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.
Paul Resnikoff of Digital Music News today posted this article on his blog, making the radical suggestion that the majors should seriously consider ditching CD’s as a major sales format, and concentrating on digital, thereby divesting themselves of the whole distribution network necessary to sell them. If they just stopped pressing CD’s all the shops, warehouses, trucks, box packers and smiling counter staff would suddenly become obsolete, bad for the truck drivers, and bad for the record companies in the short term, as they’d lose that income stream – but would such a ruthless move be good for the majors in the long run?
Looking at the storage formats that have waxed and waned over the history of recorded music, the eventual demise of compact discs seems inevitable; from wax cylinders to minidiscs, everything is replaced by a more convenient alternative. Even though this shift from physical to digital is a big one for the human mind to wrap itself around “But where is my actual music? My computer looks just the same as before” This will hold true of the CD just as it did of the horse-drawn carriage; people will stand around scratching their heads for a while and bemoaning the loss of work for farriers and the fall in the price of oats, but eventually we’ll all get used to having our music stored in a cufflink, or beamed into our brains from our mobile phone or whatever else is in store for us, and the CD will become what vinyl is now – a charming reminder of a less convenient, more physical age. Those companies that accept the decline of physical media and look towards maximising the advantages of digital music distribution (minescule distribution costs, instant worldwide availability, no cumbersome physical infrastructure etc. etc.) will be the ones that dominate the new era, and those that keep clinging to the old technology, will lose out in the future, no matter how strongly entrenched the current hardware seems.
It can be a bit difficult to keep perspective when all you hear is bad news. The music industry may be in turmoil, but it always has been, and change breeds creativity rather than destruction. Here’s Frank Zappa more than 20 years ago, explaining just what was causing the decline of the music industry back then (and a bit about masturbation, for some reason). Given that so much great music has been made since then, and how diversity and innovation are flourishing more richly than ever before due to the internet, I have to raise an eyebrow when I hear about the industry’s decline.
The web has made it far easier to promote and profit from music. So much so that it’s now possible for bands to succeed in a big way without having the big finances and professional experience of a record label behind them. This is great news for bands starting up in the music business, but it doesn’t mean that success is going to happen by itself, overnight.
The reasons that record labels have lost ground over the last few years are many: most important was their unwillingness to embrace digital as the future of music retail, but the fact that online media also made it easier for musicians to look after the business of running their career for themselves.
Not having people from a label looking after promotion, gig booking, logistics, merchandising and the many other things that go together to make a band successful does mean that you don’t have to pay for that work, but it does mean that you’ve got to do it yourself.
Don’t be put off – the rewards are there, and they’re greater and closer than ever before. It’s just that to get to them you’ve got to be creative, dedicated, willing and most of all, more smart and cunning than the lovechild of Machiavelli and a fox with a master’s in cunning from Oxford university of Cunning.
There are a few online music distribution companies out there, each professing it’s service and it’s model to be the cheapest and the best: what you need to do is figure out which of them is going to be the best for you. How many tracks can you reasonably expect to sell? What can you afford to outlay? Figure those things out and then decide which deal is best for you.
The basic models of distributor are:
Subscription – Keep your royalties, but pay a maintenance or subscription fee to keep your music online. Good if you’re going to be selling a lot of tracks. (CD Baby operate this model, also charging an upload fee)
Percentage – Don’t pay any fees, but pay for the service with a percentage of the royalties from sales (this is the model we use at RouteNote). Good if you don’t want to risk losing any money, or your sales aren’t likely to be massive just yet.
Upload fee – A flat fee for uploading your music, and then keep your royalties. Again, good if you’re hoping to sell a lot of tracks, but there’s no incentive for the distributor to promote your music, as they’ve already made their money, and can’t profit further from helping you out. (EmuBands do this)
Managed – The next best thing to being signed to a record label, some digital distribution companies will take labels and larger bands on, and for a larger cut of the royalties from sales, will make more of an effort to promote their music, or offer other benefits to their partners. It’s up to you to decide whether their efforts are likely to be worth the cut. (The Orchard operate this model)
Controlling your own output means that you don’t have to go with the same partner for multiple releases, you can pick and choose different partners for different releases. If you find that the music distribution deal you’re on with one company is working better for one release than another, you can change partners for the one that’s losing out.
Also consider that digital music sales increase your presence in the marketplace, and a record label will look at the level of your sales of both physical and digital music, and of your live gig audiences when they’re looking at signing you (if that’s what you’re after).
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.
Paul Resnikoff of 