Digital Motion dot net

When Google turned off Google video, they gave their users credits for the videos that they had purchased. Sure, a lot of them were annoyed, but there weren’t that many paying customers in the first place (hence the shuttering). Now MS is following suit, but has no “upgrade” path for customers of its Plays For Sure technology. Again, this wasn’t a successful service (obviously), but what would happen if a bigger DRM-house closed down. You’d see class action lawsuits and bills introduced in congress right-quick. If content providers insist on DRM then content providers must make provisions in their contract for support of their customers for a long, long time. It’s not just the users that should sue Microsoft (per se), it’s the record labels and the artists. Otherwise, users will start to distrust the digital stores and they will go straight (back?) to piracy.

DRM sucks redux: Microsoft to nuke MSN Music DRM keys (Ars Technica)

Customers who have purchased music from Microsofts now-defunct MSN Music store are now facing a decision they never anticipated making: commit to which computers and OS they want to authorize forever, or give up access to the music they paid for. Why? Because Microsoft has decided that its done supporting the service and will be turning off the MSN Music license servers by the end of this summer.

[via techdirt]

Music Tax Details From Source: “Pay Us Not To Sue You” (TechCrunch)

We learned yesterday that Warner Music, the third largest music label, is gunning for a $5/month music tax on U.S. residents.

The death throes of an industry that hasn’t figured out how to adapt. One thing that I never figured out about the music industry was it’s inability to be innovative around it’s business models. At the independent level, sure. But at the top-end, they are working on nearly the same model since the day the industry originated. For an industry that is all about “cool,” this is surprising. Their current set of challenges aren’t new. They are dating back twenty years! Remember “Home Taping is Killing Music?” The technology has been evolving for decades and rather than embrace it and figure out how to work with it, the music industry has fought it every step of the way until we reach this point: “Pay us in case you might want to pirate music.”

This is extortion and the ISPs need to band together to fight it.

As one of many artists who has made more money over the years from live performance than from selling records, the argument that we might be moving to a system where music would be free in order to draw people to live performances has resonated with me. I just came across the Stretta blog today and saw this:
The Stretta Procedure

The fact of the matter is Recorded Music and Live Music are separate art forms. Theyre lumped together in our minds for many reasons, but for people who push the idea that recorded music should be free, it is convenient to exclude all other types of musical expression that dont fit into their new world order business model, which, incidentally, benefits them the most Will we soon justify torrenting movies for free because theyre simply promotional material to drive awareness of actors, who should derive all their income from performing in stage plays?

I just really liked that…

Conveying data that spans more than 2 dimensions is classically difficult. In fact, successful representations like the map of Napoleon’s march from CJ Minard are celebrated. I saw this Flash thing from the New York Times representing box office returns from Hollywood films and I was really impressed how nice a job it did showing some disparate things in a cohesive way. Worth taking a look at if you think about this kind of stuff.

After his previous experiment with Saul Williams was not quite a rousing success, I figured that Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor was done toying with the music business model. Turns out that he was just getting started. The new Nine Inch Nails album is now available in multiple forms. The first part is available for free in high quality on bit torrent sites. The whole thing is available for download for $5 off the Nine Inch Nails site with a killer booklet in PDF. You can buy the 2 CDs for $10, and then there are two limited edition packages for $75 and $300.

I think this is just brilliant. Basically, he gives his fans choices at reasonable price points and makes it hard for them to not do the right thing.

As other high-profile artists emerge from their traditional contracts, I expect that we’ll see a lot more movement towards self-distribution. Especially, with artists like NIN and Radiohead who have a large percentage of their audience on-line already and can do better without the overhead of a large record label.

via Mashable

FT.com / Home UK / UK - Paramount in HD DVD blow

Paramount is poised to drop its support of HD DVD after Warner Brothers’ recent backing of Sony’s Blu-ray technology, in a move that will sound the death knell of HD DVD and bring the home entertainment format war to a definitive end.

Paramount and DreamWorks Animation, which makes the Shrek films, came out in support of HD DVD last summer, joining General Electric’s Universal Studios as the main backers of the Toshiba format.

However, Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD DVD camp that would allow it to switch sides in the event of Warner Bros backing Blu-ray, according to people familiar with the situation.

Maybe the studios are starting to realize that continuing the war between the formats is only succeeding in slowing DVD sales (which were down for the first time year-to-year in 2007). Maybe they are afraid that without a successful HD-format story, both formats will lose to downloading. For whatever reason, the US’s largest seller of DVDs has now endorsed Blu-ray. Can the HD DVD consortium reverse this decision? Does anyone even care anymore?

Warner Backs Blu-ray, Tipping DVD Scales

U.S. Album Sales Fell 9.5% in 2007 (New York Times): when the year’s top albums are Josh Groban’s Christmas music album, a High School Musical soundtrack and the Eagles, why is anyone surprised that sales are down?

Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM (Business Week): The last major label hold-out on DRM has finally realized that punishing your customers is not a good business strategy.

Trent Reznor releases numbers on his Saul Williams download experiment (nin.com): Trent is not only willing to show the data from his experiment, but also to talk about the notion of allowing a pay-what-you-will strategy as a business model

Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use - washingtonpost.com

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industrys lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.

There is no way that this was a good move by the RIAA. The digital intelligentsia is already against them, and most others who have heard about them aren’t too supportive. If they continue to pursue this line however, they will encourage a full scale revolt by the normal folk who never cared too much before. I can’t see them winning this case, but if they do, I would expect congress to enact a law protecting the millions of mp3 player-owners tout de suite.

David Byrne interviewed Tom Yorke from Radiohead about their on-line sales experiment for Wired. It was an interesting article, but David Byrne’s sidebar has been gathering even more attention. Here he tries to spell out the 6 different possible business models for musicians now. I actually thought that he summed it up pretty well. Lets ignore for the moment that if you aren’t Radiohead or David Byrne, your options (at least at first) are really limited to two business models at most. He at least says that he thinks the true independent path will be the only path eventually.

I think these discussions are really interesting and it is exciting to see some folks as smart as Byrne and Yorke discuss it, especially given their perspectives.

Idolator also had an interesting take on this discussion.