The Music Industry that Copyright Killed

If you believe that the purpose of copyright is to compensate the creator of the content, that copyright is free market capitalism at work, or that the current copyright legal regime leads to the greatest innovation and productivity, there’s a recently released report you need to read.

Notice the letterhead? Yeah, that memo came from the Republican Study Committee, which helps set policy for congressional Republican leaders. Keep in mind that even Democrats, most of whom at least half-heartedly support net neutrality, have never come this close to the outright rejection of the current copyright paradigm. The document at hand represents the most forward-thinking copyright policy ever presented at this upper echelon of government.

You can guess what happened next. Once the RIAA and MPAA got wind of the brief, they hit the phones hard and browbeat Republicans into issuing a full retraction of the too-sensible-to-be-true copyright policy memo. The Republican organization claims that this retraction was due to poor oversight, which is hard to believe since it wouldn’t have been released without plenty of oversight. We can plainly see the exact reason for the retraction is because the report is the antithesis of the RIAA and MPAA’s corrupt stance on copyright, and they went ballistic. It must be stressful working at an organizations that survives by perpetuating the kind of copyright myths that are so clearly debunked in the Republican Study Committee’s report. In that sense, the RIAA (and MPAA, but we’ll focus on the former) are mythical beasts that need to be slain for the greater good. Specifically:

1) The RIAA hides behind the myth that copyright is meant to compensate the artist, playing to our natural desire to compensate the creators for their works. Their #1 claim when protecting obscene exploitation of artists is hypocritically that they’re protecting the artist’s ability to make money. Never mind the wealth generated by these works is concentrated in corporate coffers, not the pockets of musicians whom they ruthlessly exploit, turning copyright around to victimize rather than enable artists. Modern music fans know that they’re not usually supporting the artist when they pay for access to music, because musicians are not the gatekeepers of access. Of course, musicians want to be heard more passionately than they want to be paid, and would prefer to keep their own gates, thank you. Fortunately, technology is changing in favor of the greater good, and one day not to far from now, the RIAA will be revealed for its true nature: As antiquated as the KKK.

2) As the report points out, “Copyright violates nearly every tenet of laissez faire capitalism” by entitling content producers “to a guaranteed, government instituted, government subsided content-monopoly.” Now, that wouldn’t be half as bad if that entitlement was actually due to musicians — of course, that is not so. Nearly every musician who has made a living recording music first had to sign over their entitled rights to be exploited by a third party. When you see that copyright protects corporate interests much like other questionable government subsidies that were originally meant to protect the average Joe, you see copyright needs to go, along with the RIAA.

3) The third myth in the report relates to the stifling of innovation by copyright, which was well-documented earlier this year in the research paper Copyright and Innovation: The Untold Story. In it, Michael A. Carrier of Rutgers University School of Law presents his findings from numerous in-depth interviews with business leaders from the past decade of digital music. His damning critique confirms what anyone in the digital music business knows anecdotally: the RIAA and its cronies, wielding copyright, have all but scorched the earth of innovation in the digital music industry. The RSC’s redacted copyright report supports Carrier’s conclusion, noting that our current corrupt copyright laws “Retarded the creation of a robust DJ/Remix industry” of the kind you see in many other countries — ever more depressing when you realize the US is used to being on the cutting edge of many new music movements.

It’s crystal clear to anyone studying the state of music that the RIAA has had a net negative effect on nearly every aspect — one might expect them to ruin music’s expressiveness and aesthetics in pursuit of profit, but they’ve really ruined the business they’re sworn to protect as well. I hope that folks working in cahoots with RIAA read this blog post and take this RSC report as a sliver of light shining through the exit door. Are you the head of a hydra hell-bent on destroying music, the biotechnology of group formation? Do you really think perpetuating copyright myths is helping musicians?

We can either face the truth and change for the better, or repeat the past and risk damaging music’s cultural, social and personal significants even further. Music will survive the crushing limitations of copyright, but those at the RIAA who are betting their gatekeeper position is sustainable have another thing coming.

How the Record Industry Destroyed Digital Music and Chilled Innovation (in Their Own Words)

Since Napster was sued out of existence in 2001, the record industry has ruined digital music time and time again. The result has been to stifle innovation and creativity as the industry dug its own grave with respect to consumer support. We will never really know just how much music and culture suffered from their corruption, ineptitude and negligence. But now we can get a rough idea.

Anyone in the digital music world knows that record labels continue to sue competitors out of existence rather than negotiating a settlement and moving forward progressively (Grooveshark being the most recent example). Until now, this knowledge has been intuitive. But a new groundbreaking study by Rutgers law professor Michael A. Carrier offers stunning admissions by the world’s top music executives that they have been destroying digital music for a decade. Carrier is blowing the whistle loud to expose the culture-crushing tactics of a record industry hell-bent on saving its dying revenue streams. What’s incredible is how many of these smoking-gun admissions of the record industry’s practice of destroying music through litigation and intimidation continue to this day.

For the study, Carrier interviewed and anonymously quoted CEOs and VPs of major music and technology companies. All the major labels and nearly every digital music service worth mentioning from the days of Napster are represented here, with 31 top-ranking officers included as sources for the report. Even the infamous Hilary Rosen of the Napster-era RIAA makes an appearance. The 63 pages of the report are full of juicy, candid admissions that will make your jaw drop and the whole report is worth a read, but here are a few highlights:

• The labels shut Napster down just as filtering technology was being developed to weed out copyright infringing files and/or pay rights holders for use of their content — the same kind of software being developed and used now at YouTube. Had the labels continued to develop this filtering technology, it would be much more efficient and effective today at preventing copyright infringement. Worse, by banning p2p technology, labels just pushed the technology underground and it developed in a way to make it harder to apply such filters.

• The labels were very aware that tying a great single to a lackluster album of songs was akin to “selling 1 pound of shit in a 10 pound bag” and that one of Napster’s biggest lasting effects was to destroy the idea of bundling music in albums. However, they chose to ignore this sea change in music consumption because it ran directly counter to their business model. That the album was not sunsetted for the single continues to be pure willful ignorance.

• In the face of digital music, the labels used litigation as their primary business model. Their attitude was that they were not going to license their content to anyone. This strategy, akin to “not negotiating with terrorists”, (indeed file sharers were labeled as “pirates”) meant that no “legitimate” digital music service would emerge until the iTunes store. Steve Jobs made it happen through personal connections, and the labels basically handed the digital download industry over to Apple’s “walled garden” media ecosystem. Prior to that, the iPod drove the demand for music file sharing through the roof. By not negotiating with digital music services, the industry encouraged the “underground” to flourish an eventually empowered Apple to unseat the music retailers. By the time “legitimate” means of acquiring music emerged, the consumer base was already well used to free, unfettered access to music.

• The CD retail shops basically committed suicide. They were complicit in the labels’ litigious fight against digital music innovators. The labels saw the retailers as their customers, not the listeners themselves. After all, the retailers bought 90% of record industry products. Because the labels would allow no viable digital music alternative, an entire generation learned to consume digital music without industry consent. As a result, retailers essentially evaporated when the industry finally began throwing its weight behind the sanctioned digital music retailers as mentioned above.

• Much of the industry’s irrational behavior can be explained by the “Innovator’s Dilemma”, a somewhat obvious idea that large corporations are dis-incentivized to pursue new innovations that threaten existing business models. Just to demonstrate how out-of-whack executives were with reality, here’s an excerpt from the study:

…before iTunes offered 99-cent singles, one label was “adamant” that “the single should be priced at $3.25.” The reason was that if customers bought “two or three,” then they would “make up lost sales on the album by the sale of singles.” The respondents reaction was: “You’re out of your mind” since “people aren’t going to pay $3.25 for a single.”

• The business structure of the record labels was set up for short-term success in deference of any long-term thinking. Political power struggles were common. In short, the bureaucracy of these labels, themselves consolidated into larger corporate bureaucracies, lacked the ability to innovate in the first place. The result was that litigation was the only way to sustain the business model. Technology startups simply could not go on functioning with the massive legal costs associated with defending a record label lawsuit, especially when all the labels ganged up on one company as they often did (and still do).

• We all know that the RIAA terrorized consumers with lawsuits alleging personal infringement of copyright (remember, retailers were the labels’ customers, not the public, so why should they care about offending the public?). What many don’t realize is how CEOs of tech companies were terrorized with the same allegations of personal infringement in addition to having their companies sued out of existence. Additionally, because of the obscene statutory fines associated with willful copyright infringement, this created ridiculous situations, such as Limewire being sued for statutory damages of $75 trillion, which is more that the GDP of the entire world.

• The litigious affront by labels had a real negative impact on the economy. As it sued digital music services out of existence, venture capital for any new project was hard to come by. This created a chilling effect around digital music services that persists to this day. It’s hard to convince investors to support a project when in the past they have been personally sued for willful copyright infringement simply for investing in a digital music product. Today we have very few compelling digital music services as a direct result of the industry’s approach to using litigation as a business model.

• The report does more than dispel myths about “piracy”, it clearly shows the record industry is to blame for not only its own downfall, but the downfall of music itself. The loss of innovation and venture capital was certainly a blow to society at large, but the effect of this corrupt crusade on the music itself was equally tragic. Though hard to quantify, some of the “magic of music” as it were has been lost, or at the very least transformed irrevocably by the willful negligence of the music industry. Not mentioned directly in the report is the mountains of money denied to musicians themselves, the ultimate enablers of the industry who so often get screwed by it. Fortunately, all this chaos has spurred the public to adopt radical new business models — patronage and crowd funding chief among them — and we are finally starting to “bounce back” from the damage record labels have inflicted on the culture and economy of music.

It has never been more clear that despite bringing music to millions of people across the globe, the record industry has had a net negative effect on music, particularly in the last decade. This being one of the central theses of my upcoming book, I have overjoyed to have this report as a smoking gun source for what anyone in the digital music world knows intuitively to be true. Read the report to see what I mean.

Musicians and Listeners, Your Mission, if You Choose to Accept It: Save Our Culture

Music evolved alongside language and culture over millions of years to form a universal method of communicating emotion. For most of our species’ history, music’s primary purpose was to unify communities. Over time, various forces conspired to make music’s primary purpose entertainment. Chief among these was the music industry, which subjugated and exploited cultural evolution and unity for profit.

The original intent of copyright law was to protect content creators’ livelihoods while promoting cultural evolution by preserving the creative environment. Instead, the music industry (itself now a subset of a hyper-consolidated military-industrial media oligopoly) corrupted the law to steal musicians’ profits and stifle creativity. While the industry’s rapid expansion of the market during the 20th century certainly helped spread music for and wide, the cost of this commodification on our culture and creativity was heavy.

Over the previous decade, digital technology has disrupted the balance of power between musicians, listeners and industry. The record business is no longer sustainable in an era of free access to music. Unsurprisingly, the music industry, with its history of ineptitude and entitlement, is once again throwing all the money and lawyers it can at changing the laws in their favor. As musicians and listeners, we stand at a crossroads. Do we take advantage of the opportunities technology has given us and actively redefine music in the 21st century to be a force of unification once again? Or do we continue to allow the industry to subjugate the universal method of communicating as a means for enriching corporations?

Mediapocalypse Book Update #2

Well, folks, I’m back for another book update as the first month of project Mediapocalypse comes to a close. With the book having pretty much taken over my life at this point, on the rare occasion that I venture into the outside world I get the same two questions: How’s the booking coming along? What’s it about?

It’s coming along great, thanks. As is my style, I’ve been inventing my own method as I go along, only to later find how close it is to the established process. This is most apparent in my focus over the last couple of weeks: the bibliography.

In many ways, writing a book is like writing an album. Songs are very much reconstituted from influences, or as Kirby Ferguson would say, Everything is a Remix. Similarly, a nonfiction book begins as the sum of its sources.

Since I first became interested in the subject a decade ago, I have amassed a voluminous library of music nonfiction. Thus, half of my bibliography was already done — I simply had to dust off my MLA style guidelines and start typing.

I am unashamed to admit that during the rest of the bibliography process, I got a huge assist from Amazon.com. Once I had catalogued my own collection, it became clear that I had a single mission: to find any and every other book that would be a useful source. Luckily, Amazon.com made discovery painless, with its related product referrals and faceted search. Even better, it was easy to ascertain the quality and content of the works via customer reviews and the ‘look inside this book’ feature. What’s a library again?

My bibliography (at least the book portion) is now complete. I’m sure to find a handful of secondary and tertiary sources during the writing process, but right now I feel super-confident about my factual foundation.

Posting the bibliography before the book seems sacrilegious and anticlimactic — like playing an audience tracks from your favorite artists and then asking them to guess what your album will sound like. Instead, I will give you some stats…

There are 107 nonfiction book titles currently in my bibliography, comprised of 17 primary sources, 34 secondary sources and 56 tertiary sources. I read each primary and secondary source carefully, and key passages are highlighted and marked on a 1-4 scale of importance. Any relevant notes are scribbled in the back of the book (or, on the iPad, in Evernote). The tertiary sources are skimmed rather than read cover to cover. Many of these are the dryly academic texts, from which I am seeking only to mine facts and evidence.

Of the key sources, I’m 30 for 51, meaning I have 21 more full books to read, along with a few dozen tertiary sources to skim. Yeah, that’s a lot of reading. At present, I’m reading at about 150 pages per day, which averages to around three nonfiction books per week, so I should be done sometime in mid-June.

Thinking myself rather smart for inventing the bibliography-first method of nonfiction book writing, my lovely wife, who holds a Master’s Degree to my High School Diploma, pointed out this has been standard practice for decades. Maybe I should pick up a book on nonfiction writing? Nah, making it up as I go along is too much fun.

Enough with the reading, you say, how is the actual writing going? And what the hell is the book about?

My writing process at this point is essentially the opposite of pulling meat off the bone. Poring through my source notes, I attach meaty facts and concepts to my skeletal outline in a program called OmniOutliner, nesting text into hierarchies. In the process, themes and topics emerge almost organically. In a way, I’m not deciding what the book is about explicitly — the patterns in my notes of interest are telling me what it’s about.

The dispassionate answer to the topical question can be found in a tag cloud. I tagged each of the books in my bibliography from a list of 60 terms describing topics, and then fed them into TagCrowd to see what my major themes were. Here were the top 20:

business, cognitive, commodification, copyright, corruption, culture, digital, history, industry, legislation, listener, litigation, meaning, musician, neuroscience, origin, philosophy, society, sound, technology

I think that’s a pretty good description of what I’m going for. But to give you a better idea, I will share with you the general structure of the book, in terms of the major “parts” that I will organize chapters within. This builds off my decision to proceed chronologically, interweaving the story of the musician, listener and industry to build my overall thesis. It’s shaping up to be a sort of “People’s History of the Music Industry” Howard Zinn-like epic retelling of history from the perspective of its losers — in this case, musicians.

After a typical introduction, the book will be comprised of three major parts:

Part I tells the story of the origin of music, and how musicians and listeners came into being. I seek to answer the question “What is music?” by defining the relationships between these two groups, using all the interdisciplinary tools at my disposal. This epic story spans from millions of years ago to the dawn of the 20th century, as we end Part I by introducing the origins of the music industry.

If Part I tells the story of how and why musicians, listeners and industry came into being, Part II describes how the industry came to dominate the relationship shared by those groups. Over the course of the 20th century, we witness the subjugation of music’s meaning and purpose to commerce, and examine the paradox of popular music. This section appropriately ends with the rise of Napster at the beginning of the new millennium.

Part III brings us from the digital music revolution to our present-day crossroads. This is where the payload of my thesis is delivered. The narrative threads of musician, listener and industry culminate in a blunt and critical appraisal of why the record business deserved to die, and the unprecedented opportunities listeners and musicians have in the aftermath of the industry’s fall. It ends by looking ahead to the new business of music, and how digital technology will continue to shape its future.

I’ll wrap it all up with a unique epilogue, which will use the book’s content to look ahead to chart a futuristic vision of the relationship between musician, listener and industry during the rest of the century.

In the end, I hope to publish a book that can be enjoyed by musicians, listeners and industry alike, though they may all get something different out of it. Core to my mission is to challenge readers to reconsider everything they thought they knew about music, and to become a more active participant in its creation and/or consumption.

That blog post may have been a book unto itself, but what can I say, I’ve got the writing bug. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements.

Mediapocalypse Book Update #1

For those of you who don’t already know, the purpose of this blog is mostly to chronicle my journey as a first-time book author. The nonfiction book I’m currently working on (currently sharing the same working title as the blog) is something that’s been cooking on the backburner of my mind ever since Napster first hit the scene. To put it bluntly, as a musician and fan, I couldn’t help but notice how the music industry was ruining music for profit.

Ten years and hundreds of pages of notes later, I now have a unique opportunity to take a sabbatical from my regular full-time job as a producer of websites and other creative media. I am using that time not only write my magnum opus, but to engage in entrepreneurship related to blending creative technology with my deep knowledge of the dynamic between music industry, musicians and listeners.

Now two weeks into the process, I’m sure I’m not the first to remark that writing a book has been, above all, a humbling experience. I kept writing the perfect outline, only to wake up the next day and write a more perfect outline. Even worse, as the outlines evolved, the stack of research questions that needed hard-sourced answers grew and grew. Dipping a toe into research was alarming (and eye-opening), with so many contradictory figures and findings from supposedly reputable sources. Yes, writing nonfiction was hard — and I hadn’t even written much yet.

Somehow though, all these fast-accruing research tasks and content refinements snowballed recently into a big breakthrough in terms of structure. For the first time, I feel like I have laid the foundation and erected the scaffolding of what will be the final book. Up until now, I was thinking of the book as building an argument, because what I am writing about is going to primarily challenge many deeply-entrenched views of music and the industry, some of which are taken for granted.

However, when I really thought about it, I realized I should draw inspiration from the books I most loved to read, and a couple in particular came to mind. Both Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to Present — very different books on disparate topics — had the same general narrative structure. There was an overlying chronological progression, but at the same time, three primary topical narratives weaved their way through each chapter of the book. Often, a chapter would have a dominant topic, but the aim of the larger narrative was to illustrate the interplay between the three topics in the title.

My eureka moment was in realizing this is exactly how I should present my book. One of my foremost goals with the book is to provide a new understanding of the interplay between musicians, listeners and the industry. By threading these topical narratives chronologically through history, through the present and into the future, I would have a content structure that is proven and fits my communication goals like a glove.

Now my studio walls are beginning to look a lot like a scene out of a police detective TV series, with timelines stretching across walls dotted with key events, running along separate tracks which represent the narrative of the primary themes. I recently began organizing my timeline in Preceden, a pretty awesome web-based “fancy timeline creator”. Stepping back, I see everything starting to take shape, with repeating cycles and unique accents — like a song. It’s all very befitting for a book on music.

Rethink Music Conference Recap: Top 5 Lessons

Several weeks ago I attended the Rethink Music conference in Boston. I can honestly say it felt like I downloaded the entire music industry in 48 hours. A non-stop parade of executives and managers concisely detailed the challenges they faced in the digital music age. In panel after panel, their guarded optimism shone like a dull reflection off a classic automobile that won’t start. Between furious note-taking and tweeting, I got all the the insight, confidence and enthusiasm I needed to begin writing the book I’ve been planning for ten years.

I want to extend thanks to the organizers and everyone who made this conference possible. Attending it changed the way I look at music and the music industry forever. Writing a book about musicians, fans, technology and the music industry has been a dream of mine since Napster hit the scene. After spending the beginning of the year cataloging my key thoughts and ideas from the past decade, I am now tackling this monster project every day.

I approached the conference deeply entrenched in my disdain for the overall apparatus that controls access to and thus commodifies music. I believed that technology got us into this mess and could get us out of it. I felt that music should be free like water (and bottled for profit when it serves the artist’s best interests). Most importantly, I felt that our culture had become a wasteland for the benefit of a corporate media oligarchy.

After attending the Rethink Music conference, that smoldering resentment of the exploitative music industry has never been more fully stoked. The trampling of artists’ and fans’ rights in a quest for revenue continues unabated, but you can’t blame the industry. It’s their job. But I’m not writing the book to change the attitudes of the music industry. I’m trying to change the attitudes of fans and artists — it’s the only way to force the industry to change.

Here are my five big “lessons learned” from the conference:

#5 – Lawyer Jokes

I learned what many Americans already know — that lawyers are generally evil, and entertainment lawyers are worse. I always knew IP law was horribly broken, but I never realized how this was the absolute bedrock of the talent exploitation business. he lawmen justify their dubious ethical position by telling musicians, “I’m doing this to protect your rights and revenue”, which rings about as true as a cigarette company telling a smoker they are protecting their freedom of personal choice. What’s worse — with rock and pop publishing deals involving multiple parties, I learned that some big deals just don’t get made. The result? The rights holders can’t afford legal representation to make a deal after the fact, caught in a Catch-22 because the deal isn’t done. Millions of dollars are floating around unpaid because deals don’t get made, period.

#4 – Unintellectual Property

I learned the industry is really as dumb as you think they are when it comes to technology. Incredibly, Napster hasn’t really taught them anything, now 10 years down the road. There were a few exceptions — Open EMI’s pre-cleared license hacker sandbox was the most notable. The Echo Nest is clearly and deservedly well-positioned to become industry tech darlings, enabling the big boys to play with the same tools the small, agile tech startups hold inherent to their hacker talent and creativity. But by and large, the entertainment is a lot like the government — it still doesn’t understand IP in the 21st century, and thinks it can use the old tactics to prevent the freeing of music for the good of fans and artists (to benefit the industry). But without technology in their blood, it’s going to be a multibillion dollar quixotic struggle of epic proportions to try to steer the future of music into conglomerate control. Since they can’t dam Niagara Falls, all they can do is pass laws to make it illegal to visit. But what happens when all the rivers flood? Consider that in the U.S. Apple generates over 100x the annual revenue of all domestic record labels combined, and then you see how badly the music industry needs help in the technology space. This is all so ironic because the entire record industry is based around leveraging technology to make people pay for music.

#3 – Complexity

I learned that one of if not the biggest impediments to the industry generating revenue in the digital space comes from their technological stupidity. One of the main themes of the conference was how screwed everyone will be for years to come because of the industry’s inability to manage the information that is responsible for profitability. There are an infinity of micro payments flying around for songs with different metadata and all manner of licensing, publishing and other exploitation rights and rates to be tracked. Though there are myriad solutions being put on the table, the industry seems to have collectively shrugged its shoulders, hoping the geeks will figure out eventually if they throw enough money at the problem. I heard a lot of guarded optimism as a facade for folks who were clearly flummoxed by the complexity of digital music analytics.

#2 – Gamification of Social Music Advocacy

I learned that what I believe to be most exciting and promising thing happening in music today — the gamification of social music advocacy — is something the industry is largely oblivious to. While the conference’s Genesis award winner Have You Heard was honored for proposing such a system, it’s insanity that the big players like Spotify had nothing specific to show in that regard. Perhaps they thought they were protecting “trade secrets” but I’ve got news for them: this is exactly why the music industry is choking. someone smarter than you is going to beat you to it. You need a Turntable.fm to come along and flout licensing until the Big 4 say, “why, look at how you’ve grown! Accept our terms or we’ll kill you.” That’s the industry’s current model for innovation — let the geeks figure it out, then buy it or sue it out of existence. For the young entrepreneurs fresh out of Harvard who proposed the “FourSquare for fans” idea at the conference — I’m afraid this too could be your fate.

#1 – Artist Responsibility

Perhaps the most important lesson of all: I learned that when artists blame the fucked up music industry for their failure to succeed — or worse, their failure to get paid from their success — they’re ultimately blaming the industry for their own failure to understand the music or the business. There are a million “How to Succeed in the Music Industry” books, none of which have ever helped anyone write a good song. Conversely, there are thousands of great songs written by musicians that no one will ever hear, because the artist has no faith, interest or aptitude in the music business. Why should they? The industry is actually OK with its role as artist scapegoat, because if the artists really understood their responsibilities, they wouldn’t have to put up with such exploitation. Being a musician is really about being an entrepreneur, starting a small music business. What we need is millions of small music businesses, not a handful of monopolies trying to squeeze the last dime out of a dying industry, willing only to co-opt and rarely to innovate. Music, like life, is free and alive — and as they said in Jurassic Park, “life finds a way.”

Response to Tunecore CEO Jeff Price’s Grooveshark Diatribe: Music Should Be Free, Sorry About Your Business Model

This comment was posted to a blog post by Tunecore CEO Jeff Price which launches both personal and professional attacks on Grooveshark. Grooveshark’s CEO Sam Tarantino quickly shot back with 6 reason by music should be free, all six of which I agree with. Tunecore makes its money charing a flat $50 fee to musicians in exchange for digital distribution (and 100% of royalties, minus the sizeable chunk the distributor removes). Grooveshark is an ad-supported global jukebox. Unfortunately, they have become a scapegoat for the low compensation musicians are receiving from digital music, when really this is a problem endemic in the industry.

I was so incensed by Price’s hollow and mean-spirited diatribe I had to respond — you might want to read the original post to put the following in context:

To say that Tunecore “does not earn its money off the sale of the music” is preposterous and misleading. Who is drinking whose own Kool-Aid here? You may charge a flat rate, but without digital music sales (ie if music were freely distributed as it should be), you would not be able to charge a fee.

This is a classic case of “the dinosaur’s tail doesn’t know its brain is dead yet.”

As a musician, I always appreciated the service Tunecore provided as a cost-effective way for musicians to “play the game”. But it’s alienating diatribes like yours that bring me closer to the conviction that a world of free music is the inevitable and far better solution.

How about you stop whining and use some of those profits to fight for a better deal from iTunes etc. for artists?

The current system does not compensate us fairly, from the top (Eminem) to the bottom (most musicians). You do nothing but make it easier for us to be compensated unfairly.

Yes, of course musicians want to be paid for use of their music. That’s called licensing. Listening to music via the global jukebox is a different and fair use.

You’re completely missing the point. Those of us who have already accepted that music will and must be free don’t care if Grooveshark is banking off our streams. They provide an incredible platform to distribute our music! What is the alternative, $0.005 per play? Musicians simply don’t feel the way you characterize them in your post, and I for one resent it.

I’m sorry you’re not in the 360 licensing or concert businesses. I don’t think Tunecore has much of a future with the rotten, condescending attitude you’re displaying. I don’t hear an ounce of fighting for musicians in your argument — how about using some profits to lobby the digital distribution cartel for a much-deserved greater royalty for artists? Or do you just spew ad hominem attacks and vitriol at your competition in hopes that mean words will make the problems with your business model go away? I certainly won’t be returning as a customer.

Anonymous Announces Disruptive “Anontune” Music Platform, Sounds a Lot Like Tomahawk

Anonymous announced today (in another silly voice-garbled video with the typical grammatical errors) the shady but righteous group has built a prototype of the “Anontune” digital music service. It’s based a simple idea: there is a ton of freely streaming music on the internet spread out across YouTube, Soundcloud, Grooveshark, Bandcamp, Last.fm and hundreds of other sites. Anontunes seeks to aggregate all of these sources into a single interface that can search and locate these streaming files with the ease and elegance of iTunes.

The interesting thing is, such a service has existed for months, and it’s called Tomahawk. Just a couple months ago, Wired magazine called it the “Most Important Music App Nobody’s Talking About“.

Tomahawk is an open-source hacker project, just like Anontunes. It pulls streaming music from multiple sources. And it manages to do all this in a slick iTunes-esque software client that features social integration. The code and API are well-documented and there are already apps being built on the platform.

The Anontune white paper brings up a number of important ethical points concerning why digital music should be freely accessible. I’m excited to see Anonymous join the fray — the are fighting the good fight as Davids against the Goliath-run corporate oligarchy. And to give them credit — Anontunes has a pretty cool research agenda in addition to its media consolidation goals. The idea of using a ‘global jukebox’ to data mine peoples listening and discovery habits could drive digital music consumption through the roof. But the streaming music aggregator — I’ve heard it before, through my speakers, running Tomahawk.

Tomahawk has the polish of Limewire in its prime — well put-together but still not child’s play. Anontunes is so rough around the edges I don’t think anyone but other hackers are gonna bother. There’s another expected and familiar Limewire-esque problem: the catalog is polarized between widely available popular music and obscure stuff you’ve never heard of. And there are bugs aplenty, particularly because the technologies they’re aggregating content from are always changing.

The RIAA may have their claws deep enough in digital music to control the global jukebox through Spotify and other officially licensed services, but give Tomahawk and Anontune a few years and you’ll once again be hearing about grandmas having to settle with the major label music cartel for $25,000 because their grandson listened to an American Idol single on her computer.

CASH Music’s 360° Music Marketing Platform is an Open Source Revelation

CASH Music's admin abilities look impressive.

I’ll be the first to admit it, I have been out of the digital music scene for a while. Well, I’m officially back and doing tons of market research, getting ready for next week’s Rethink Music conference in Boston. I’ve discovered a slew of new organizations I can’t wait to learn more about, and a plethora of services and products for musicians I can’t wait to test drive.

Number one on my hit list right now is CASH Music. As profiled in a recent New York Times article, Maggie Vail and Jessie von Doom are in the process of creating what I believe could be a watershed product for independent musicians.

For a long time I’ve been baffled at the lack of decent WordPress templates for bands. That seems like the most reasonable solution for my band — an open-source WordPress theme with a nice admin panel that allows a high level of customization. There are plenty of themes to be bent to the needs of a musician, but none expressly designed for their unique needs.

The team at CASH Music has me losing a lot less sleep these days, having figured, “hey, instead of a theme, let’s just build a WordPress for bands from the ground up. Oh yeah, let’s make it free and open source too.”

Geeks with a bit of web dev knowhow can use the self-installer to get up and running and have a robust set of band-specific web tools at one’s disposal. The admin manages content, CRM, mailing lists, eCommerce and events… so CASH Music gets 10.0 on nailing all the key ingredients of an amazing platform there. These elements elegantly come together as the building blocks of custom web tools that can be implemented by site designers.

This is the most brilliant thing about CASH Music: Not only is it open-source, but the company is nonprofit. When I read this, my head split open and rainbows enthusiastically sprung out. The team had an incredibly successful Kickstarter funding drive that ended in March (they raised over $60,000 — double their goal). These funds will go toward their work on an easy-peazy hosted version for the masses, wisely following the model of WordPress.org.

Keep in mind this is all open source! That means, as a musician, you are seeing 100% of the revenue (well, maybe more like 97% after transactional fees, but still). Musicians the world over are truly fortunate that a talented group of people have taken up the cause to address the problem of lower revenues for artists amidst much more widespread consumption.

I can’t wait to have some time to try out my own install — I’ve been using Bandcamp for our band’s website now for about a year. Perfectly utilitarian, but I do miss having our own unique look and feel that features original content. I certainly couldn’t be more impressed with their combination of ethics and strategic thinking, so it’s time to kick the software tires. Stay tuned for part two.

Madonna Sets Record for Largest Second-Week Drop in Album Sales

Fail is heavy in the air for Madonna, who saw sales of her new album MDNA nosedive 88% to a measly 46,000, setting a record for biggest second-week drop in chart history.

This from arguably one of the top ten names in the music industry, signed to an obscene $120 million, 10-year 360 deal with LiveNation, with one of the largest promotional budgets in the business. Her marketing plan started with a Super Bowl half time performance — an album release doesn’t get a much bigger springboard than that.

No matter what IPFI propaganda will tell you, the CD is the end of the road for physical music media. For the majority of music fans, there is far more value in having access to the digital copy. This is clear as crystal in the numbers: Physical sales fall year-over-year while digital sales are on the uptick. Keep in mind Madonna’s miserable numbers included these digital downloads.

The new trend in physical music media sales can be found in Madonna’s first-week album sales (359,000), when the music industry temporarily convinced themselves that the slo-mo flash crash of the CD media format had hit a plateau. The secret behind the trophy showing was bundling — in this case, the bundling of a free CD or album download with any concert ticket purchase. That’s right — if you wanted to take your friend to the Madonna show, well, you both bought the album too. This gross inflation of actual sales (180,000 albums were bundled with tickets) makes the official SoundScan numbers pathetically hollow.

Good thing LiveNation has a 360 deal — they’re going to need that licensing revenue.