Archive for: music distribution

Music Piracy – Back and Forth On Damages In US Courts

Jammie Thomas-Rasset may have caught a break, depending on whether the US courts can agree with one another on the amount of damages appropriate to each breach of music copyright. Originally, the consortium of record labels was awarded damages of $80,000 per track involved in their case (the plaintiffs only sought damages for 24 out of an alleged 1,702 tracks – $136,160,000, before you get your calculator out), but this was redacted by a certain Chief Judge Davis to a mere $2,250, reducing the total damage payment from $1.92 million to $54,000.

Despite the fact that this reduction is at odds with a statute that imposes a much higher limit of $150,000, it seems that this isn’t good enough for the defending legal team, and they’ve moved for a new trial. This exposes them to a new award for damages, which in turn would be subject to the same sort of adjustment… This repeating, ‘Wheel Of Fortune’ style allocation is bound to go on for a while, depending on the pressure from the recording industry, who have equal determination to, and presumably deeper pockets than the defendant, but whatever sum the clicker stops on, it will have very far reaching repercussions for the future of the fight against piracy in the States.

Vevo’s Launch Lands It On It’s Feet

Vevo was born of the collaboration between YouTube and the major labels, after the long argument about revenues from YouTube’s streaming of copyrighted music and videos. Vevo has been streaming music video since December ’09, and in that one short month, has overtaken Myspace music as the No.1 music video site in the US. Techcrunch reports the following figures, with a more detailed analysis.

Top U.S. Music Services On The Web (in unique visitors, December, 2009)

1. Vevo: 35.4 million
2. MySpace Music: 33.1 million
3. AOL Music: 29.0 million
4. Warner Music: 23.3 million
5. MTV Networks Music: 17.6 million
6. Yahoo! Music: 16.4 million
7. Jango Music Network: 9.6 million
8. ToneFuse Music Network: 8.3 million
9. MSN Music: 6.6 million
10. Rhapsody: 6.5 million

Most of the traffic on Vevo was driven there from YouTube, and the service isn’t available outside the States yet, but given the warm reception Vevo has recieved, look for roll-out into Europe and Asia in the near future, as well as startled reactions from their competitors.

Radiohead’s Guitarist Shoots the Rainbow With MIDEM

Head over to the Midem blog and watch an interview in which Ed O’Brien discusses how they made a success of releasing ‘In Rainbows’ independently of any record labels, and what that success meant for their band.As one of the most important ‘game changing’ releases of recent years it’s interesting to hear O’Brien tell the big labels to sit up and take notice. Of course Radiohead had the benefits of already having been made famous working with record labels (XL, TBD, Parlophone, Capitol), and the novelty and notoriety of being one of the first big acts to give their music away, but there are lessons to be learnt.

Oversteps – New Autechre Album In March

Does your brain need scrubbing out after the weekend? Then you’ll be interested to note that Mancunian electronic artists Autechre have announced that they’ll be releasing a new album. Their music is a crushed up, jangling, unsettled and deeply atmospheric mix of glitchy, static sounding samples and electronic noises, sometimes over soothing synth lines and drum beats seemingly recorded over a telephone mic, sometimes blended with a brooding black wall of noise. Released and distributed through Warp on the 22nd of March, Oversteps will be Autechre’s tenth full album in a career that spans almost twenty years (their first single and EP were released in ’91 – make you feel old?). Tracklisting as follows, but if you can make head or tail of it you’re a better man than me:

Oversteps:

01 r ess
02 ilanders
03 known(1)
04 pt2ph8
05 qplay
06 see on see
07 Treale
08 os veix3
09 O=0
10 d-sho qub
11 st epreo
12 redfall
13 krYlon
14 Yuop

There are a lot of fresh tracks (some with less than 1,000 plays) up on their white-on-white myspace page (drag highlight it if you want to actually read anything) but none of them seem to feature on the new album listing.

Bid To Buy The Orchard Raised To $2 By eMusic Owners

The Orchard’s majority stock owners, Dimensional Associates, are considering a bid from music streaming service eMusic’s owners, JDS Capital. JDS have been angling for a majority in The Orchard for a while, and this is the third time they’ve come to the table with a new bid, this time of $2, up from their original price of $1.68.

The period between the announcement of the initial bid and this last news has seen the Orchard’s stock prices climb out of the trough they were in last October  (a $1.05 low point). The advantages to the tie in of a music distributor and a music streaming service are obvious, as eMusic would gain unlimited access to The Orchard’s catalogue, and take advantage of the entire chain of profit between musician and consumer, using their own services to promote artists they think will sell.

Emusic Signs Warner Music Deal

Emusic has just announced that they’ve licensed not only Warner Music’s catalogue, but that of every one of their associated sub-labels. From their blog:

So — quite a few new arrivals today, eh US members?

Over 10,000 albums, to be precise, a dizzying avalanche of stuff from the Warner Music Group. No matter your taste in music, there’s sure to be something here that appeals to you.

The increased catalogue will hopefully mean more subscribers, which in turn will mean more pairs of ears that can access all the music that RouteNote distributes to them… A small trickle down perhaps, but positive news none the less.

Digital Music Rides High in 2009 – Neilsen Soundscan Report

Neilsen gathers information from both bricks and mortar and online stores in the US, and has released a full report of music sales in 2009. The album charts are more or less what you might expect, apart from the last minute addition of Susan Boyle, who sold almost as much in the 5 weeks after her debut was released as Taylor Swift, the next biggest selling artist of 2009.  Michael Jackson’s death in the Summer undoubtedly caused his high chart position, but dear old Lady Gaga has smashed into the number 4 position from practically a standing start. Shows what you can achieve if you’re prepared to take your clothes off in a college bar, dole out some pizza and start selling your hair.

Best Selling Albums 2009

1. Fearless / Taylor Swift ~ 3,217,000
2. I Dreamed a Dream / Susan Boyle ~ 3,104,000
3. Number Ones / Michael Jackson ~ 2,355,000
4. The Fame / Lady Gaga ~ 2,238,000
5. My Christmas / Andrea Bocelli ~ 2,207,000
6. Hannah Montana: The Movie (soundtrack) / Hannah Montana ~ 1,823,000
7. The E.N.D. / Black Eyed Peas ~ 1,787,000
8. Relapse / Eminem ~ 1,735,000
9. The Blueprint 3 / Jay-Z ~ 1,515,000
10. Only by the Night / Kings of Leon ~ 1,398,000

In terms of an artists’ overall units, rather than single albums, MJ topped the list, with the Beatles (whose catalogue is owned by the Jackson estate) making a surprise appearance at number 3, presumably supported by their Rock Band license deal.

2009 TOP TEN SELLING ARTISTS

(based on Album sales from 12/29/2008-1/3/2010)

1. Michael Jackson  ~   8,286,000
2. Taylor Swift     ~    4,643,000
3. Beatles    ~     3,282,000
4. Susan Boyle    ~     3,104,000
5. Lady Gaga     ~    2,813,000
6. Andrea Bocelli    ~     2,668,000
7. Michael Buble     ~    2,280,000
8. Eminem       ~      2,166,000
9. Carrie Underwood   ~    1,895,000
10. Black Eyed Peas   ~   1,881,000

Another widely expected, but still pleasing phenomenon is that while the CD slides sickeningly into obscurity, vinyl sales are up: 33% in a single year, to 2.5 million albums. The Beatles and Jackson feature high on the list in the vibyl format, resting on a bed of heavy listening, serious music fan music like Fleet Foxxes, Animal Collective and Radiohead.

2009 TOP TEN VINYL ALBUMS
(12/29/2008-1/3/2010)

Abbey Road/ Beatles       ~       34,800
Thriller/ Michael Jackson      ~       29,800
Merriweather Post Pavilion/Animal Collective  ~   14,000
Wilco/ Wilco        ~       13,200
Fleet Foxes/ Fleet Foxes       ~      12,700
Backspacer/ Pearl Jam         ~        12,500
Veckatimest/ Grizzly Bear       ~      11,600
Appetite for Destruction/ Guns N’ Roses    ~     11,500
Big Whiskey & the…/Dave Matthews Band    ~    11,500
In Rainbows/ Radiohead         ~        11,400

2009 TOP TEN VINYL ARTISTS
(based on vinyl album sales from 12/29/2008 – 1/3/2010)

Radiohead       ~      45,700
Beatles       ~      38,800
Michael Jackson    ~     30,400
Metallica       ~      30,200
Wilco          ~       29,600
Bob Dylan       ~      24,500
Animal Collective     ~    20,600
Pearl Jam       ~      19,900
Bon Iver       ~      17,100
Iron & Wine      ~       16,600

The Changing Face of the Music Industry – A Record Label’s Perspective

Record label Kudos has written a long and detailed post that goes over a lot of the things that we usually discuss on this blog – they make a few good points, and it’s nice to hear someone else thinking along the same lines as us. In brief they state that the music industry has got to work on changing the 95% of music downloads that don’t make them any money (i.e. Pirate downloads) to being legal, money generating downloads, and that the way to do that is to create software that delivers the service the consumer wants, and at the same time delivers revenue to the rights owners.

“Historically, technology was developed by The Producer, and served The Producer.
Today it is often developed by The Consumer to serve only The Consumer.”

Digital Piracy Round 2 – Appropriate Damages

An important trial regarding the illegal online distribution of music in the States has reached the next stage of the argument – there’s no longer much discussion about the fact that duplicating music over the net without rights holders permissions is illegal. Inevitable, perhaps, but certainly a clear violation of intellectual property law. What’s now being put into question is the appropriateness of the massive damages that are being sought by the record labels from individual file sharers.

In 2007, Jammie Thomas was sentenced to pay damages of $222,000 for 24 counts of infringement ($9,250 per infringement). Later, a retrial was granted, and in June 2009 a jury returned a similar decision, but with increased damages of $1.92 million ($80,000 per infringement). In July last year, Boston Student Joel Tenenbaum was also found to be willfully infringing, and a jury awarded damages of $675,000 ($22,500 per infringement). These vast sums were awarded by the American courts as ‘punitive’ damages – fines intended to deter others from repeating the criminal behaviour rather than as a straight like-for-like compensation for the actual, direct  cost of the criminal action.

The amount of lost revenue from a stolen CD is pretty easy to calculate; the shop you take it from loses out on the sticker price, but if that CD is then made available to share over the net, who is responsible for the thousands of copies that may arise on people’s computers? Each individual that makes a copy can (at a stretch) be said to have stolen a product of the same value as the CD, but is the uploader responsible for the actions of the other offenders? Granted, if no-one uploaded the music, you’d be forced to go and buy it if you wanted to listen (assuming it’s not on Spotify or Last.FM of course), but the uploader of a track doesn’t actually make those thousands of copies; they just make it possible for them to be made. A slim distinction perhaps, but an important one; it could be (and is being) argued that ISP’s and torrent tracking/sharing websites are equally complicit in these piratical crimes. If this is the case, is it right to bring down the hammer of justice so hard on the single individuals that are caught and prosecuted? A lottery of punishment that victimises the few for the crimes of the many doesn’t seem a just way of combatting piracy…

Part of the motion that Tenenbaum’s lawyer’s have filed with the District Court of Massachussets, quotes a precedent from the US Supreme Court; “few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process.” Compensatory damages being the direct making-up-for-loss costs, and punitive damages the deterrent. To fall in line with that Supreme Court ruling, the direct damage Tenenbaum caused would have to be the equivalent of stealing $75,000 worth of music (at a 9x multiplier), and Jammie Thomas would have had to have left the record shop with $213,000 worth of CD’s in his backpack! Whatever the result of the retrial request, it seems somewhat academic in the specific case, as I can’t imagine a student can lay his hands on $675,000 to pay the damages.

Death of a Streaming Service

Imeem is still waiting for a signature on the deal selling the all-but-defunct company to Myspace – and the writing is far from on the wall as to how successful the integration of the two company’s software and customer bases could possibly be, especially when you take into account MOG’s recent and Spotify’s impending US launches of their streaming music services. Will anyone go to a band’s myspace page to listen to a few tracks if they can just hear the whole catalogue for free on Spotify? Perhaps not, but Myspace must still consider they’ve got a great deal, considering that Imeem spent at least $25 million on building their brand, technology and user base, and the sale price is rumoured to be as low as $1 million. According to Digital Music News, it was a legal dispute with our digital distribution competitor the Orchard that finally pushed the ailing social network over the edge and forced the negotiation of a sale:

“We held an emergency board meeting to shut everything down,” one executive told Digital Music News.  “The [Orchard] lawsuit was definitely the final nail.”

Subsequently, other executives close to the situation confirmed the decision.  “They just ran out of cash, it was just a cash thing,” one executive shared, also anonymously.  “The potential liabilities – $150,000 per stream – could get astronomical.  [Imeem] thought they had a case, but they couldn’t afford to fight it.”

I think it’s a shame that Imeem has been forced to give up their autonomy, but the fact of their acquisition by Myspace shows who got the model the right way round; Imeem couldn’t stay afloat because they couldn’t afford to pay for the licensing costs of the music they were using from the advertising they sold, and because they were not efficient enough in properly securing the rights to use it, hence the court case threatened by the Orchard, whereas Myspace gets everyone to sign up their music for free – read their sign-up agreement again – and their proposition snowballed, a little free music, and a few million users kept growing until they had every major act and every teenage girl in America signed up. The combination of huge traffic and no licensing costs meant that they were able to pocket all of their ad revenue, but they are not as attractive a proposition to the artists and record labels as there is no revenue coming back to them in the same way that Spotify sends money upstream per play, unless,  like the major labels, you’ve got enough clout to demand a revenue sharing deal. If MOG or Spotify can find a way to include the band info and minor social element that Myspace provided, or perhaps team up with Facebook to provide music streaming and playlist sharing then Myspace will be blown out of the water – regardless of which little social startups they squash into their business in the meantime.