Author Archive for Paul Sanders

Many Opinions, Not Much Information

Published
by
Paul Sanders
3 months ago
in Industry and Press
. 0 Comments

I was asked recently to write a guest blog at UK national newspaper website, the Telegraph. Here’s the result.

In it I predicted, perhaps rashly but we shall see, some kind of breakthrough in the uneasy relationship between ISPs and the music industry. It’s long overdue: as anyone can discover with a few internet searches we have been working on building this bridge for the last five years. I was adding my voice to a small wave of comment about us, most of it ill informed about not only our own business model, but also about the enabling technology and the respective positions of ISPs and record labels.

One of our favourite comments was that our enterprise is ‘naive, flawed and doomed to fail’, which we liked so much that we thought we’d make a t-shirt with it.

And one of the reasons I liked that comment so much was that in some way you can apply it to all human endeavour, including blogging itself. It seems that we have created a proposition that some people struggle to accept as possible let alone probable or inevitable. Here’s Jupiter’s Mark Mulligan:

My take is that if they are close to announcing something, it will be significantly watered down from the proposition they’ve been trying to get labels to sign up to for years. (here)

and Paul Resnikoff:

the service represents a step down from current, free acquisition options (here)

You can’t please all the people all the time. I shall continue to predict a breakthrough, sooner rather than later, we shall continue to develop our platform (see the recent job advert on this blog), and we shall continue to make ‘no comment’ to public speculation about our business and partnerships.

Two Comments from the ISP World

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

At Telco 2.0 I met Keith McMahon who writes the insightful TeleBusillis Blog - I have linked to his comments about Playlouder MSP. The Telco 2.0 organisers have now posted about us on their blog under the title, MSP: ISP plus Content.

Many thanks to each.

The debate we are part of in the ISP world makes the music industry paroxysms look puerile. A quick summary of the latter. Major record companies have turned a very simple question - how to charge digital music companies for their use of the sound recordings - into an extraordinarily complex and fraught conflict. In return the world is giving their revenues a pasting, and the artists are finding ways to do without them.

ISP future business models are an altogether bigger and more complicated story. Ed Richards of Ofcom suggested at the annual lecture recently that broadband should start to be considered a utility, as so much of life depends on being connected. That introduces ideas about universal service which give a different slant to the European version of ‘net neutrality’, the ‘mere conduit’ status which protects the ISP from liability for the acts of its subscribers.

For sure there is a big difference between the two, but the essential principle that makes them both work is that the carrier should not interfere with the content on its network. ‘Mere conduit’ seems to me to be an acknowledgement that some behaviour will be undesirable - and certainly in the copyright industries we have seen that more bandwidth means more undesirable behaviour.

For Governments though, the great threat is that investment in new broadband capacity will lag behind other more adventurous nations, and broadband scarcity will bleed innovation out of services delivered over broadband networks. Now is not the time to be introducing greater risk to that investment, by opening service providers to new liabilities, or new responsibilities.

Our own view is that the content and services that broadband bring into people’s homes and lives are being undervalued by the very mechanisms that were designed to protect the carriers, and that until we all find a way to unlock that value both the broadband and content industries will remain blighted.

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 attending Telco 2.0

Published
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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!

New Feature: Playlists - Rip. Mix. Burn.

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

One of the wake up calls for the music industry (which arguably is still fumbling sleepily with its alarm clock) was the Apple advertisement ‘Rip. Mix. Burn.’

Not only did the phrase lead to some heavy whinging from record labels - for irresponsibly encouraging piracy - it also spawned a swarm of academic papers and conference speeches right across the copyright reformist movement. More chilling for the industry however, it positioned Apple as a far more emotionally engaged intermediary between the artists and the fan than the labels themselves.

Apple’s press release is here:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/feb/22imac.html
and the TV ad is here:
http://www.theapplecollection.com/Collection/AppleMovies/mov/concert_144a.html

Yesterday we added our own contribution to remix culture. You can now make a Playlist in the Playlouder website, give it a title, and share it with other members. Just the basics are there right now, but this is a feature we think is very important so we shall be developing it over the coming months.

Let us know what you think.

More Playlouder Invites

Published
by
Paul Sanders
1 year, 3 months ago
in Industry and Press
. 183 Comments

We’re happy enough with the site and the ISP ordering to start giving out more invites to people who want to be in at the start with the new Playlouder. Once you’re a member you get 3 invites you can send to your friends too. So I hope to see you in the site…

Goodbye Fopp. Hello HMV

Published
by
Paul Sanders
1 year, 3 months ago
in Business and Industry
. 1 Comment

We are very sad to report the demise of our little dog Fopp in an incident involving a very old gramophone player and a large firework.

To commemorate, we used our artist’s impression of this tragic event in one of the banners which guide people from the previous incarnation of Playlouder to the new beta service. We felt it was somehow appropriate.

We have however been asked to remove the image. We apologise unreservedly for the confusion this may have caused HMV and its customers.

Playlouder Beta Invites are Going Out…

Published
by
Paul Sanders
1 year, 4 months ago
in Business and Industry
. 19 Comments

We’re now pushing Playlouder beyond the few friends and family who have been helping us test, and giving members a few invites to hand out to their friends and family, who may not be so forgiving of our changing features and bugs. It’s a nervous moment.

To add to the tension, everyone in the UK (nearly) who gets an invite can sign up for a trial ISP account. Testing is all very well in a controlled environment, but you can never really tell what people will do left to their own devices.

Let’s see if it works.

BPI raids Company Network

Published
by
Paul Sanders
1 year, 4 months ago
in Business, Industry and Music
. 0 Comments

Many will have seen the news, as reported by the BBC, The Register and others, that the BPI and Scottish Police have raided Honeywell after getting a tip off about music sharing on the company’s network.

Here’s the BPI’s press release.

Fact is, there is no licence that Honeywell could take on behalf of their employees which would have enabled them to enjoy music in the workplace. The music industry appears, despite all protestations to the contrary, to have given up on trying to sell music. I say appears, maybe it did try, but why publicise the raid rather than an offer of a truly compelling licence which would tie the music to the company network and which Honeywell could market to staff as part of a great welfare and entertainment package?

Instead Honeywell gets massive disruption and negative publicity, the BPI and the music industry gets seen as the people who always say no, and no new revenue flows back to the creators and producers. Lose, lose, lose.