Category: Music

FindLaw: 56% of Americans Oppose RIAA Lawsuits

A survey by legal website FindLaw has found that 56% of those polled were opposed to the legal actions currently being undertaken by the music industry. With the Recording Industry Association of America stepping up its action and the new Pirate Act coming into effect, then this dissatisfaction can only increase.

3,400 people have been sued since last September – more than 600 of those cases have been settled for an average of US$3000 (€2,473) each, netting the RIAA at least US$1.8 million (€1.48 million). No case has gone to court, no artists, ostensibly the victims of file trading, have received any of this money. Recent figures suggest that CD sales are up 10% on last year, legal music download sites are doing such good business that the market is rapidly becoming crowded.

FindLaw surveyed 1000 participants and found that 56% were against the lawsuits, 37% supported the action, and 7% had no opinion. Opposition is higher amongst younger people, with nearly two thirds of those between 18 and 34 objecting.

Quoted on the FindLaw site, Professor Sharon Sandeen,intellectual property law tutor at the Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota said: “Although the RIAA’s lawsuits are unsettling to many, they are based upon sound law because it is a clear violation of copyright law to make a verbatim copy of a protected sound recording,” says “The underlying public policy at work is the notion that without copyright laws, musical artists would be less inclined to create music and, as a result, there would be fewer sound recordings. So the individuals who complain about the lawsuits should ask themselves: ‘Would I rather live in a world with freely distributed but less music, or pay for the music I enjoy so that there will be more of it?'”
“I suspect that many people, when educated about the purpose of copyright law, support the law,” Sandeen continued. “Public opposition to the lawsuits may be due, in part, to what some people consider hard-handed tactics by the RIAA.”

FindLaw, legal news and commentary

UK Download Chart Launches September 1

The Official Chart Company has announced that legal music downloads will be getting their own chart from September 1 2004. “The rapid growth of legal download music sites has shown the music industry that downloading is the future,” they said in a statement.

It looks like they’ve finally cottoned onto the fact that there’s not much point in doing a singles chart if only eight people are buying them. iTunes UK has sold 450,000 downloads since launch, against the 500,000 CD singles that were sold during the same period.

Now that we have a number of high-profile legitimate music download sites in Europe, there’s finally somewhere to collect reliable data from. ITunes, Napster and MyCokeMusic.com and others will be providing metrics. Where’s Bleep, eh?

Since those sites are doing very good business by all accounts, it’ll be interesting to see what total sales numbers are. I personally can’t wait to see what effects demographic spread, the complete lack of content from some labels, and the fact that under-18s don’t have credit cards will have on the new chart. However, when The Beatles’ back catalogue finally comes online, the charts will be entirely dominated by those irritating mop-topped shriekers once again.

The number one downloaded track last week was the Pixies’ Bam Thwok, which is an iTunes exclusive. Happily this reinforces my point about the demographic skewing of the new chart: the last time the Pixies were number 1 was …. never, having last bothered the single-buying public in 1991 with a brief stint at 27.

The BBC is considering broadcasting the chart on Radio One. Surely they should be webcasting it?

The Official Chart Company

Mixing on Mobiles with Orange Fireplayer

Orange are launching a new service – Fireplayer, which allows users to download tracks and remix them by adding effects. Attendees at Glastonbury were the first to get their hands on the new service, and it launches to the rest of us on July 1st. Fireplay currently offers 20 tracks for remixing, but the company is hoping to expand the range to offer more choice.

Fireplayer is available as a free download from the Orange World portal. Your finished masterpiece than then be saved to your mobile as a TrueTone ringtone to impress/offend your friends/travelling companions.

Also launching on 1st July will be Orange’s new music service, the imaginatively titled Music Player, where subscribers will be able to download and listen to music directly to their mobile phones. Given that the service will launch with only 200 tracks will no doubt be somewhat of a hindrance to uptake. However, Orange see mobile music as critical to their future and have a history of successful innovation and so to expand the range of available music, they are conducting talks with all major labels. Tracks for Music Player are a proprietary format, but perhaps this is the beginning of music labels seeing mobile phones as a secure platform for content distribution?

Tracks for Fireplayer cost UK£3.50 (€5.25), music downloads for Music Player cost UK£1.50 (€2.25)

Orange

US Senate Passes Pirate Act Without Hearing

The US Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation (PIRATE) act has been passed by the voice vote in in the Senate on Friday. The act still has to be passed by the House and signed by George Bush, but already carries a US$2 million (€1.64 million) budget for civil lawsuits against violators in 2005.

The act allows the Department of Justice to sue alleged copyright infringers, in addition to those cases brought by the Recording Industry Association of America. The RIAA are naturally very pleased that they have some backup in the hundreds of cases they have bring launching.

“I commend the passage of these common sense proposals that offer flexibility in the enforcement against serious crimes that damage thousands of hard-working artists, songwriters and all those who help bring music to the public,” Mitch Bainwol, RIAA chairman and chief executive officer, said in a statement. “These acts will provide federal prosecutors with the flexibility and discretion to bring copyright infringement cases that best correspond to the nature of the crime, and will assure that valuable works that are pirated before their public release date are protected.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation rightly points out on their website that no money from any of these cases goes to the artists whose work is being infringed.

Orrin Hatch, a Republican Senator who is one of the sponsors of the act, has a related project up next, the Inducing Infringement of Copyright Act. This act sets out to penalise companies for producing technologies that can potentially be used to pirate content – such technologies include CD writers and iPods. Aside from the obvious loss of personal freedom and backwards technological step, the EFF is concerned that the act could be misused – if your competitor manufactures something that you don’t like, say the iPod for example, then you can claim that it has the potential to infringe copyright.

The Department of Justice

The Electonic Frontier Foundation

European iTunes Stores Sell 800,000 Tracks in One Week

There was a distinct lack of surprised faces yesterday at Apple’s announcement that their European iTunes stores sold a total of 800,000 tracks in their first week of operation.

The most popular store was the UK version, accounting for 450,000 tracks out of the total. In the week that OD2 was acquired by Loudeye, iTunes sold 16 times more tracks than its closest competitor. Best cash that cheque as fast as you can, Peter. No figures are available from Napster.

One ploy for attracting sales was to release the first new track for 13 years from the Pixies exclusively on iTunes, though I’d like to see how much direct impact this had as there can’t be that many Pixies fans left still alive.

iTunes

Loudeye Acquires OD2

Loudeye, a business to business digital media company has acquired Peter Gabriel and Charles Grimsdale’s On Demand Distribution (OD2) business.

The move will effectively double Loudeye’s revenue, and has created the world’s largest digital media company.

OD2 provide outsourced digital distribution for companies like Coca Cola when they want to launch an online music store. Customers include HMV, MyCokeMusic and Wannadoo, but combined Loudeye and OD2 will have more than 200 customers across the world.

Jeff Cavins, Loudeye’s president and chief executive officer said in a statement: “By combining with OD2, the leading digital music service provider in Europe, we become the largest business-to-business digital media provider in the world with the largest licensed digital music catalogue in the industry,” “This significantly strengthens our solutions for our customers globally and immediately expands our customer relationships and partner opportunities. Together OD2 and Loudeye deliver a powerful, next-generation digital media platform to enable companies to launch complete digital music offerings around the world. In addition, this will globalize Loudeye’s content management, piracy protection and promotion services and will enable us to leverage OD2’s broad reach and strong customer relationships to expand our business into new markets.”

“OD2 and Loudeye share virtually identical goals, vision and passion for the future of digital music and I see tremendous opportunities for our combined company to drive digital media deployments worldwide,” said Charles Grimsdale, co-founder and chief executive officer of OD2. “Our proven success managing the specific challenges of pan-European digital media deployments will be a strong asset for Loudeye and significantly raises the barriers to entry for other service providers looking to enter the European market. Furthermore, Loudeye will enable us to offer a much broader range of new services to our current customers and extend our capabilities into such fast growing areas as the wireless arena.”

With online music sales across Europe predicted to reach €1.3 billion by 2007, there is a lot at stake in the industry – expect more mergers and disappearances over the next 18 months.

On Demand Distribtion

Loudeye

Universal to Launch “New” CD Format

When someone near the top at Universal Music asked in a meeting “Why are people buying less singles these days?” what do you suppose the answer was?

Was it “Because the growth in DVDs and video games, which we also publish, mean that consumers are buying other, more expensive products instead, and so our profits are increasing anyway”?

Was it “Because music download sites are increasing in popularity, so singles are now less relevant in the connected age. We license our music to online stores, so we’re still raking in the money – we should encourage downloading because we don’t have to manufacture, design and ship a product”?

No, sadly, it looks like the answer was neither of these two well accepted facts. Insight and informed views kept their hands down that day, and chose instead to munch quietly on the chocolate Hob Nobs, dreaming of home time.

Instead, it looks like someone with a history of dizzy spells, and perhaps head injuries, stuck their trembling hand up straight into the boardroom air and squeaked “Because the singles are too large and they don’t have enough ringtones on them.”Well, someone give that bright spark a promotion, because Universal plan to delay the inexorable slide of single sales by bringing out a “new” single format, based on one that died on its arse more than a decade ago, although with the tiniest of twists.

The Pocket CD is the same size as CD singles were for a while in 1990, 8 cm, and carries codes for ringtones. That’s it – that’s how they imagine saving the CD single.

Lucian Grainge, chairman and chief executive of Universal Music UK, predicts that his rivals are going to love the idea: “If it works, everyone else in the industry would be crazy not to join in.”

Yes, they’d be crazy alright.

The Pocket CD will be piloted in Germany and the UK, and Asda is expected to be one of the launch outlets.

Universal Music

Copy-protected CD Reaches Top of US Chart

A copy-protected CD has reached the top of the US album charts for the first time. Velvet Revolver’s “Contraband”, published by BMG uses the MediaMax copy protection system from SunnComm.

BMG have stated that they intend to release more protected CDs over the year, but is carefully choosing which ones get the treatment. So far, the label has released 12 DRM-protected disks, with about 2.5 million units out in the wild.

The disk stops PCs ripping the audio part of the disk to MP3s, but has copy-managed WMA format versions of the music on another section of the disk. This of course means that consumers are getting a lower fidelity product because the full capacity of the disk is not used to store the original music. The Windows Media files also tend to be encoded at a lower bit rate than audiophiles usually prefer. Because of the mixed format, these disks are no longer strictly CDs because they don’t adhere to Phillips’ Redbook standard for Compact Disks.

The WMA/copy protection scheme used by MediaMax makes it all but impossible to transfer music you have legally acquired to an iPod, as Apple’s music player will not play Windows Media Files. Given that it’s the most popular music player out there, SunnComm are working with Apple to provide a solution, though this seems to be centred around petitioning Apple to incorporate other formats into the iPod rather than getting their own house in order.

You can of course circumvent the whole copy protection scheme by simply holding down the Shift key when inserting the CD. This technically means that American readers will be breaking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and could end up in prison.

SunnComm

Euro iTunes – The Next Day

There are, I’m told, 700,000 tracks available in iTunes. That certainly does sound like a lot. What are they, though? I must confess, my first few searches came up blank. There I was, yesterday, having just subscribed, thinking “I’m 35. Technologically savvy. iPod owner. Credit card. I AM the physically embodiment of the demographic that iTunes is aimed at.”

But I couldn’t find any of my favourite artists. Later on in the day, my friend Neil happily told me what the problem was: I listen to weird stuff that no-one is going to put in a music store launch.

That’ll be it then. No Autechre. No God Speed You Black Emperor. Certainly no Plaid. Oh well.

But plenty of the Darkness and the Corrs. But where’s The The? Only four tracks from Brian Eno?

Anyway, on with the shopping. I adjusted my expectations that iTunes would offer me every track I’d ever wanted and started to treat it like a mid-sized branch of Fopp.

And suddenly it became a lot better.

Signing up was a little random – I entered my details on no less than three separate occasions during the day, seemingly without a hitch. But after the service was finally happy that it really did have my credit card details, I was off to hit Mastercard for lots of multiples of 79p.

Perhaps Apple would care to explain why British subscribers pay 79p (€1.19) for a track and our European neighbours pay €0.99? Is it a reward because they’re better at football, or is it because British music execs have more expensive lunches to pay for?

Navigating through the iTunes store is incredibly easy – and a handy breadcrumb trail will lead you back down each level, from track to artist to genre to home. You can’t get lost, and this has to be the easiest music store navigation out there. Compare it to MyCokeMusic, which had me punching my TFT before I gave up and wrote the rest of my £10 off.

Celebrity play lists are a great idea – featured artists list a CD’s worth of tracks and they’re right there to buy – though there are only five playlists at the moment, and one of those is from Moby.

And that’s it, really – that’s all you can say about it: it works fantastically well and it’s easy. Click on the track you want and it’s downloaded. Then it’s on your iPod and you’re listening to it on the bus.

I suppose it’s expected with a catalogue this size, but there are a few howlers in the track information – weren’t they given the info directly from the labels, or did some work experience person at Apple US shuffle 70,000 CDs into a PC? Even the most casual scout through the store throws up listing errors frequently – my personal favourite being the David Sylvian track “Taking the Evil”. It is, in fact, called “Taking the Veil”, and is about a completely different thing altogether. Freudian slip?

In short, if your music tastes are similar to 95% of the nation then you’ll get along just fine here – iTunes really is an amazing achievement. If you normally buy your music in a petrol station, then you’ll be laughing. You know who you are, Dido fans.

If you’d had an iPod since day one, then suddenly it all makes sense.

Definitely the best and cheapest (but not by enough) music store out there.

Apple iTunes

European iTunes Launches – UK79p or €0.99

Apple’s much-awaited iTunes store has launched in Europe, and is setting a new price for music.

Offering 700,000 songs for UK79p and €0.99, the price point is considerably less than Napster UK, who last month claimed to us that wholesale prices where the cause behind their UK£1.09 (€1.62) basic price. Most iTunes albums will cost UK£7.99 (€12). However, iTunes UK is rather more than its US equivalent, famous for its US99c price for single tracks.

Also, note that UK79p is actually €1.19 by today’s exchange rate, so UK music buyers are getting fleeced yet again.

iTunes has one of the best set of consumer rights behind any music site, allowing users to play a track on up to five different devices along with unlimited CD burning.

Due to massive interest, the iTunes store is being a little unresponsive at the moment – we’ll be logging in later and taking it for a proper test spin.

AOL chose today to announce that they have formed a partnership with Apple to integrate iTunes into their product. The main advantage for AOL will be single-click registration, with free downloads promotions and iPod competitions.

Apple Launches iTunes