“We used to fool ourselves,’ [Edgar Bronfman, CEO of Warner Music] said. “We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.“
Link

If I am working for Warner Music I wait 6 more months before printing my resignation letter, just in case this is finally the definite sign that this industry is waking up. The “inadvertently”part is a bit too much, not sure how you can sue hundreds of people without noticing but hey, at least the process started.

Another study revealing the obvious: downloads are what TV is to DVD: a free teaser that actually increases sales in the long run. This one from the Canadian government:

• When assessing the P2P downloading population, there was “a strong positive relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchasing. […] The study estimates that 12 additional P2P downloads per month increases music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.
• When viewed in the aggreggate (ie. the entire Canadian population) […] we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.”

Link

Why? Simple: people who download love music, and they will buy CDs for artists who make a real effort in making the object appealing (the only context in which it makes sense, because in an iPod world a CD is an obstacle to my wish to listen to my music), reward their favorite bands with “donations” (I bought CDs I had downloaded a large number of times) and gifts to others. A tune is a teaser, and a teaser is an occasion to get in touch. In our economy of attention this is all that matters. Music has a bright future. It simply needs to change.

Consumers are pushing the creative industries towards a free model, forcing a reinvention of monetization, a crucial element of the chain that “professional” artists obviously need. As more and more creators experiment free models, mixed reviews come in. This fascinating interview of Jean-Louis Murat, a French musician who is known for being very opinionated, gives a harsh perspective:

You have been one of the first French artists to open a web site in 1998 and to offer songs, exchanges, links, images on it. Is you current anti-internet stance in contradiction with that?

[…] At the beginning, I was putting an exclusive song on my site every week, downloadable for free. Then I stopped. These songs were downloaded without a “thank you”, without a “hello” , and eventually sold as paying compilations in conventions. I belonged to the idiots who believed in the mirages of the internet, and therefore to the inner goodness of people, to communautary exchanges.

Link (in french)

And now Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert:

I’ve been watching with great interest as the band “Radiohead” pursues its experiment with pay-what-you-want downloads on the Internet. In the near term, the goodwill has inspired lots of people to pay. But I suspect many of them are placing a bet that paying a few bucks now will inspire all of their favorite bands to offer similar deals. That’s when the market value of music will approach zero.

That’s my guess. Free is more complicated than you’d think.

Link

Free is not an option as it will be forced by consumers, so the question is not about wheter is can happen or not.The lesson here is that free is not something that can happen by simply taking money out of the equation. Both artists and listeners need to adapt and re-negotiate how they will interact. Artists having the longest way to go in their quest for new monetization channels, but consumers should also adapt their behaviors and change their outlook on artists who are more and more enhancing our lives and less and less pieces of a puzzle trying to screw us as much as possible.

If you are a Swiss citizen you need to act against a dangerous law giving abusive rights to the copyright economy, limiting freedom to create and share in the process. The copyright economy is dead, political powers simply need our help to understand it, and the Swiss political makes it possible with 50′000 signatures.

Sign the petition here.

Billboard will finally start taking into account real figures, now counting online sales. Better late than never.

“it was inevitable that Billboard’s charts would ultimately widen the parameters to reflect changes that are unfolding in music distribution,” says Geoff Mayfield, Billboard’s director of charts.
Link

This means Radiohead or the Eagles get a shot at the rankings even if their record never or barely go into physical stores.

 When you started using LimeWire, did anyone ever mention that if you did certain things you might be breaking some laws?

- Why would they put music on the internet and invent mp3 players if it was against the law?

You mentioned you like Sean Kingstone - what if I told you that Sean Kingstone’s boss might send you a letter asking for money because you shared his album on LimeWire? What would you say to him?

- W.E! [whatever!]

Come on, play along with me. What would you say if he did?

- I’d say “tooooo strict!” and anyway he can’t make me do anything. He’s not the boss of me, he’s the boss of Sean Kingstone.

What do you think might happen if you didn’t pay him?

- Nothing. I’m too young to be charged by the government so he can’t charge me.

Inside the mind of a 9 year old filesharer, fascinating stuff.

I was at the concert of Bjork last month at the Paléo festival, and noticed that two of the guys on stage were using (beside shiny macbook pros) some weird electronic instruments, constantly playing with shapes on giant table screens. I finally found what these things are: the reactable and the Lemur.

Reactable

The reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on a luminous round table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

See it in action here it’s absolutely fascinating. This might be the coolest interface I have ever seen.

Lemur

The Lemur is a top of the range control surface for audio and media applications, that breaks from the prior art on several grounds. Its major innovation consists in its brilliant modular graphic interface concept and its exclusive multitouch sensor technology.

The Lemur promo video is youtubed here. Electronic Music is getting very visual, a plus for the booming live industry who is now a 20$ billion business (vs 30 for the struggling recorded music industry as explained in French here).

A recent survey shows that most IT projects are late in Europe, with Sweden holding the best success rate (a mere 44%) ahead of Switzerland (24%) and Czech Republic (20%). The main causes for delays are “outsourcing, changed project goals, and poor managerial coordination”.

These figures could be misleading - for example if a one day delay equal to a one year delay - but they show the reality of an industry that still hasn’t figured out how to work adequately with clients, the blame usually having to be shared between the clients-who-change-their-mind-all-the-time and the consultants whose job security probably doesn’t depend enough of on-time delivery.

Prince is giving away his latest album with the Mail on Sunday, in advance of his 21 concerts (!) in London later this year.

As expected, the music industry is outraged, despite the fact that Prince is simply reverting to the patronage based business model that was current in the medieval era.

“In European cultural history, virtually every major and minor figure in music, literature, and the fine arts from the Medieval period to the early modern era had some relationship with the patronage system”

Wikipedia

As the Mail on Sunday’s managing editor puts it:

“They [the music industry] are living in the old days and haven’t developed their businesses sufficiently. We can enhance their business. They are being incredibly insular and need to move their business on”

BBC News

Beyond the chance to poke yet another joke on the back of the poor music industry, this is an interesting example of the economic cycles innovation gets us through. An old way of doing things (patronage) comes back on the forefront, simply refined by an innovation (the internet).

Microsoft is innovating with the Zune player, most notably by bringing to the market the first mp3 player allowing wireless exchange of musical files. It sounds like a nice idea but there is a catch: every song you will receive from other players can be played three times before they get automatically deleted.

Problem is, this protection against the evil consumer is violating many licenses, most notably the creative commons ones. 99% of musicians, the ones who like me are stupid enough to make music for fun, have only one incentive: getting their friends to listen to their music and share it. With Zune we will lose that right because Microsoft has “no way to sniff out what you are sending” so they “wrap it all up in DRM”.

It is again a case of the worst-case scenario becoming the norm to protect the interests of a minority. The musical market is increasingly made of independent artists and new and innovative labels. The market share of the big music companies has dramatically decreased^*, probably as much as what TV is experiencing because of youtube. Yet these guys still have their entries into the high spheres of the economic world, getting their voice heard as if they represented the whole market. An increasingly disturbing aberration.

Zune reminds me of airport security, treating everybody as terrorists – lowering the global quality of life in the process – while missing 60% of all bombs, i.e. being dissuasive at best, useless at worst.

More info on medialoper.com

^* I am not speaking in monetary terms here, but in listening time. If you have seen some numbers on this I would be happy to have a look, my email is on the right side of this site.