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]

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.

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…

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

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

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.

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.

I’m sorry I didn’t post a link to this sooner. This is a nice perspective on the whole digital music landscape from the boss over at Yahoo Music. We’ve heard from the major labels and we’ve heard from the retailers, but Y! has a different view which is interesting. I’ve followed this since the beginning. I started Unit Circle Rekkids right near the start of the Internet’s explosive growth period. I saw different digital solutions emerge and fall by the wayside. After getting burned on Liquid Audio (if you can imagine, back then you paid them (A LOT) for the software to encode your music so that they could sell it and take a cut).

Over the years, digital distribution has changed from an interesting idea to I think the best solution for indie music. If we can get the majors to get over themselves, I think the days of manufacturing CDs are at an end.

So, what cdconnection is doing is listing my albums in their inventory and when a customer buys from them, they buy from cdbaby and then mail it to their customer. This is incredible. Not that cdconnection is doing this. I mean, kudos to them for thinking this scheme up. What amazes is me is that people are buying these overpriced albums from them when they are available much cheaper even at Amazon.com, cd baby or direct from unit circle.

I just did a search on a random unit circle album and I see that cdconnection is paying for #1 placement on google for my artists and albums. The first “real” search result is Amazon. I mean how dumb do you gotta be to not notice that?

This is sort of the genius/evilness of web 2.0. With the magic of technology you can suck in the entire All Music Guide and use it to populate a database for your on-line store. Then you can go find the cheapest prices for your “inventory,” mark it up %200 and fulfill on sales only. The customer is happy, they got the record they wanted (little do they know that they are way overpaying for it), the on-line distributor is happy (a sale is a sale and they’ve already got their mark-up), even the label is happy (a sale is a sale, as long as they don’t do the math and realize that cdconnection is making more money off this sale than ANYONE else including the label/artist/whatever), cdconnection is happy (they don’t have to warehouse anything, they just resend whatever they receive, so it is a nearly pure-profit operation).

Yow.

• Puppies, Flowers, Rainbows and Kittens: Dear Radiohead and the rest of the music industry
• The Long Tail: Radiohead Economics
• The Long Tail: Everything in the music industry is up! (except those little plastic discs)

We’re entering a new phase of the industry and it seems like things are starting to take shape where things were very unclear before. The writing has been on the wall for a long time for the CD. Download is just easier. The CD itself spelled its own doom by downplaying the fetishism of the original vinyl albums: people used to stare at 12″ album covers, if people look at CD booklets once, they almost never look at them twice.

The question has been more about DRM and pricing since iTunes, and it still is, but the future is written on the wall. The bigger question is about the eventual structure of the music business.

Are record companies still relevant? Sure, as promotions vehicles. As talent identification agencies, not so much anymore. That is something they brought onto themselves, though. The way forward for the record labels could have been as the talent scouts. They could have taken advantage of the lowered barriers to entry and lower costs and let a lot of artists bloom. Some of these artists would become mega-stars, some would be marginally profitable and some would lose money (but less money that they would in the old days). Overall, the labels would have probably ended up more profitable and more relevant. Instead, they went the other way. They circled wagons around their big money makers and only signed artists that sounded exactly like their big money makers. Now their money makers are wondering why they have these leeches attached to their earnings when they can do it themselves and the labels are in a true pickle.

The piece of information I’m desperate for as various artists do these experiments around digital pricing is the question that isn’t asked. “Why did you chose to pay what you did?” We can all speculate, but getting the average amount someone willingly paid for a download is one thing, but knowing why they paid that is just (if not more) interesting.  Some more data points not collected: did people download the InRainbows record off bittorrent because they didn’t like giving personal information to the Radiohead store, or did the store not work for them, or was it too slow, or was it just easier since they already used bittorrent all the time anyway?

I hope that future experiments along these lines will ask some questions and tell all of us the answers.