Music News Bulletin - 13/12/08

For the fans, by the fans...are fan driven private concerts the next big movement? December 8, 2008
"There are many entrepreneurs who are working on the next frontier of filtering great music to the world through technology. The industry is currently awaiting the release of the 'silver bullet' technology that can dissect good from great music and the relativity of that music by user group and then geographic preference. While this is bound to be on the horizon there has to be a means that every world class musician can develop a sustainable business making great music by bonding with their true fans.

Why Private Concerts? Private concerts started when music was first on the scene back in the days the Kings and Queens utilized their free time bringing in the top musicians from their town to perform private concerts for them and their friends. The best musicians back in the 1700's would be summoned to the castles to play for a group of elite socialites that the only reason to come to the castle, other then to fufil the request from the King, was to listen to the best music in that given region. After these private concerts, these musicians where considered royalty by the guests (fans) and continued to be considered, and paid, as the top entertainment of those times." [MusicThinkTank]

Live music as accessible as water...next hyper growth market?
"In the multi-billion dollar paid entertainment marketplace, live music currently makes up only 2% of total spending. In today's world of economic challenge, the entertainment pie is not going to get any bigger and it will most likely shrink. For one segment to grow, it has to take dollars away from other segments of the entertainment pie. Movies are the top magnet for entertainment dollars, for every $1 spent on live music, $7.60 is spent on trips to movie theatres. Artists should consider fan-driven-private-concerts to grow their slice of the entertainment pie."
[MusicThinkTank]

The 3 dimensions of the music Long Tail December 13, 2008
"So we're all familiar with The Long Tail, right? The idea that the internet facilitates a massive number of low selling, low impact products/services/entities to exist because of the very low cost of having a presence, which when combined make up a very significant chunk of the market.

In music it's been the shift from hundreds of artists selling millions of records to millions of artists selling hundreds of records. Or downloads. Normally, everything in the long tail is grouped together as the low-sales stuff, whether that's things that once sold a shed-load of copies but now have very little commercial traction (back catalogue material) or artists that are producing current, vital work but selling in smaller numbers." [MusicThinkTank]

Music News Bulletin - 25/11/08

Anderson downgrades Long Tail to Chocolate Teapot status: Metaphor swallows Man 21st November 2008
""The end came quickly," as authors of morbid weepies like to say. On Monday WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson effectively admitted game over for his "Long Tail", the idea he's been dragging so lucratively around the conference circuit for the past four years. In as many words, he downgraded it from "the future of business" to something that's, er, not very helpful for your business at all.

"I'll end by conceding a point: It's hard to make money in the Tail," Anderson wrote. "The revenues are disproportionately in the Head. Perhaps that will never change."

As befits a quasi-religious cult, the straw that broke the Long Tail's back wasn't empirical evidence, but the Word of God. The Google God, to be precise - Eric Schmidt. Will Page's exhaustive analysis of tens of millions of music transactions from a giant digital music store had already prompted a last ditch stand. But it was remarks by Schmidt, however, interviewed by McKinsey, that prompted the downgrade. Schmidt said they make most of the money in the top 10 per cent of advertising inventory." [TheRegister]

Artist Royalty Program (Slight Return) November 7th, 2008
"This is a blog post I wrote for the Last.fm blog, head over there if you want to join the discussion:

With the Artist Royalty Program we wanted to solve a crucial problem. Since we started in 2002 we had licensed music from various ‘content owners’ (major and indie labels as well as digital music distribution companies), and we also paid money to collections societies all over the world. But there were certain artists and labels losing out: those who do not have access to all the above, or chose not to be part of this traditional music industry network." [HeutePopMorgen]

The Long Fail: the cost of digital distribution November 25th, 2008
This is a my recent contribution to the Music Think Tank where you can join the discussion:

Digital distribution as well as promotion has undoubtedly been the best thing that could have happened to music fans as well as musicians. Even bigger content owners are finally seeing the opportunities (instead of the threats) that come with the technical change of delivering ‘media’ over the last ten years. It is now easier than ever for artists to connect to their fans and delivering the music to them, gatekeepers have been eliminated and (in theory) artists can reach out to millions of music fans out there through the internet. So far, so good.

Everyone who works in music knows that there are various new challenges that have developed through new digital delivery methods and those challenges can make it difficult to monetize digital music. I won’t be going into the issue of file sharing (there are enough people out there who have something to say about that) but I want to explore a common misunderstanding about digital media: “digital distribution is free” (or at least very cheap). It is not at the moment." [HeutePopMorgen]

EU Public Affairs Monitor - 20/11/08

How to destroy the music business 20th November 2008
"Put yourself in these hypothetical shoes for a moment. My goal is to make as much money as possible by doing as little work as possible. I have no creative talent except for generating and recycling marketing buzzwords. I have no technical knowledge or ability - but I can get my head around a Twitter feed. It doesn't sound promising, but you'll want in, I promise.

Now let's imagine a business that can achieve our goals. The natural place to start this business is on the internet - where one can harness the labour of millions of people and pay them sod all for their work. Under the smokescreen of "collective intelligence" or harnessing "the wisdom of the crowd", we can keep our supply costs at zero. And if we can keep reminding these rubes that "power lies at the edge of the network" or "in the Long Tail", they'll produce lots of stuff for us for nothing, without complaining." [TheRegister]

TechDirt's Backfiring Defense of the Thomas Decision--and the "Effective Freedom" of Totalitarian Terror (Part II) 11.21.2008
"Having dealt with Mr. Masnick's self-immolating attack on my analysis of Thomas, I must now even more emphatically reject Mr. Masnick's absurd claim that he "proved" that my paper on Free Culture mischaracterized the views that Professor Lawrence Lessig expressed in Code, a deplorable book advocating government control of the Internet and lawsuits against programmers. Frankly, mischaracterizing Lessig is pointless: quoting him suffices. Nevertheless, Mr. Masnick claimed, "The worst was when a variety of others pointed out Sydnor's out of context comments [sic] and put them back into context--and Sydnor still stood by the paper, refusing to admit he took a single comment out of content."

Nonsense: I stand by my paper because Mr. Masnick and "others" failed to quibble successfully even about details wholly tangential to its main argument. As Mr. Masnick's post indicates, his quibbles claimed that I had unfairly portrayed Lessig as a "communist sympathizer."" [IPCentral]

Asinine lawsuit from French music interests targets Sourceforge Nov 15th 2008
"Torrent Freak reported yesterday that the SPFF -- think of it as the French RIAA -- filed lawsuits against the developers of P2P clients Vuze, Limewire, and Morpheus. There is also a fourth target, and I'll get to that particular bit of insanity later.

The SPFF's beef is with the fact that these programs don't provide a system to block copyright protected materials from being shared. Because the programs don't prevent files from being shared, the SPFF argues that the programs are complicit in the act itself." [DownloadSquad]

Music News Bulletin - 29/08/08

Now Hollywood is chasing UK downloaders: And getting the wrong guy 29/08/08
"Tiscali threatened to disconnect a customer for illegally downloading a TV show last week, after receiving a copyright infringement notice from a Hollywood studio. The only problem was the customer had quit the ISP months before the alleged transgression was made." [TheRegister]

Pandora prepares to join titsup.com club: Web radio outfit struggling to cover royalties 18/08/08
"This weekend saw a cry for help from personalised web radio outfit Pandora. It blubbed that music industry royalties are too high for it to survive on meagre web 2.0 advertising revenues. In a Washington Post confessional, the firm's founder and CEO Tim Westergren said: "We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision. This is like a last stand for webcasting."" [TheRegister]

World shocked (shocked!) by Legal P2P: Old news sinks in 13/08/09
"Why does the idea of legal P2P - something music fans have been clamouring for since the original Napster - still cause so much confusion? Britain is set to be the first country outside Korea where punters will be offered such services (as we revealed back in June), but the idea still seems too incredible for many journalists and bloggers to comprehend." [TheRegister]

EU Gives Green Light to Sony's Acquisition of BMG 16/08/09
"Yesterday the European Union approved Sony Music's acquisition of Bertelsmann's half of its Sony BMG joint venture. Last month Sony agreed to purchase BMG from Bertelsmann for around $900 million. The need for regulators' approval is a standard procedure and an especially potent topic in a recorded music market with such concentrated ownership. The EU approval effectively ends an appeal by indie trade group Impala that asked the EU to rescind its original approval of the merger. As I wrote last year, indie label sales in the US -- either because of or in spite of the merger -- fared well since the merger. From the time of the merger through October of 2007, a period of just over three years, Sony BMG's share of US album sales dropped to 21.76% from 29.78%. Indies rose to 20.55% from 17.58%." [Coolfer]

Another Case Against Long Tail Economics 15/08/09
"At Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge, John A. Quelch has a post titled "Long-Tail Economics? Give Me Blockbusters!" Quelch is the Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Quelch explains the benefits and lures of blockbusters and offers five characteristics that define a blockbuster. His bottom line is this:
More risky than pursuing blockbusters is not to pursue them, to condemn your enterprise to a lifetime of slave labor harvesting the long tail of micro-opportunities rather than imagining, pursuing, and marketing the global solution to an important, widely shared problem." [Coolfer]

Music News Bulletin - 30/07/08

The Long Tail and the Dip
When you launch a new product or service, you have a choice. It's tempting to go for the bestseller list, to create a mass market hit. This is the box labeled 1 on the tail above. Everyone wants to be here. It's where ego meets profit. A home run. Pixar lives in box 1.

In order to have a bestseller, you must reach the unreachable. Most of the people who buy a bestselling book buy no other book that month, or even that year. The very nature of the top of the list is that you're reaching not just the frequent purchasers and the passionate, but those that only show up for the hits.

The second pocket is labeled, conveniently, #2 (not because it's second best, merely because it's the second one I'm mentioning). This is the profitable, successful niche product. Roger Corman's horror movies, say, or Vandersteen's $3,000 stereo speakers. Not a product for everyone, certainly, but among those that care and are choosing to pay attention, a fantastic choice." [SethGodin]