Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Hellfire for Filesharers…

Friday, October 16th, 2009

The Guardian newspaper today has this very pertinent story on the challenge of getting music reviewers’ interest while at the same time preventing pre-release leaks:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/oct/15/illegal-file-sharing-promo-copies

“In the war against albums being illegally uploaded on to the internet before they are released, David Tibet of the underground band Current 93 may have struck a minor, if resounding, victory. “This is a promotional CD,” announces a little girl on the promo copy of Current 93′s new album Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain. “Anyone illegally selling, copying, uploading or downloading this material is condemned to eternal hellfire. Happy listening, God is love.” Then Tibet – a devout Christian with strong views about the impending apocalypse – intones “murder” over a guitar riff heavy enough to terrify Satan. It makes you wonder whether a casual upload is really worth being cast into Hades for.”

I declare an interest – state51, one of the businesses that came together to create Playlouder MSP, works with David Tibet.

When we were putting together the original plan for Playlouder MSP we built a beta ISP partly because we believed strongly that the ISP music bundle was very compelling and felt a retail strategy had chances, but also because we had to demonstrate to two cynical industries that it was possible for the technology to work to deliver consumer friendly services as well as to protect the value of music.

Ironically, while we were the only ISP in the world that was able and willing to identify music being illegally shared, and then intervene to stop it, one of the accounts on our network was used to upload a pre-release copy of an album. We were in beta phase, and were handing out IP addresses dynamically without keeping records, so when we received a notification from the BPI there was nothing we could do, short of the rack and thumbscrews for all our trial account holders, to identify the culprit – even if it happened on the wire rather than on an open wifi.

Even more ironically that transfer would and could have been stopped automatically if the record label involved had supplied us with their music, as it would have gone into our content recognition systems which in those pre-encryption days were reliably catching high 90s percentages of music transfers.

It is a sign of an industry in distress when the relationships between artists and the honoured few who are offered the chance to hear and review new music are so weak that the trust is routinely flouted; and when there is more kudos for upping on waffles than for delivering a thoughtful review. When, where, and how to introduce a work to the public seems like a reasonable privilege to reserve to the creator, even if we recognise that once released other people have many other rights that need to be respected. It is also one of the foundations on which value in music is built.

So respecting the release date is one of the principles we hold to at Playlouder MSP, and we have invested heavily over the years into making sure that as far as possible we can back up that respect with real action. The final irony is that the label itself was the cause of our failure to stop a pre-release leak on our beta network, but that did not stop them circulating some of the correspondence to ISPs we were trying to interest in solutions to help prevent new leaks in future, in an attempt to damage our reputation. My conclusion – if one is needed – is that trust is a conversation built on mutual respect.

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Lobbying by Numbers – The Record Industry Credo

Monday, July 27th, 2009

A perfect exposition of the difficulty of adapting what’s inside executives’ and industry leaders’ heads in a period of change appeared in the FT this morning, in the form of a letter from BPI head Geoff Taylor responding to a somewhat downbeat piece on the futility of fighting piracy.

The figure 13% is a bit of a bloody disaster if you ask me – the fact that it is so low shows far greater success in holding back the electrification of the music industry than it does ‘substantial progress’. But this picaresque tour of the problems and concerns shows that the lobbyists either do not wish, or are not equipped, to deliver a nuanced and complex message which reflects the complexities of the world they are trying to change.

The fact that they are not willing to spend more than a few million per year to recapture the £200m claimed foregone revenue shows that either they do not believe the number themselves, or that they do not believe that enough of them believe it.

There is a strong case to be made on behalf of all the affected industries that incentives are misaligned to the point that public value in digital networks is being destroyed almost as fast as it is being created, but it won’t come out of something that relies, Chauncey Gardener-like, on hovering along a continuum between cab-driver common sense and a fundamentalist credo.

The letter is below, and online here.

UK record labels have refashioned their businesses

Published: July 27 2009 03:00 | Last updated: July 27 2009 03:00

From Mr Geoff Taylor.

Sir, The suggestion that “the music industry is no closer to solving the problems created by digital piracy” overlooks substantial recent progress made in the UK (“Pirates on parade”, Analysis, July 22).

UK record labels have refashioned their businesses to bring music to consumers online. Digital music services such as iTunes, Amazon mp3, WE7, Spotify and Comes With Music now contribute 13 per cent of overall revenues, and groundbreaking new offerings, led by internet service providers, are coming online.

The memorandum of understanding signed with the government last year saw ISPs publicly accept their responsibility to deal with online filesharing. The UK government explicitly committed to achieving a 70 to 80 per cent reduction in illegal downloading in two to three years, and the forthcoming digital economy bill will propose new duties on ISPs, enforced by Ofcom, to tackle illegal filesharing. It will also give Ofcom the power to impose stronger regulation if that is needed to solve the problem.

For the record, independent research for BPI by Jupiter shows that this year music labels will forgo £200m ($329m) in lost revenue due to illegal downloading. Between 2007 and 2012 the cumulative loss will be £1.25bn. These figures discount heavily for downloads that may not have been purchased, contrary to the assumption frequently levelled at the industry that we treat every illegal download as a lost sale. The jobs that are being lost as a result, and the threat to future investment in creativity, should be of concern to everyone in the media industry, including the FT.

Geoff Taylor,

Chief Executive,

BPI (British Recorded Music Industry), London SE1, UK

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Commissioner Viviane Reding Makes Important Statement

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Telecoms and Media, has made an important statement about the approach Europe will be taking towards the balance between consumers’ and creators’ interests and rights as the EU forms and delivers its digital policy over the next five years. It is very clearly in favour of the development of new content licensing and distribution models, even where rights owning industries have been themselves reluctant to come forward into the digital marketplace.

Playlouder MSP has been at the forefront of this movement for the last 6 years, working with the music industry and ISPs to develop a licensing and service model that can truly deliver the benefits of a networked digital economy to consumers and business alike. With support from the EU the promise looks closer than ever to being fulfilled.

This is a key excerpt:

It is necessary to penalise those who are breaking the law. But are there really enough attractive and consumer-friendly legal offers on the market? Does our present legal system for Intellectual Property Rights really live up to the expectations of the internet generation? Have we considered all alternative options to repression? Have we really looked at the issue through the eyes of a 16 year old? Or only from the perspective of law professors who grew up in the Gutenberg Age? In my view, growing internet piracy is a vote of no-confidence in existing business models and legal solutions. It should be a wake-up call for policy-makers.

If we do not, very quickly, make it easier and more consumer-friendly to access digital content, we could lose a whole generation as supporters of artistic creation and legal use of digital services. Economically, socially, and culturally, this would be a tragedy. It will therefore be my key priority to work, in cooperation with other Commissioners, on a simple, consumer-friendly legal framework for accessing digital content in Europe’s single market, while ensuring at the same time fair remuneration of creators. Digital Europe can only be built with content creators on board; and with the generation of digital natives as interested users and innovative consumers.

The full speech can be downloaded here: Vivianne Reding Speech, Brussels, July 9th 2009

Posted in Business, Industry, Music, Playlouder | 1 Comment »

Javascript application developer for music services

Monday, April 6th, 2009

Work on our music app is coming along nicely, and we’re hiring more client-side talent!

http://mediaserviceprovider.com/jobs.html

As the ad says: the role would suit a Javascript guru who enjoys the challenge of developing a real thick-client application in the browser. It may equally suit a GUI application developer with solid experience on other platforms who’s confident in their ability to pick up the necessary Javascript skills.

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Posted in Development, Jobs, Music | No Comments »

A Copyright Win Win for ISPs

Monday, October 29th, 2007

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!

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New Feature: Playlists – Rip. Mix. Burn.

Tuesday, September 25th, 2007

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.

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BPI raids Company Network

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007

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.

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Playlouder MSP participating in Music Tank seminar on file-sharing

Monday, July 2nd, 2007

This should be an interesting discussion, with a good cross-section of participants:

“The F Word: Monetising Filesharing – An Industry Solution”, brings together the leading proponents of the remuneration-for-access model – rightsholders and ISPs – to debate the issues and opportunities of licensing filesharing. It will seek to generate an outline of discussion points and next steps for the industries involved, which we hope will illuminate an exciting new dawn for recorded music. With UK recorded music sales suffering alongside an unfolding retail crisis, the think tank will focus on how filesharing can be monetised. (Full Copy below).

SPEAKERS:
Keynote: Fred Bolza – Broadcast Online Development Director, MCPS-PRS Alliance

Panel:
Richard Gooch – Director of Technology, IFPI
Paul Hitchman – Co-founder & MD, Playlouder MSP
Malcolm Hutty – Head of Public Affairs, The London Internet Exchange (Linx)
Jon Salmon – Head of Broadband Content & New Platforms, Tiscali

DIARY:
Date: 5th July ’07
Venue: Bertorelli Restaurant & Bar, Frith Street, Soho, London
Time 18.30 – 21.00hrs

This think tank will focus on what is perhaps the single most pressing issue facing the recorded music industry today – how to finally run with something most of us or our kids do, license it and help it grow. Yes it’s the F word: Filesharing.

After all, for most music lovers, the passion, discovery and sharing of music is what it’s all about. And as any technologist will tell you, sharing information, and electronic files is what the internet was built for. But filesharing isn’t purely about downloading from various P2P and Bittorrent sites – people are bluetoothing tracks, using messenger, email and file transfer services, sideloading to mobile, sharing whole hard drives… and the list is set to grow.

We’re talking about fixing a growing disconnect between the traditional recordings industry and how increasing numbers of fans first come to sample and discover new music. This isn’t about CD doom-mongering – we expect CDs to be with us for some time yet, together with new forms of premium priced music. Rather a rebalancing of the relationship between the business and the fan, whereby fans are encouraged to do whatever they want with their music (or anyone else’s in fact) and artists and rightsholders are recompensed according to useage.

We’re talking about accepting the notion that the business can no longer control distribution and then attempting building a model around that. This will require a cooperative, inclusive approach across the digital music value chain – involving not just rightsholders and their representatives but ISPs, mobile phone companies, and MP3 and blank media manufacturers.

It’s also going to take some time. The opportunity needs to be properly valued and considered, issues will need to be resolved, and the music and technology industries will need to cooperate in a way that’s currently unprecedented. It’s a mini quantum leap from today’s business, but events this year suggest we may be approaching the sort out mindset necessary for this transition.

Let’s face it, 2007 is already looking like a strong contender for Year Zero as far as attitudes towards digital music go. The majors are finally beginning to give up on preventative DRM, giving music fans the convenience and interoperability they have come to expect from MP3s. And it’s become accepted wisdom that the decline in the recorded music market, both in the UK and across the world will only be partially offset by the digital download market, at least over the next few years. Even six months back the prevailing wisdom on these issues was considerably different, and a year ago it was almost diametrically opposed.

With cutbacks, falling revenue and mergers the order of the day at the majors, and indies feeling the squeeze as well, the time has come to act.

This event brings together the leading proponents of the remuneration-for-access model with rightsholdersand ISPs to debate the issues and opportunities of licensing filesharing. It will seek to generate an outline of discussion points and next steps for the industries involved, which we hope will illuminate an exciting new dawn for recorded music.

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Big Cheap Storage and Music Recommendation

Monday, June 25th, 2007

Valdemar Poulsen – inventor of the telegraphone – has got a lot to answer for. Music went with the rival phonogram, and then the optical disc, but the next 20 years is the age of magnetic recording and storage.

Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K1000 is the first 1TB hard drive – on sale now for £200. That’s 20p per GB, about one quarter of what it was 2 years ago. By 2009 it’s going to be 2TB using current proven technology. And drives for consumer electronics will be up to 200GB. That’s a year and a half.

Toshiba has shipped over 5 million hard drives to automobile manufacturers. There are plenty of people talking about wireless access to music, so it’s ‘just there’ wherever you happen to be with your device, but I’d bet on people carrying around huge libraries for a while yet.

You can’t fill that kind of storage if you have to make a purchasing decision for each track, and nor can you really choose track by track what you hear. Massive personal storage is ideal for ‘smart caching’ and that needs neat ways to organise playlists.

I think algorithmic music recommendation is missing a trick, perhaps through assuming a lot more friction around choice than there will turn out to be. When you can say to a friend ‘here, have this playlist I put together last night’ and you get both the list and the music in a few seconds (I was recently checking out WiMedia) you have social interaction and recommendation in one hit and with almost no math!

Posted in Development, Music | No Comments »