Music industry shoots itself in foot, again

IFPI Advises Kids to Use LimeWire and Kazaa:

Together with the charity Childnet, IFPI recently launched a campaign to educate kids, teachers and parents about the dangers of filesharing. Ironically, the legal alternatives they suggest direct the kids to LimeWire, Kazaa and sites that sell hardcore adult movies.

DRM to make a comeback?

Some people at the RIAA think music DRM will make a comeback:

You know how all the record labels have been dropping their requirements for DRM on their music, opening up more and more venues for DRM-free music? Well, according to David Hughes, head of RIAA technology, that’s just a temporary condition. From now on, we’re going to increasingly rent our music with subscription services that will use DRM to take it away from us if we stop subscribing.

Hughes believes that per-track purchases are going the way of the dodo in favor of these other models, and that’s why DRM will have a resurgence. “I think there is going to be a shift,” he said. “I think there will be a movement towards subscription services and they will eventually mean the return of DRM.”

Hughes is almost certainly wrong on this. DRM restricts customers’ freedom, and they don’t like it, which is one reason why the RIAA had to get rid of it. (The other reason is to compete with Apple iTunes, which otherwise would dominate the paid download industry, to the detriment of the RIAA).

The RIAA are worried

The RIAA are worried. Worried that someone, somewhere might still not hate them, after they’ve treated music fans and musicians alike with contempt for years. To rectify this, they’re trying to pass a law that would allow them to seize people’s houses (in the USA, at least) if they’re caught with unauthorised music:

I was just alerted that the House of Reps has passed HR 4279, with the lovely name, PRO-IP (Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008). Like the doublespeak PATRIOT Act and Peacekeeper missiles, PRO-IP puts local law enforcement in a position to demand the forfeiture in criminal proceedings of stuff used to violate copyright. Which means that instead of the RIAA simply trying to collect fines, they can also incite local authorities to collect all the computers and related gear that was used to pirate.

If this bill is passed in its present form by the Senate and signed, that means there’s no more pro forma RIAA lawsuit payoffs, because if you wind up settling with the RIAA, you could still lose all your stuff in addition to any fee you paid them.

In fact, you could lose your house even if you haven’t pirated music:

This is particularly irksome in light of the MSN Music shutdown, about which the EFF has written a strong and powerful letter. It is increasingly likely a normal person could have purchased music legally from an online site, burned it to an ordinary audio CD, and in the right set of circumstances be branded a pirate because the original “granting” authority no longer exists to prove that the consumer was a legitimate purchasers.

If this law passes, I’m sure a few well-publicised cases will turn everybody against the RIAA and their increasingly desperate tactics, not just in the USA but in other developed countries. And then the backlash will begin: politicians will find they can’t get re-elected unless they stop sucking up to the RIAA, and they’ll start enacting sensible copyright laws, ones that recognize that the Internet, with it’s ability to instantly, effortlessly copy and transmit information, isn’t going away.

Swedish MPs want to legalise file sharing

Slashdot is reporting that 13 Swedish MPs want to legalise file sharing. Yay!

The decline of the recording industry

The Economist has a good article up about the decline of the recording industry: The music industry from major to minor.

It won’t tell you anything you don’t already know ifyou’ve been following this sage, but it is a good summary.
(Note that I call it the “recording industry” rather than the “music industry” because there are lots of economic activities about music: for example manufacturing, distributing and selling musical instruments, teaching people to play musical instruments, playing music in front of live audiences, being a venue for the above, making and selling clothing with images of bands on it, etc. These industries are not, as far as I am aware, in decline the way the recording indsutry is. Maybe that’s because these industries are based on making something people want whereas the rcording industry is based on rent-seeking.)

Music DRM is dead; movie DRM will die

Warner Music is to sell non-DRM’ed MP3 files:

Warner Music has announced that it will begin to sell non-DRM’ed MP3 music files on Amazon, making it the third (of four) major labels to sign up for DRM-free distribution of their music, Universal and EMI being the other two. Only Sony BMG have held out — and that’s the same label that gave us the infamous Sony Rootkit, a dangerous hacker-tool that Sony infected millions of PCs with in a failed bid to prevent copying of its music.

Sony is now the only holdout, and it’s likely they will move to non-DRM’ed music during 2008. Thus the battle over whether music will be delivered in an open format, or whether the music corporations will control us while we listen to it, is essentially over.

The moral of this story? That selling your customers deliberately substandard products and treating them like criminals is not, in general, a good business strategy.

Moving on to the motion picture industry, both it and the music industry have struggled to cope with the new world where copying information and transmitting it around the world is quick, cheap, and effortless. The music industry has felt the pressure earlier, because music has less information that movies and is thus encoded as smaller files — 4 MB for a song, 1 GB for a film are typical. But the underlying pressures are the same.

Expect movie producers to start giving up on DRM by 2010, as it becomes apparent that (1) it doesn’t prevent people making and distributing unauthorised copies, and (2) it pisses off would-be customers. Instead movies will tend to be financed by cinema audiences and merchandising, and also state funding such as with the BBC in Britain or its equivalents in other countries. Movies might get less revenue, but this won’t reduce the number made since they will be cheaper to produce due to advances in computer graphics and machinima.

UPDATE 2007-Dec-31: according to Ed Felten, earlier this year, Warner’s CEO Edgar Bronfman said that selling MP3s would be “completely without logic or merit”.

Radiohead makes $6-10 million from new album; RIAA gets nothing

Wired is reporting that Radiohead have made estimates of between $6 million and $10 million from downloads of their new album, In Rainbows, for which they have bypassed the record companies and made it available as an MP3 download from their website, with the downloaders paying an amount of their own choosing. The average amount paid per album was between $5 and $8.

And of this $6-10 million, the RIAA’s cut was zero. Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

As Radiohead’s Thom Yorke said: “I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one. And, yes, it probably would give us some perverse pleasure to say ‘Fuck you’ to this decaying business model.”

My message to the RIAA is simpler: ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

(via Slashdot)

The music industry: ten years behind the times

Techdirt has a funny article about how the music industry are only ten years behind the times:

[Rick] Rubin and others in the industry are much more interested in setting up some sort of universal subscription system that would allow any subscribers access to any music on any platform. What’s most amusing about this is that this is exactly the proposal the EFF suggested many, many years ago, which recording industry executives insisted would never work. What’s even funnier is they might be right now, after managing to screw up all sorts of goodwill from customers. Back when the EFF suggested it, it probably still could have worked. However, Rubin is exactly right on where the industry is headed if it doesn’t figure out these new business models quickly: “The future technology companies will either wait for the record companies to smarten up, or they’ll let them sink until they can buy them for 10 cents on the dollar and own the whole thing.”

That prognosis seems about right to me.

That’s why I’ve always figured that things would work out in the end. If the RIAA members keep shooting themselves in their collective feet, then the problem will eventually take care of itself.

Pretty much.