Monthly Archive for October, 2007

A Copyright Win Win for ISPs

Published
by
Paul Sanders
1 year ago
in Business, Industry, Music, Playlouder and Press
. 0 Comments

Tomorrow (October 30th, 2007 for posterity) Playlouder has a chance to make its case at the ISPA’s annual conference. Paul Hitchman, along with other ISPs, regulators, commentators and Government will be discussing copyright. It’s a very good time to be raising our heads above the parapet, with relations between ISPs and the music industry looking set to take a far more corrosive turn.

To support our case I have written a short article for ISPA. If you can get past the local references it states our position quite well.

A Copyright Win Win for ISPs

Hearing Lord Triesman’s somewhat confusing description of data banks being matched to music being exchanged on the net was just as puzzling for us at Playlouder MSP (arguably the UK’s only specialist in this area) as it must have been for ISP observers and the more clued up members of the record companies.

With a foot in each camp we at Playlouder MSP can take a stab at how the thought might have got lodged in his head. The ’sue the fans’ strategy implemented by the BPI on behalf mostly of the major record labels, which has had no discernible positive effect on the growth of digital revenues and has been a PR disaster, has run its course. In search of a target other than itself the recording industry has stepped up rhetoric about ISPs being gatekeepers to illegal music, and was hugely encouraged by recommendation 39 in the Gowers report which seemed to agree with them that ISPs could and should do more. Boosted by the Belgian SABAM/Scarlet case, in which the Audible Magic Copysense appliance was mentioned, the BPI has been busy telling anyone who will listen that there’s a cheap and easy way to clear unauthorised music off the internet, and it’s only self-interested footdragging by ISPs that is stopping it happen.

I’m not going to rehearse the arguments, both technical, legal, and strategic, which make any such attempt an extremely bad idea for music companies as much as for ISPs. Instead, there’s a compelling case to be made that music can benefit the ISP industry even more that it currently does. There are a number of obstacles to be overcome, not least on the music industry side, but none are insurmountable. And, far from trying to achieve a ‘least worst’ settlement over copyrights on public networks, a bit of imagination coupled with some negotiation could see a settlement which flips the antagonistic relationship between music companies and ISPs into a model of co-operation and mutual value creation.

If this sounds like I have been drinking the ’special sauce’ (this is the music industry after all), well maybe I have. But Playlouder MSP has been building the model and it seems to us to stack up. First, consumers value music, very highly. For your hardcore music fans it might surprise you to know that music makes up a £10 per month value that they perceive in their broadband service. The real nutters can be stretched up to £20 per month. Even mainstream users reckon that £5 per month is a fair price to pay for broadband music. To us this says that anyone who was sitting on the now deceased OiNK.cd (RIP - looking forward to BOiNK.cd from the Pirate Bay) and its ilk was getting too much of a bargain.

While incremental revenue opportunities here might be limited except for a few niche players, we need now to turn to what broadband music lovers say about ISPs, none of which has so far managed to tap into the emotional relationship people have with music despite chucking a bit of money at ‘brand affiliation’ projects. Over 60% said that music would keep them loyal, and a huge 70% said that music on a competing ISP would make them consider switching.

Those of you with active product strategy brains will already be spinning this out into the future. Today BT’s Digital Vault includes ‘private’ music sharing (itself a bundle of copyright infringements which don’t seem to have bothered their corporate lawyers too much), but how about building public sharing, community, and internet radio right into every broadband subscription? All the value of that past music experience and music preference, coupled with the digital libraries of your customers, and the infinite future opportunities around finding and sharing new music would be stuck firmly to the broadband subscription, and every outreach by a customer to their music loving friends would be an invitation to switch ISPs and join the party.

Back to reality, though. What’s it going to take to stop both sides of the divide from doing all they can to destroy the value of broadband music? The answer is surprisingly simple. A licence and some money. No ‘big brother’ network monitoring, no DRM, no ‘unplugging’ customers, no compliance overhead, no invasion of privacy, and no compromise of the ISP’s ‘mere conduit’ status. I’ve called this a copyright win win. I’ll add another win - for the Government, which surely would prefer to see a private commercial settlement than a bundle of extra legislation that would end up not actually helping the music industry but would add an unwelcome element of risk to the next generation of ‘broadband Britain’.

All comments welcome!

Why Playlouder Pays Rather Than Charges Music Companies

Published
by
Paul Sanders
1 year ago
in Business and Industry
. 0 Comments

One of many conversations I had at Telco 2.0 resurfaced a question that ISPs like to throw into a debate about unlicensed music distribution (AKA p2p filesharing). Why, instead of trying (with great difficulty it must be said) to get record companies to accept money for the music on the networks, why should ISPs not charge them for carrying the product to the customer?

It is after all a very valuable service. Without that free carriage - provided at zero incremental cost over the standard consumer broadband charges - download services such as iTunes and Napster would be looking at very different economics, and labels would not get their current majority share of retail revenues. We just need to look at mobile music services to see how this works. The networks take about one third of the retail price just for delivering the file.

As an ISP we could have taken that view too. The very low chance of getting targeted by the BPI for filesharing, coupled with a few simple and cheap services we can bundle with the ISP subscription, such as encrypted VPNs and online digital storage lockers, would mean that our subscribers had access to safer and more convenient ways to share music without paying the people who make it.

But that would have left us in the same competitive position as every other ISP, charging the same for music as they do for spam, and fighting a low level war of attrition with rights owners over p2p filesharing they refuse to license. Our customers tell us they love music; they want more of it, more conveniently delivered, and they’re happy to pay. Read the Playlouder MSP research for yourselves if you are sceptical.

So rather than pick up pennies on delivering music for other companies, which our technology would allow us to do just as it allows us to report on licensed music traffic, we set out to unlock the true value of music, for our customer, for us and for the creators. We’re sailing with the wind here, as we learned recently that p2p filesharing is by the music industry’s own calculations the lesser of many evils besetting the music business.

Playlouder market research

Published
by
paulhitchman
1 year, 1 month ago
in Business, Industry, Playlouder and Statistics
. 1 Comment

Back in June we commissioned an independent market survey carried out on our behalf by Entertainment Media Research. We presented a summary of this research this week at the “Who Is In Control” conference in Reykjavik. Here is a copy of the presentation: Market Research presentation

There are a number of interesting points to note and conclusions to draw. In particular: the implications for ISPs are that an MSP service bundled with broadband access would reduce customer acquisition costs and reduce churn; and music fans are prepared to pay a significant premium to vanilla broadband for unlimited legal access to music.

If we extrapolate from the findings of the survey it appears that there is market of more than £250 million p.a. in the UK alone for the MSP service.

The more I have to hack ActiveRecord’s guts

Published
by
matthew
1 year, 1 month ago
in Development, Geekery, Rails and Software architecture
. 11 Comments

to make it do something right - the more I’m tempted to rewrite it from scratch.

That whole “I never took (or never understood) a database theory course at university, so I’m just going to pretend it doesn’t matter, and that a relational database may be treated as nothing more than a glorified filestore for my Objects” attitude just doesn’t cut any ice with me, but seems sadly prevalent within the Rails community. Yes, good object-oriented design is really important - but you need a sophisticated relational approach in order to get a handle on the data model behind any kind of non-trivial inheritance & mixin hierarchy, and to persist it in a logically sound and efficiently-indexable fashion.

What’s more, I contend that your ORM tool needs to understand something of the relational algebra in order to represent what is going on in a sufficiently elegant, flexible way - otherwise you’ll always be piling hack ontop of hack whenever you want to map the results of a moderately complex query over to the OO side. Joining SQL strings together is not the way forward - these things are syntax trees with structure!

Ahem. Sorry if I sound exasperated. SQLAlchemy on the Python side gets this kind of thing ABSOLUTELY SPOT ON, and dare I say it, so do some of the Java ORM frameworks (shame about the XML config files and Java’s tendency towards boilerplate code and bloated syntax, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater Rails-ers)

The problem with Rails’ ActiveRecord is that it’s neither here nor there - neither the kind of lightweight, simple ‘map objects to database rows and nothing much else’ approach originally implied by Fowler’s Active Record design pattern - nor the kind of powerful ORM tool which is capable of turning the kind of tricks that are increasingly demanded of it in anything like an elegant fashion.

It seems the Rails team’s solution to some of the endemic problems with ActiveRecord’s messy guts is to wrap them up in a huge plastic bag known as caching - an acceptable pragmatic approach, I accept, in many situations, but one which would not be nearly so necessary had a different approach been taken to ActiveRecord’s architecture.

I feel that superior approach needn’t have come at the cost of ActiveRecord’s ‘convention over configuration’ and ‘easy to get started with’ benefits either - it just would have required a little more forethought and a little humility in learning about the Relational Model before attempting a tool which maps complex data models to a Relational Database.

Crap, I’m starting to sound like Fabian Pascal now aren’t I.

We moved to Git

Published
by
matthew
1 year, 1 month ago
in Development, Geekery and Tools
. 4 Comments

I’ll admit it took a while to convince me of the merits of decentralised version control. But after a really nasty couple of merges, enough was enough. We’ve dropped SVN in favour of Git - which seems to be the biggest contender.

The main selling point for me was that it keeps track of all the metadata surrounding merges - information which SVN forgets about, requiring you to document your own merge metadata in commit messages, and scour the SVN logs trying to figure out which changesets have already been merged, when, whence, whither, by whom.

Other wins:

  • It’s really fast
  • Easy creation and painless switching between local ‘topic branches’, which you can create for each feature you’re working on and merge into eachother easily
  • Easy to swap work-in-progress patches with other developers without having to commit to a centralised trunk
  • Easy to make lots of quick local / offline commits, which you can later crunch down into one whn merging, if you want
  • Have the whole history available locally, and lots of backups of the repository

Some minuses:

  • The git-svnimport tool appears slightly buggy. Don’t count on it to import your SVN branches properly, especially if you moved them around at any point in the SVN history. In our case the branches it created only contained the files which had changed since the branch was created in svn - rather than fiddle around sorting them out, I just deleted them and re-created them from the git master branch by applying an svn diff. Which is OK if the history of your branches isn’t super important, but less than ideal otherwise. I also found that a small number of files were missing from the trunk, and had to be re-added manually - I suspect git-svnimport gets a bit lost when files have been moved around in non-trivial ways in the SVN history.
  • There is something of a learning curve with Git, especially when it comes to more complex merging, branching, tagging, cherry-picking tasks which were the reasons I first wanted to move to Git. I found this set of lessons learned helped a lot, ontop of the ‘Git from SVN’ tutorial. Once you know what you’re doing though, it’s faster and a lot less fiddly at merging than SVN.

Playlouder attending Telco 2.0

Published
by
Paul Sanders
1 year, 1 month ago
in Business, Industry and Playlouder
. 0 Comments

I shall be attending the Telco 2.0 event on the 17th October in London, along with Will Page from the MCPS-PRS Alliance, who is speaking. On the basis of past performances what Will has to say should be extremely interesting to those considering the nexus of communications, the creative industries, and public policy. Will has published a paper on the economics of recorded music which I would recommend to anyone.

Playlouder is of course right in the middle of the debate, having taken the highly controversial step of offering to pay for and manage the flow of music on its network. As we see it we are removing a level of legal risk, while at the same time delivering a much higher value experience for broadband users who have been very badly served recently by music companies and ISPs alike. BT plus Limewire is in no way a decent music offering; customers deserve far far more. And DRM is poison, not panacea.

The 16th October also sees me at the Ofcom annual lecture, this year entitled ‘Citizens and consumers in a converged world.’ I am hoping that at Ofcom at least they will not try to wrap up unlicensed use of music with pornography in one big bundle of content likely to cause ‘harm and offence’. There is a normal and reasonable commercial solution to the music use; license it.

I hope that what we are doing at PLaylouder is enough to show people on all sides that there is a third way in which we don’t have to sacrifice any party’s interests to deliver next generation broadband services and healthy creative industries, without requiring half the country to be illegal, or indeed needing any government intervention. Perhaps I shall see you there!

Baby Aborigine

Published
by
matthew
1 year, 1 month ago
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

A new Damascu Bite opened on Brick lane. They do rather tasty Syrian food. More amusingly though, their take-away menu features:

Mix Yalanjy (Staffed vine leafs, Baby corrugate, Baby aborigine)

Good news if you’ve been waiting years for the chance to tuck into minature native Australians…

Playlouder at the ISP Association conference

Published
by
paulhitchman
1 year, 1 month ago
in Business, Industry, Networking and Press
. 1 Comment

MSP (the company that owns the Playlouder ISP) is sponsoring the ISP Association’s annual conference on 30th October.

The focus of this year’s conference will be regulatory and commercial issues being faced by the ISP industry. Clearly online music services and P2P file-sharing directly affect both of these issues and Playlouder is at the forefront of delivering solutions to the problems faced by both the music and ISP industries. These are also issues which are of concern for the UK government as it tries to balance the interests of consumers with copyright owners and ensure that the UK has a viable and competitive broadband industry.

Stephen Timms, the Minister for Competitiveness in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform is delivering the Keynote Speech, and I will be participating on a panel discussing Copyright. Until now ISPs have understandably reluctant to accept any responsibility for the flows of music over their networks and this has led to the antagonism between ISP and music industries. Playlouder MSP provides solutions to this problem by turning the relationship on its head and enabling a commercial partnership between the two industries whilst at the same time giving consumers what they want - unlimited access to music for a flat fee.

Playlouder in Iceland

Published
by
paulhitchman
1 year, 1 month ago
in Business, Industry, Networking and Playlouder
. 0 Comments

The very fabulous Iceland Airwaves festival is this year hosting a conference on the future of music called “Who Is In Control” (17th October). The specific focus is on whether Iceland could be a test territory for a completely new model for digital music.

Gerd Leonhard, who has long been a supporter of Playlouder MSP is the key note speaker (for his thoughts on the future of music distribution see here). I am participating in a panel called “Let’s Go Shopping” which will explore new ways of consuming culture and entertainment with an emphasis on actual consumer behaviour and demand. We recently carried out some market research in this area which will hopefully be able to shed some light on what consumers actually want and, just as importantly, what they are prepared to pay for.

This is the press release for the conference:
THE FUTURE OF MUSIC TESTED IN ICELAND

Who is in Control? - an international conference on the future of music and the latest trends in digital marketing will be taking place in Reykjavik on Wednesday 17 October 2007.

Reykjavik (ICENEWS) 24 September 2007 - Icelandic Music Export has partnered up with Nordic eMarketing and the Trade Council of Iceland to host an exciting conference on new marketing initiatives and the future of music on the internet.

With just 2% of music consumers paying for downloads, the challenge for the industry has been to try and find a way of adapting to - and surviving within - the Brave New World of the internet and 3G Technology.

Who is in Control? is an international conference that will be held in Reykjavik on the 17th October 2007 to discuss not only a new business model and whether Iceland could be a test bed for it, but also the latest trends in digital marketing, new technological opportunities and funding in the digital world.

Various high profile speakers from around the globe will attend the conference, including representatives of major record labels, marketing experts, lawyers, music magazines and websites and leading brands and chains.

The keynote speaker will be futurist, Gerd Leonhard, http://gerdleonhard.typepad.com Other confirmed speakers and panellists include Alison Wenham CEO of AIM, Ralph Simon CEO of Music Entertainment Forum, Federico Bolza Head of Digital Strategy for Sony-BMG, Paul Hitchman at playlouder.com and Tina El-Hagen Venture Business Manager at Guardian New Media Ventures.

Jane Pollard, Head of Creative Strategy at Beggars Banquet, will also be showing samples from the Thom Yorke campaign as well as discussing different approaches to breaking new artists. Iain Forsyth, Head of Digital Media at Mute Records, will talk about his campaigns for Nick Cave’s new Grinderman project, as well as the Moby “Hotel” campaign.