Bronfman wants a service levy

Another Wired piece. This time pointing to Warner Music's plan to "bundle a monthly fee into consumers' Internet service bills for unlimited access to music."

Reznor v Radiohead on Wired

10 Rounds head to head courtesy of the good folks over at Wired

Billy Bragg on Bebo

The chaps over at Coolfer are linking to an interesting story about Billy Bragg's comments on sites that use musicians to drive traffic towards advertisement-ridden web pages but don't remunerate the musos themselves.

This takes me back down my memory lane to what I like to call the golden age of MP3 with the original MP3.com which ran a payback-for-playback scheme where artists were paid from a pool generated by advertising for their playback. I still have my first royalty check . . . sigh

Sony + Subscriptions - DRM???

An engadget report suggests that Sony will shortly launch a subscription-based music service. No big news there - everyone else is doing it, or about to. But the fine print is that it will be ipod compatible which leads to speculation that it will be DRM-free (because apple has so far refued to licence Fairplay to anyone, let alone Sony). We'll wait and see...

Exetel and p2p

Looks like Australian ISP Exetel has caved into the demands of MIPI (the local industry's anti-piracy police) and blocked users who partake a little too much in p2p activity. More in a SMH article here, but not much detail as to how the company identifies such users. Seeing as the rest of the Australian ISPs (and the industry body) aren't too keen on treating their customers in this way, one has to suspect that exodus won't just be the name of a Leon Uris novel. Then again, it's a policy that Exetel say they have been implementing for 2 years so may be a MSM beatup. Whirlpool discussion here.

TechDirt clarifies

The Music 2.0 meme is read by some as the 'Death of the Label'. But as we allude to in our recent 'Towards 2.0" paper (link somewhere on this site) it's way more complicated than that. Whatever new business models emerge require resources and brains that need to come from somewhere, so it's conceivable that clever labels might adapt. Which is all preamble to a nice post from Techdirt clarifying a few thoughts.

New IPod generation

Inspired by the Nokia "comes with music" handset, Apple is thinking of launching a new generation Ipod that would give to consumers free access to the entire ITunes library, in exchange of paying a premium price for the device.

Music industry is only partially happy to have found a new source of income: Apple is thinking of paying only $20 to the music industry partner for each device sold, against the $80 paid by Nokia.

On the consumer side, marketing researches have shown that consumers would pay up to $100 more to have free unlimited access to ITunes for the entire life of the device.

NIN v RadioHead

Trent Reznor on Radiohead on Ars:

"I think the way [Radiohead] parlayed it into a marketing gimmick has certainly been shrewd," Reznor said when speaking to Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Michael Atkin. "But if you look at what they did, though, it was very much a bait and switch to get you to pay for a MySpace-quality stream as a way to promote a very traditional record sale."

Songkick Battle

Songkick is a newish service designed to help users find bands and their gigs. They've mashed together some data from myspace and amazon and given you a way to compare three bands at a time. Geeky and a little bit interesting. Maybe. Check it out.

NIN launches the Ghost film festival

After the release of their last album Ghosts I-IV in editions ranging from free to $300 box, Trent Reznor asked to their fans to create music videos for the songs of the album.



The winners, selected by the band, will present their works on a specific YouTube section.



"To expand the idea of the "Ghosts" project, we're inviting anyone and everyone to create visuals to accompany the album's music. In a few months, we'll be gathering the entries we feel are particularly exceptional and highlighting them. There are no rules to this - be as creative as you like. Create a music video, or a short film, or something completely abstract. Use only one track from the album, or use multiple tracks. Only one caveat: Incorporating copyrighted materials (clips from movies, music by other artists, etc) into your video might limit our ability to feature it in the future"



Very clever marketing 2.0 maneuver....

The Top 20 Record Company Mistakes

From Blender magazine, a list of the biggest screw-ups in the history of recorded music. (via Boing Boing)

REM makes another move

MSNBC is reporting that REMs new album will be available on the social networking site iLike - well before its official release date. We can check it out on March 24th to see exactly what *is* available but apparently:

"the iLike launch will make the 11-song set freely available to anyone using iLike.com, Facebook, iTunes or any of the other social networks and sites that offer an iLike application for their platforms."

Whatever that really means

Un-indie

This from Coolfer on what is (not) truly indie in this day and age. Some interesting stuff about Apple's ad campaigns too.

Jock Dynamite Records

Thanks to CC Rachel for the heads up about this label. All the music is freely downloadable under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License. I've just downloaded Mr Jabsticks' "I Think We May Have a Situation Here" - thirteen 192kbps MP3s of electronic weirdness - just what I need for this evening :P

The Fairness Principle

This is an interesting piece on fairness in Music 2.0. Of particular interest is Trent Reznor's disappointment about the number of downloaders who paid for Saul Williams' debut release. I have to admit that I didn't pay for it, but after listening to it, it's not the kind of album I would buy. This disappointment probably influenced his release decisions concerning the new NIN album.

More NIN

There's an interesting write-up of Reznor's latest offering at Coolfer.

An interesting aspect is that the music has been licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. This is all well and good, but not all 'remixers' are mash-up artists. What we really want is access to the masters like Reznor provided in previous efforts to more engagingly interact with his fans. Perhaps they'll turn up on the NIN site at some stage.

Seth Godin's Thoughts on the Music Industry

A fun read here It's long, but here's the flavour:

The internet is the ability to get any song you want in front of the people who want to hear it with huge reach and no barriers. What matters isn’t how many, it’s who. Who are you reaching, who are the thought leaders, who are the people who are going to tell other people?

Nine Inch Nails from 0 to 300

The Register reports that NIN has released its new album a la Radiohead. Get 9 tracks for free, or pay to get more.

More on Facebook Music

Following on from Beatrice's post about Facebook Music, I decided to sign up for an account. At first it seems just like signing up for any other online distribution site requiring users to submit email address, band bio, images etc. But when I finalised all the personal details and was ready to sit down and experience the tedium that is uploading MP3s (**see my bonus little rant about this below) when Facebook asks me to "verify my account". What does this mean?

Well, in what I'm seeing as an ultimate step in copyright paranoia, Facebook asks you to submit an electronic image file (i.e. JPG, GIF or PNG) of some legal documentation that proves your identity (i.e. driver's licence, passport):

For legal reasons, Facebook can only authorize you to upload music to your Page if you verify that you formally represent INfest8. Please upload a valid form of legal identification (only passports, photo drivers licenses, or school IDs will be accepted) that identifies you as Steve Collins. You can upload a JPG, GIF or PNG file.

Why is this required?
In order to upload music to your Page, we need you to submit a valid form of identification that identifies you, the admin of the Page. By submitting a valid form of identification, you are confirming that you either own the copyright to the content you will be uploading or that you are authorized by the copyright owner to upload that copyrighted content to your Page. Please note that you can black out any sensitive information on your identification if you wish, other than your name and picture. We currently only accept photo passports, school IDs, and drivers licenses.

I guess that their trying to cover their backs from the outset so they don't run afoul of those poor old boys and girls in the RIAA.

EDIT: I should probably add that this verification process takes two business days. I assume that means that someone has to sit and go through every submission. Reminds me of when MP3.com used to vet each song for unlicensed samples - I ran afoul of that a few time myself.

**Having been using online distribution sites since 1998 I've signed up with many of them and every time I have to go through the tedious exercise of uploading the same tracks over and over again. What would be nice and probably more cost effective when it comes to server space, would be to have a central repository for MP3s that can just be linked to whatever social networking/distribution site you want to sign up with. Meh!

Facebook has finally launched is Music Section

Since last thursday Facebook Music is finally available.



Bands can now create their own profiles, upload songs, photos, videos, plus fans can buy tickets, merchandise and songs, thanks to deals with Music Today service and iTunes.



It will be interesting to see which strategic move MySpace will do next.......