so the 20 minute limit on a track is gone. However, the price of a 20 minute, or 30 or 40 minute, track is the same as that of a 20, 30 or 40 second track. Or at least that seems to be the case on popular sites such as iTunes and eMusic. When consumers buy by the track, it is likely that artists and labels are paid the same amount regardless of track length.

In a McLuhan-esque fashion, this will motivate artists and labels to record more tracks of shorter duration. They might even break up an intended 20 minute piece into several shorter sections. However, consumers are pulled the opposite direction. It is far less expensive for them to purchase longer tracks, as they get more music for their money.

Tzadik pulled their catalog from eMusic, reportedly because they felt they were losing royalties on longer tracks. This serves no one, as now a large potential audience doesn’t have access to their offerings.

In my own purchasing on eMusic, I find that I tend to buy longer tracks more on whim and at the spur of the moment, and tend to delay or avoid purchasing albums with more than 12 or so short tracks.

Obviously there is a middle ground, and it has been adopted by other sites, most notably the battered AllOfMP3, where pricing is based on the length of the track or album. This is a fair solution for both producers and consumers.

Catching up on events, eMusic came out with patch for their new download manager. For the few days that I used it, it worked well. Then they announced that the user backlash had been such that they were reverting back to the old one, though there was an option to continue using the new one. After playing with Free Download Manager for a while, I’ve concluded that eMusic’s old manager is the one for me. It only downloads the MP3’s on a page, it files them in an appropriately names directory, and names all the tracks for me. Free Download Manager defaults to downloading everything on the page, and you have to figure out how to filter out what you don’t want.

My favorite music download site, eMusic swapped out their old download manager for a new one. The old manager worked well. You clicked on one button to download all of the tracks from an album and it did the work for you, sticking the music in an appropriately named directory of your choosing.

The new manager is an attempt to be a music player and collection manager as well. Big problem, however. It screws up the basic task I need it for, which is downloading. Every single time I download an album, at least one track doesn’t arrive properly. Every single time.

So I’ve turned off the default download manager option in my account settings. I’m experimenting with Free Download Manager and Download Them All, the latter a Firefox plugin. Once I get one of them to operate properly in one-click mode I should be set.