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.

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?

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…

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

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.

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.

Today MP3 is 10 years old while in the US music downloaders paid for 158m songs during the first six months of 2005 (+187%).