Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

-- because they have all they want for free, not because they don't like my
stuff.  I thought I'd better add that part.
  

    
I think a significant portion of the people who download music - yours, for
example - for free won't want to pay for it when it's offered for sale.

But I think the number to look at is not "How many people will want it for
free who won't pay?", but "How many people who would have paid, won't pay
when it's also offered free?" Someone who gets it for free but wouldn't have
bought the music anyway if you hadn't offered the freebie doesn't matter to
your bottom line one way or the other.
  

    

Being a manager of a developing artist we struggle with the same questions -
but here's the strategy we use, which seems to work really well for us right
now -

He's got free music out there and available from a 5 song EP he recorded.
We have this up on tons of sites (including when my computer is on, Napster)
for people to download freely with links to his website.

What we find most often is that people WANT to give him money.  They'll
listen to the free stuff, and then come to his shows.  And offer us money
for the CDs we mainly give away.

Just tonight, in fact, someone came up to us at a free show and asked us
where his tip jar was - we really didn't think to put one out - for us it
was more an exposure thing - but he offered him $5 - just for playing a few
songs on his guitar!

Anyway, I think there are an awful lot of  people who will pay to hear good
music - people who understand that we have to support good artists, or they
won't be able to be artists.

I really have no information about whether the majority of people are like
this - but some of the research I've seen seems to point that way.

In general, though, I don't feel that an artists music should be made
available without his/her/its consent.
  

    
 Dan Bricklin (the author of VisiCalc) compares the software industry's
efforts to combat piracy to the recording industry's efforts:

 http://www.bricklin.com/softwarepolice.htm
  

    
Scour.com, considered to be the most likely successor to Napster, is
essentially closing up shop due to an investor pullout.  The pullout is
based on fear of further legal action and existing lawsuits against Scour,
Inc.

"Citing a lack of funding as a result of ongoing lawsuits leveled against
it by such entities as the MPAA and the Recording Industry Association of
America, Scour Inc. laid off 52 of its 64 employees Friday. The remaining
12 are the executives and the key technical staff needed to maintain
operations...."

Doubtless, Ovitz could find other investors.  But it appears that he is
actively divorcing himself from the whole area.


http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/bpihw/20000904/en/under_fire_scour_lays_off_staff
_1.html
  

    
looks like mp3.com is toast.  crushed by Universal/Seagram, the last link
in the licensing chain.  In a way it's comical ("who is last -- Universal?  
okay, you guys hit them with the big stick after we've all collected 80
million in settlements").

http://www.nylj.com/links/mp3ruling.html

they may survive if they win the appeal.  But $1 billion is twice their
market cap... or, was before the stock dove 30% in after-hours trading.

Napster, inc., isn't subject to these measures as they never actually
ripped any mp3s.
  

    
Fascinating.
  

    
It REALLY looks like collusion.  But how would you prove that in a court of
law (Mike)?
  

    
5 interesting things about this week's climate

 1. Scour.com is toast.  Only 12 employees left, which makes Angry Coffee
 a larger organization (!).

 2.  Mp3.com is so toasted that this morning Robertson announced that he
 would re-open my.mp3.com, a suicidal move that seems to have no upside
 (anyone?  is there an upside here, or is Robertson just punch-drunk and
 surly?)

 3. Gnutella and Freenet don't work.

 4. Napster is probably going be taken down in q4 2000, although this is
 debatable and it is an interesting legal debate.

 5. The mp3board.com lawsuit threatens to make links illegal in some cases.

 So the situation has really changed.  VC won't touch the bad mojo of the 5
 leaders in this space.  No funding means no product.

 It looks to me like the record labels are winning.  They will simply
 release their own version of a digital distribution network and sue
 everyone else into the ground.
  

    
I wouldn't count Freenet out entirely.  Free software often takes a
long time to get right, and I think the hackers behind it had a rather
naive initial design.  But if they're smart and stubborn enough they'll
get it right eventually.
  

    
Agreed, Brian.  But Clarke's most promising project isn't actually
FreeNet; it's that thing he's building for the major labels, Uprizer.

At least, I hope he's building it for the majors, or he'll suffer the same
fate as scour & mp3.com.

I had great hope for mynapster, very cool product.  but now that they're
"legit," there's someone to sue.  My money is still on the hacker
community to produce the best solution.  

On the open source front, some groovy stuff: Vorbis (open source
alternative to the .mp3 format), eTantrum (watermarking that actaully
works and even makes sense) both show tremendous promise.

But it always gets back to funding vs. time.  Given enough time, hackers
with no money will probably produce a solution, like a finished Gnutella
of FreeNet.  But there is no time.  We are in a footrace.
  

    
There's plenty of time.  It's not a company and there's no burn rate.
It doesn't need to be first.

(In the meantime the commercial vendors make money.)
  

    

>The mp3board.com lawsuit threatens to make links illegal in some cases.

Can you say more about this, please?


>eTantrum (watermarking that actually works and even makes sense)

I have heard a little about watermarking.  I even broadcast some watermarked
material nationally and asked listeners to send tapes in to the company so
they could see if it was working (the answer was yes, if I recall correctly).

How will watermarking help the creators retain the ability to earn money with
their work?
  

    
Given the entertainment industry's track record with Web sites, I think it's
going to be a long, long, long time before the labels build an effective
distribution network. Even with their backs against the wall. Let's not
forget that scour.com was, despite it's "pirate" reputation, a Hollywood-
driven effort. As was Pop.com, which Dreamworks killed off before launch
this week. I know the latter wasn't intended to be a music site, but its an
example of how incredibly hard the Net is and has been for the big media
companies.
  

    
All I can say is alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 ...
  

    
 I agree with the sentiment that the open source hackers can take as long
as they want.  There's no race for them, and as soon as they're finished,
if their product is better than whatever the major labels offer (for users), 
then people will flock to it.

 If they can't come up with anything better than what the major labels 
offer, then users will have won anyway, because the major labels will 
be offering something pretty darn good.  

 I think that now that people are acclimatized to Napster, their standards
have been set high enough that they won't settle for any old bullshit
alternative.  I tried out Napster again the other night, and it works 
really freaking well.  The music library is huge, too.

 The Motley Fool had a good column on this stuff the other day:

 http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker000907.htm

 Here's an excerpt:

This excellent New York Times piece, "Is Litigation the Best Way to
Tame New Technology?" starts with a long quote from Jack Valenti,
president of the Motion Picture Association of America (the guy's
suing because their DVD encryption was weak enough to be broken by a
16-year-old). He said that, "The growing and dangerous intrusion of this
new technology" threatened the entire industry's "economic vitality
and future security," and further that the new technology "is to the
American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler
is to the woman alone."

This speech was given in 1982, and he was referring to the invention
of the video cassette recorder, without which none of us would be
renting movies. Video rentals are a SIGNIFICANT portion of a modern
movie's overall revenue, and they fought tooth and nail to keep it from
happening.
  

    
Some of the Industrial age laws do not work in the new gae of information.
While many judges are clinging to the older laws based upon even older laws,
if coblers had the same clout as the recording industry in the industrial
revolution, we wouldn't be buying nike's, we'd still be buying shoes from a
localobler.. Some may argure that this isn't such a bad thing.... on the
other hand, eventually the shift is going to happen.  we are stil at the
very tip of the iceburg... It's a shame that corporations seem to have more
clout than the individual in todays political climate.  same as it ever
was........
  

    
Great that someone dug up Valenti's stand against VCRs.
  

    

Reposted from a similar discussion elsewhere in the WELL:



In the Deadhead/jamband subculture where I earn my living, there is a pretty
sizeable faction that has pretty much grown up with the belief that music is
"free."  It is recorded (with permission) at concerts and traded (with a huge
assist from the Internet) freely and widely.  I have no research I can point
to, but copious anecdotal evidence suggests that to a significant segment of
the population, the only music that is valued is that which they don't have
to pay for.

It is axiomatic in the Grateful Dead culture -- promoted by the band's own
lathologically self-effacing remarks over the years -- that the studio albums
are lame and live tapes are where the action is.  Even the official live
albums (with the exception of "Live Dead") get a (largely deserved) bad rap.

The Grateful Dead subculture is shrinking in the years following Garcia's
death, but the "jamband" culture that sprang up in the Dead's wake is
growing.  Digital technology is a huge factor in that: when the music was
distributed on cassette, you could only get a couple of generations away from
the master before hiss and speed problems rendered the music unlistenable.
Now, with cheap CDs, there are distribution "vines" and "trees" that spread
literally thousands of clean copies of a given show.

It's great promotion for the artists, up to a point.  I am one of those
artists -- a guy who loves my solo stuff just passed out 50 CDs to random
people on the Furthur tour, at his own expense, just because he wants to
evangelize my stuff.  But will it help me sell CDs?
  

    
More on the legality of hyperlinks:

Mp3board.com does not host any music files, nor do they host a DB of
pointers to files, as Napster does.  The company merely faciliates the
posting of links to mp3 directories and files by individuals via
message boards.

The RIAA's argument and the basis for thir lawsuit is essentially "don't
try to get off on a technicality. Your site exists to aid and abet
infringers of copyright law."

A fair point (they sure chose the wrong name, didn't they?).  However, the
law is all about technicalities. There's another case in the mix down in
Florida, and the preliminary results suggest the possibility of liability
for "bad" links.

If linking is sometimes illegal, it's going to do weird things to the way
we build Web sites.  So this is a case where the RIAA, in its efforts to
meet its own agenda, is actually helping to enact legislation which
affects everything from free speech on the web to the way we include links
on the sites we build.

it's pretty scary.
  

    
 Basically it's an effort to make the web not the web.
  

    

Re: 69    "But will it help me sell CD's?"

I would suggest that David is selling "music content", not CD's.  I think
that consumers are making a very loud statement that the current pricing
($15+) and delivery mechanism (CD's) of music content is no longer seen as
being an appropriate value for their dollars.  Absent pricing and delivery
which is seen as appropriate, consumers will choose available delivery
mechanisms that entail no cost simply because they do desire the content.
That does not mean that most consumers will continue to use "no cost"
delivery mechanisms if a pricing/delivery system is developed which is
viewed by consumers as being appropriate.

A free marketplace will eventually determine what pricing is perceived as
being an appropriate value by consumers.  I suspect that a price of less
than $1 per song, coupled with on demand availability, will be considered to
be an appropriate value by most consumers.  Put that together with some type
of copy protection and I think we would have a workable system.  Although
there would still be hackers who would break the copy protection, I believe
that the vast majority of consumers would use the authorized delivery system
and be more than willing to pay what they consider to be an appropriate
price.

By not aggressively developing such a system, the labels are doing a great
disservice to artists.  By not listening to what their customers are saying,
the labels are doing a great disservice to artists.  The labels are not
protecting artists, they are screwing them (as usual) by not responding to
the marketplace.  This should  not be a fight between labels and consumers
or a fight between artists and consumers.  It should be a fight between
labels and artists because what the labels are doing is ultimately a great
disservice to the artists.
  

    
There are some good links to recent legal decisions that threaten to impede
the Internet's natural growth in this article:

http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/09/08/

"But the decisions are no less legally binding for being silly: As of last
month, domain names aren't property and thereforecan't be stolen; the
ability to decrypt a DVD corresponds directly to the intent to pirate it;
and linking to a program declared illegal is itself illegal. The legislative
branch has kicked in its own contributions, too: The DMCA (Digital
Millennium Copyright Act) and UCITA (Uniform Computer Information
Transaction Act) are wonders of embarrassing corporate glad-handling, all at
the expense of users."

No comment on the article itself.
  

    
I'm in a peculiar situation compared to David. My primary age demographic is
in the mid to late 40s.

I put some MP3s of a few of the songs from the new cd on our website and
sent out a press release and got over 900 downloads of the newest song in
one week. Another MP3 got 180 downloads which is about the number of hits we
used to get for the whole site in a month. We've gotten airplay on 80 NPR
affiliates and interest from another syndicated show that is in 53 markets
as well as a handfull of individual stations.

As a group that has been taking in under 20 grand a year, we were anxious
for the larger market and consider the cds to be part of our marketing
effort. Also, since our song parody material is fairly topical, we don't
mind giving it away to create interest. There is a Bobby Knight number
written as of yesterday for example.
  

    

Please share the link to that... if you don't mind!