Frankness

 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.

Reactable

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).

Only 24% of IT projects are on time in Switzerland

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.

Who are you going to sue this time?

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).

Viral DRM

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.

More moves in the music industry

EMI Music Publishing, the song rights company, yesterday announced a deal with Skype, the internet telephony business, to sell music on Skype’s new retail website. Under the deal, Skype will be licensed to use song copyrights from EMI’s catalogue to sell music as downloads and ring tones

Link (via the excellent Guardian Blog)

The music industry of tomorrow is still in formation. What an intriguing move. Is Skype planning on using its space on our desktops to sell us things? Is it the beginning of a mid term merger with ebay services and knwo-how?

Open source DRM

Great initiative from Sun Microsystems: DReaM, an Open-source initiative backed by Larry Lessig, father of Creative Commons.

The goal is to promulgate an open-source architecture for digital rights management that would cut across devices, regardless of the manufacturer, and assign rights to individuals rather than gadgets.

[...] If DReaM works, consumers will be able to access their purchased songs through a number of providers, and using a wide variety of devices.

France, now Sun Microsystems, maybe there are reasons to believe…

France 2.0

When was the last time France saved civilization? I can’t remember either, but it’s happening again!

A new business model for the music industry

Since my days as the webmaster of Fréquence Laser (for the non-swiss: formerly the biggest music retailer in the country) I have been particularly interested in how the music industry refuses the adapts to changes brought by new technologies. DRM is not the solution. Treating your customers like crooks neither.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch (my personal blog of the year if you ask) has a post on what he thinks is the future of this industry, and I can only agree with him.

Magnatune’s Answer to the Music Problem

There are two key business model issues to note that make Magnatune different.

The first is that Magnatude allows buyers to download music completely free of DRM and in the format [...] and quality of their choice [...] I think this is the only way a label or artist can charge for music – no DRM and offering a choice of formats and quality.

Albums sell for $5 and up (the buyer decides if he or she wants to pay more). [...]

The second business model difference is [...] they share a flat 50% of gross proceeds (before any costs) from music sales with artists.

In a word? Play fair! And it will take us another decade to get there completely.

I wish I had another free spot at LIFT to hear somebody like John Buckman.

Joyeux anniversaire

On fête aujourd’hui les dix ans du format mp3 au moment ou on apprend que les téléchargements légaux sont en hausse de 187% aux USA. 158 millions de chansons ce qui représente plus de trois fois le total de la même période en 2004.