I'm not a big Korn fan, but their new video, which you're only gonna see online, is very interesting. [That's a streaming WMV format movie, which if anyone can view under Linux or download, I'd like to hear how.] In the video the band trashes a record store while text flashes on the screen criticizing the record industry. They talk about the fact that one company owns all of the five major channels that play videos, and ask if you think you'll see their video on TV. (There would be a lot of bleeping.) They talk about the fact that the music industry promotes about four songs per week and gets their current top 40 hits played 100s of times a week. So, since Korn knows no one will play their video and since apparently their record company asked them to change this video and they refused, one of the many things that flashes on the screen during the video is Korn encouraging you to "steal" their video. Check it out. (Although, again, if you really want people to steal a video, you wouldn't make it available only as a Windows-formatted stream that few can figure out how to save or even view on non-Windows platforms!)
Also, someone (Korn?) has done a nice remix of the song that includes Howard Stern talking about his recent censorship by Clear Channel Communications. Stern starts criticizing Bush, and a few days later, he's off all Clear Channel radio stations. Does anyone need a reminder why concentration of media ownership is a bad idea? We've got to take back the airwaves, people.
Salon has a good article about Howard Stern's recent political turn and the influence it could have on this fall's election. The idea is that his traditional listeners include a lot of unregistered and non-voters who will be motivated by Stern's outrage to get involved and vote against Bush. Let's hope so. (Korn links via BoingBoing).
The big-label recording industry, as we know it, will soon die. And the digital music delivery companies will kill them. But not because of piracy. It'll be because they will be better at the only job that is left for the recording industry to do: promotion and marketing.
Technology has made it possible for anyone to record music at home at low cost. Technology has made it possible for anyone to distribute that music world-wide on the internet for almost zero cost. But an unknown artist faces at least one critical problem: How do you get people to know you exist at all? You need marketing. You need promotion. The recording industry thinks that this will continue to be their job in a digital world. But once again they fail to see how technology will make them obsolete.
Right now the new Napster, Real Networks, iTunes, and a dozen other start-ups are trying to figure out how best to recommend new music to people based upon the music that they like. It's like Amazon.com's recommendations or Tivo's suggestions. Granted, some of those technologies are really lousy right now, but a lot of people are economically motivated to make them a lot better and soon. If Napster or iTunes makes these services better, it's money in the bank--they sell more tracks.
And while it's unclear whether the Dept. of Homeland Security will share their know-how, law enforcement agencies are ardently working on basically the same problem: How do you look at a set of relevant data points and predict something about a person? It might be looking at the music they've downloaded and predicting what other songs they will like or it could be looking at what library books they check out and predicting whether they will try to blow up federal buildings. But in both cases we are compiling databases of information and making predictions about human behavior.
And what happens when these technologies get really good? Well, for one thing we should worry some about our privacy and read the terms and agreements we click "I agree" on (and encourage our congress-critters to read the Patriot Act before voting "Aye!"), but the point here is that these advancing technologies have the potential to put the final nail in the recording industry's coffin. That unknown artist who records their own music and distributes it on the internet will also benefit from the advances in these recommendation/promotion technologies. The small group of people that do know about the artist's work inevitably have other likes that connect them to more potential fans. The best of these technologies can scale up exponentially in a friendster-like fashion. So, these potential fans get exposed to the unknown artist's music and if the music is good, they may like it. They may buy it. And the unknown artist's need for traditional promotion and marketing just decreased significantly.
Sure, any artist that goes on world-wide tours and tries to put CDs in every store on several continents is still going to have a manager and will use a lot of currently existing industry infrastructure. But their bargaining position when they come to the table with the recording industry is totally changed. In this quickly-approaching new world they will need a very limited set of promotion and marketing services that they may even contract out on a tour-by-tour or CD-release by CD-release basis. There will be few to no reasons for them to sign away all their rights to an industry that co-opts all their royalties. Technology will shift the power in these relationships to artists and when that happens, an oblivious industry will finally sputter out its last wheezing breath.
Today, Tuesday, February 24th, 2004, the web goes grey.
DJ Danger Mouse remixed Jay-Z's (new) The Black Album using exclusively samples from the Beatles' The White Album (apparently, every sound save Jay-Z's voice is from The White Album, "every kick, snare, and chord is taken from the Beatles White Album and is in their original recording somwhere [sic]."). Check out DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album. Read the cease and desist letter from EMI.
He couldn't make this album legally in the U.S. So, this isn't some theoretical loss of creativity we face. The Copyright laws in the U.S. are broken. We should let the DJs create.
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that they have learned of at least one radio station that cannot play copy-protected CDs using their current technology. That this would happen was predicted at the blog, mediageek, back in November 2001.
"Most commercial radio stations now run under some kind of automation and store most of their music on hard drives. Although they have the physical CDs, most of them are ripped to the automation system's drive (usually at full uncompressed quality). If copy protected CDs prevent this, then it's like telling radio stations 'please don't play this CD.'"The promotional CDs in question came from EMI who has shipped over 16 million copy-protected CDs to date. One Australian who cannot play an EMI CD in his Marantz DVD player properly has written them to say he will never buy an EMI CD again.
The article does suggest that the CD contains software that might allow the CDs to be played, but apparently no technical information about what the software does is included and so the station manager refuses to allow its installation. (A wise security precaution given the past history of comanies including spyware that phones home.)
Christopher Guest, the genius behind This is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, and Best In Show, has a new docu-comedy out called: A Mighty Wind. It opens today in select theaters. See the trailer here.
The NY Times has an article indicating that Natalie Merchant "will release her next album, a collection of traditional songs called "The House Carpenter's Daughter," on her own label, Myth America Records. It is to be released June 1 through Ms. Merchant's Web site, nataliemerchant .com, and July 1 in stores."
It's stories like these that show the Recording Industry to be such liars and unnecessary middle-men.
From the article:
"The House Carpenter's Daughter" needs to sell only 50,000 copies to break even, less than 15 percent of what "Motherland," her last album for Elektra, sold.
"We're not trying to recoup some enormous debt," Mr. Smith said. "The economics of making this record are very prudent. When we sell 200,000 copies, we'll be standing on our chairs, hollering. If we released this record with these kinds of goals on a major label, we would look like a failure. At Elektra, if you just sell 1.5 million, everyone goes around with their heads down."
Ms. Merchant is not the first well-known musician to become independent. Prince, after battling Warner Records over his desire to release more music in a year than the label thought it could market, started his own company, NPG, and has since released double- and triple-CD sets at whim. Todd Rundgren markets his music directly to subscribers to his Web site, patronet.com"
On Wednesday, NPR's Marketplace had a story on several other musicians who have given up on the big labels and started their own. Read and/or listen.
From the report:
...the big labels are increasingly reluctant to spend their money and time developing artists that don't fit a narrow pop formula. ... The artist contracts are notoriously one-sided. Most major label artists, for example, will never see any money from the sale of a record until that record has sold about a million copies. This is because the major label contract stipulates that artist royalties are paid only after the label has been paid back all the money they've spent on recording the record, promoting it to radio, making videos (usually 50% of this is the artist's responsibility), touring costs and the artist's advance. But these costs can only be paid off using the artist's royalty percentage. In other words, if the artist is supposed to be paid about $1 of the retail price for every CD sold, then only $1 of the income made from the sale of each CD goes against paying off the artist's debt to the label. If the label's costs were a million dollars, which is pretty standard, the artist would have to sell one million CDs to break even.
Not many artists sell a million copies of any of their records. So, except for the advance that labels pay their artists in anticipation of a new record, the vast majority of artists on a major label will never make any money from the sale of their records.
The most shocking part of this story was that Aimee Man's former band 'Til Tuesday (recall Voices Carry from the 80s?) sold over 2 million records for their former label Sony and never made a cent. It's absurd! The big labels are dinosaurs and we are watching them drive themselves into extinction...
I just downloaded an MP3 by the Beastie Boys! But wait, don't call the RIAA yet. The Boys are giving it away for free on their site. It's an anti-war song called "In a World Gone Mad". You can also read the lyrics.