Hard News: Another nail in the coffin of music DRM
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The Enemy and Toy Love were IMHO 100 times better live at the Cook than anything that was ever recorded.
They've only themselves to blame for that. they got the guy from dragon to produce it for fuck sake. and in australia, land of pub rock, what did they expect?
If I was producing them I'd gauge the success of their recordings thus far (the singles) and look at a possible live band feel recording for at least the initial tracks. But thats just me, -
its a difficult balance but you can see why people would rather stay at home than spend 4 hours standing in the most run down bars in town being assaulted by unskilled sounds. (roughan is hardly unskilled but he is obviously out of touch with the wants of the audience)
He's an excellent engineer and a good bloke, but he's got a rep for mixing everything and everyone really loud. It just seemed really inappropriate for a band with all the lovely touches of BNRs.
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Robbery: viable alternatives.
There's endless combinations of laws that might build a commercial structure around the production of art without limiting the non-commercial copying of the same. One example follows.
Trademark laws could be extended to prohibit the commercial use of authors and bands names without paying a fee, protecting the artist's name rather than the copies and permutations of particular tunes. Automatic fee structures could be put in place as they are for various things already.
Clarify the laws that prevent you claiming someone else's work as being your own (essentially the case around trademarks and commercial purposes already).
All of a sudden the Rolling Stones classics can be played by any fool, copied by anyone, but their own recordings can only sold or used for commercial purposes as "Rolling Stones", which in turn bags the Stones a fee, for some number of years before old works fully enter the public domain, for free classic radio and golden oldies pubs.
Because fees are fixed and compulsory, it's just as cheap to pay the Stones as it is to pay a ripoff, which would improve elevator and shop muzak no end.Give a small compulsory cut of band revenue to songwriters. Done.
There's all sorts of musical art has died under the current system, documentaries are being killed before they start, songs that mix from dozens of popular tunes can't exist, songs that give new life to 20 year old classics are extremely rare. We get a single studio recording of each song, without variation, maybe a mix or two of a top single, maybe one or two covers in ten years. Live stuff mostly can't be aired or sold, a cool new riff will only be heard at the one concert it was played, because copies are illegal.We get lip-syncing at concerts rather than variation on the radio. It's the opposite of creativity, it should have died in the 80's, but copyright law killed all the innovation, and keeps it hidden away in low-quality amateur jams.
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Give a small compulsory cut of band revenue to songwriters. Done.
It's called a performance right and it's collected by APRA.
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one thing to remember is that the current system is one of monopoly, a monopoly protected by the entrenched music industry and copyright law - there's no price competition at the basest level - you don't see multiple versions of the Stone's latest CD from different vendors all competing on price at the record store in the same way you might see paint at the hardware store - it leaves us (the consumers) open to abuse - it's the real reason I can buy CDs for $9 in the US and $30 here
On the other hand we now have iTunes and Amazon (and others) facing each other down for online sales - that can only be good for us the consumer.
I would argue that DRM is not a global issue, it's largely an American issue because the US (and maybe Japanese) based parts of the music companies have thought they could make a deal with the hardware manufacturers(mainly M$) to build hardware that would plug up all the gaps and make perfect DRM - consumers weren't part of this loop - there are enough geeks around now that reliably plugging all those holes just isn't likely (we'll see about blu-ray/HD maybe they'll pull that one off)
The real problem is that any genuine DRM is subvertable by pirates who want to spend enough money - and it just takes one guy to take one copy - people spend all this time closing the "analog hole" - for example on the video side we now have encrypted data all the way thru the cable to the LCD screen - but I'm an electronic engineer - I know I can choose the highest quality TV I can find, take the back off the LCD, drop some hardware on those wires that drive the LCD panel and record some nice HD in the clear and recompress it into as good a stream as it caame from - tomorrow it will be on Pirate Bay or selling on $1 DVDs in Bangkok and Mumbai (with carefull analog design I can do the same on a high-end audio system)
So if you can't stop the guy you really want to stop with ANY crypto system (notice I didn't mention crypto here at all) but you're going to go out of your way to shit on your normal customer - it's not good business, you don't get any money from the pirate, you do from me
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From Wired:
The report that Sony BMG is moving to DRM-free downloads represents the music industry's white-flag concession that its copyright-protection scheme created a powerhouse in Apple's iTunes Store while failing to combat piracy ...
Michael Nash, a vice president of digital strategy for Warner, said Dec. 27 that the label was dumping DRM because it needed to counter the dominance of Apple, which since 2003 has sold more than 3 billion songs -- most of them coded with DRM that only plays on the popular iPod. DRM-free songs can be played on the more than 100 million iPods and iPhones already sold, but non-Apple DRM-coded downloads largely don't operate with Apple devices.
It just happened.
Meanwhile ...
Online music retailer eMusic -- which claims the second spot place behind Apple iTunes Store in the ranks of digital music services -- said that it had a banner holiday season for 2007. It surpassed its forecasts by 100 percent end ended the year with more than 400,000 paid subscribers ...
eMusic operates on a subscription basis -- users pay a monthly fee, which enables them to download a set number of songs per month, depending on how much they pay. But unlike Windows DRM-based music subscription services like Napster, eMusic sells all of its music in MP3 format, eschewing any sort of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, so once you download a song, it's yours to keep, and it works on the Mac, PC, iPod, iPhone and any other MP3-capable device.
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There's endless combinations of laws that might build a commercial structure around the production of art without limiting the non-commercial copying of the same
the laws are already there to protect the rights of copyright holders and creative types, but they are unpolicable with current technology, and anti copying technology is the only way to re instate the balance.
Being against that is like being against burglar alarms. The issue isn't the DRM its that some people can't be trusted to not steal shit.
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Being against that is like being against burglar alarms. The issue isn't the DRM its that some people can't be trusted to not steal shit.
Very true - I'm against car alarms as well as DRM. Like you said, its not the idea, its the implementation. Car alarm false alarms piss off many, many more people than they prevent car thefts. Much like DRM, they'll make amateurs think twice about ripping off your car, but if someone who knows what they're doing wants it, its gone.
The problem is, with the amount of dosh at issue, we still don't have a decent DRM implementation that does more good than harm. This leads me to believe that such a beast doesn't exist - Apple have come close, but not close enough to beat DRM-free.
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then I suggest you come up with a scheme that penalizes the people who steal stuff but which doesn't crap on those who don't - remember most of us are honest law-abiding people who want to pay for and use music sensibly (I spent 1/2 an hour yesterday explaining to my daughter why we weren't going to have limewire in our house) - spend your energy catching the people who are breaking the law
however this is just the first battle in something much much bigger - something that may result in the eventual downfall of capitalism - for the moment forget about music being bits - things are just stuff and bits - atoms and information about how to put them together 9a design). You can see the beginning of it - local guys Ponoko are an example - you send them the bits, they send you back wood (sort of the first step to an instant Ikea) - DIY fabbers mean you can take bits and some raw plastic feed stock and you can make arbitrary plastic stuff - at work we use a commercial fabber (basically a 3D inkjet printer) to create models of TV remotes to see how they feel in your hand - you can buy one for 50-100k - the local Polytech has one and rents it out - it can actually make stuff you can't make any other way
I've worked designing chips on and off for the past 20 years and watched the technology curve - these days we're building stuff in the order of 100s of atoms in width in 2D - I think we're at the start of a similar curve for 3D stuff - we'll be using this generation of fabbers to build the next one that can make smaller stuff
50-100 odd years from now we'll all have a box in our house that makes stuff, we'll feed in raw material in the top, some energy, download a design from the 'net and things will come out - arbitrary things, anything - the cost of things will depend on the cost of the atoms, the cost to move them around and (maybe) the cost of the design - want a cool couch - down load it and next day it will come out of the household fabber - or milk or a plant or the Mona Lisa - or stuff you can't make today - diamond windows from coal? don't like it? feed it back in the box, pulling something apart is really just the same problem (keep the kids away!)
people who make and sell things will be going the way the music industry is today - people who design things will be in the situation musicians are today ..... what will money mean? certainly physical notes will be meaningless/useless - if things don't have value how will the economy work? will it need to work - if no one has to work anyway does it need to?
I think people who make bits (musicians, artists, designers, etc etc) will be the people we look up to and that currency of fame may be all we have left
the world's going to change in big ways and the issues we're talking about here today are just the beginning of issues that will echo all through our society
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50-100 odd years from now we'll all have a box in our house that makes stuff, we'll feed in raw material in the top, some energy, download a design from the 'net and things will come out - arbitrary things, anything - the cost of things will depend on the cost of the atoms, the cost to move them around and (maybe) the cost of the design - want a cool couch - down load it and next day it will come out of the household fabber - or milk or a plant or the Mona Lisa - or stuff you can't make today - diamond windows from coal? don't like it? feed it back in the box, pulling something apart is really just the same problem (keep the kids away!)
Folks who think this scenario is actually only a few years away are very active here.
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well I don't think a universal fabber is that close - I've been around the industry long enough to both appreciate the growth curve and to understand the potential issues - but I do think it's going to be real and about a generation or so away
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Mozart? Mozart? Not sure what the state of copyright law was in the Austrian empire, but Mozart supported himself variously as a concert artist, a court composer, and from commissions
You miss the point Stephen.
Copyright law existed in most European countries in one form or another (as far back as ancient Greece whose playwrights had rights based on their works..Luther copyrighted his editions) by the mid to late 1700s, although clearly not in the form it has developed to, but Mozart's art was subject to copyright. The commissions you mention above are indicative of such, and, indeed, the commissioning of works in Europe is integral to the development of musical copyright. Baroness von Waldstätten claimed ownership of his works, although she allowed them to be performed.
Paying writers for commissions is pretty much the definition of music publishing.
Stephen Foster may not have made a fortune from his songs but they exist in the public mind because they were widely published, and because the devices and corporations that disseminated the music were able to use copyright protection. Berliner and Edison were not altruistic crackpots, they were inventors by profession.
you don't see multiple versions of the Stone's latest CD from different vendors all competing on price at the record store in the same way you might see paint at the hardware store - it leaves us (the consumers) open to abuse - it's the real reason I can buy CDs for $9 in the US and $30 here
Not true, in Auckland I can buy the same CD for wildly differing prices if I wander between JB HiFi, Real Groovy (who are almost always the most expensive) and Marbecks.
BTW one thing I think that may go away is the industry made mega-star - Britney isn't going to happen (but Hannah Montana or the Monkees might because of the TV tie-in) - instead we're going to see lots of great little bands - fewer big stadium tours, more pubs/raves/etc
If you think the multinational corporations that create these things are going to go away....seriously? Universal, which still makes a lot of money, far more than most of us can conceive, is going to fold up tent and say no more manufactured pop stars, or Apple is going to say that the focus of iTunes (which is overwhelmingly pop star orientated, as is the new AmazonMP3 store) will spin to focus on obscure little bands..well its a great idea but it won't happen. Great little bands playing groovy venues to cool people are forever niche. The niche may grow to become a bunch of bigger niches within niches, hence the rise of the rather wonderful eMusic as pointed out by RB, but the real growth in the digital market right now is still manufactured pop.
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yeah but that's not true competition - Universal or whoever are allowed to choose the wholesale price of a particular CD - JB, RG et al all have to pay that same price in NZ - there's no way a lower priced wholesaler can come in and undercut them because they have a legal monopoly
On the other hand they can charge a different price in another wholesale market (like the US) - that sort of setup gives us $9 CDs in the US and $30 ones in NZ - it's the same thing that leads to other evils like DVD region coding so you can protect those market differentials against gray marketting
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yeah but that's not true competition - Universal or whoever are allowed to choose the wholesale price of a particular CD - JB, RG et al all have to pay that same price in NZ - there's no way a lower priced wholesaler can come in and undercut them because they have a legal monopoly
No, not at all. Much of Real Groovy's and JB HiFi's stock is sourced offshore.
Parallel importing laws broke down those monopolies years ago. What Universal can offer is a) resupply b) marketing support c) Sale or return, and a myriad of other things. But Real Groovy can choose to buy that release from anywhere they like.
The simple reason you can buy a CD cheaper in the US is quantity of scale (oh, and the massive discounting that a retailer like Amazon or Wal-mart demands). The list price in the US is often not much different to NZ. In many countries it's much higher.
Where I'm writing from right now the list price of a legit CD is about NZ$9.
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you don't see multiple versions of the Stone's latest CD from different vendors all competing on price at the record store in the same way you might see paint at the hardware store - it leaves us (the consumers) open to abuse - it's the real reason I can buy CDs for $9 in the US and $30 here
actually there are different wholesale prices to retailers depending upon how powerful they are. price breaks for quantity are normal and the reason the big chains can afford to charge less.
the competition present in the market place other than that between the warehouse and Real Groovy, is between different cds.
so not between copies of the same stones album but between a $15 indie cd sold at a gig and a full price disc sold at real groovy.
There is a larger range of price options now, although none are equivalently to the $9 price you mentioned.and I just bought some pain today, the prices were all pretty much the same. bunnings, placemakers, mitre 10, all too expensive, when did paint become so valuable?
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I'm against car alarms as well as DRM. Like you said, its not the idea, its the implementation.
so you're not actually against either in concept, just execution. you want to take that up with the people who design these things.
how bout a car alarm that signals the owner rather than the people sleeping in the street, and whispers in a menacing voice to those in close proximity that the alarm has been activated.since paul's nominated me chief designer of DRM ( I don't know why he's not doing it since its more his field) I would suggest the idea DRM was one that knows it is playing for the original purchaser and knows so without any interaction with the client (purchaser).
can you pop that into your faber maker and see what it looks like.
further to my first idea ilok as used by protools plugins designers has an on line registration thing for a key. I personally hate the device but I like the idea of stored registrations for devices.if it was a simple process to add a new device (u just bought a new ipod, or computer, or stereo etc) and it kept track of it and allowed all you digital media to know it was allowed to play on said devices and any you decided to add to your list in the future all would indeed be good, and no I'm not offering to design said scheme, I'm just pointing out that the concept of a workable and managable drm is not unimaginable, just not yet made.
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I actually implement DRM for a living - I don't design it though - largely because the people who do that are VERY secretive - it does mean I know where a lot of the bodies are buried. I build US cable TV settop boxes (kind of like the Sky box that sits under your TV) - I know how all this stuff works - all the secrets - but I honestly don't know how to steal cable without paying
The basic problems with the sort of stuff you want to deal with in your DRM don't have to do with the crypto - how you securely pass stuff from one place to the other (that little lock in the bottom corner of your browser) or how do you validate your identity or that of the person you're doing business with - you can easily assign devices unique ids and reliably pass them around and verify them - that stuff is easy, safe and reliable
The real problem is one of keeping secrets - more importantly you need to be able to have one person to be able force another person to keep a secret - that's hard ....
In your DRM's world the music manufacturer needs to be able to force their customer to not share their unique ID that enables their music with their friends - that ID is just a bunch of bits - it can be shared just like music - the obvious solution is to put the secret in a box - but you have to take the secret out of the box to use it - it's vulnerable then - you could hide the secret (that's how DVDs work) but people who look hard enough will find it - you could keep the key to the box somewhere safe - but it would just be another box, or a chain of boxes and keys -
In the case of your Sky box the key is embedded in that card you plug in and Sky depends on the fact that you can't get inside it to read it out because it's silicon - they can do that because they own both the box/card and the place that makes them - it's also why Sky wont let you buy your own (better!) decoder from a 3rd party (like the company I work for) or build your own (like MythTV)
In the PC world a 'trusted boot chain' means that the key to the first box is hidden somewhere in the hardware and all the software loaded from that point is validated by the software above it
The results tend to be difficult to use and unwieldly (these days we call that 'Vista' - and this is one reason it's sometimes painfully slow) - it also means that people who want to make their own software (who like me use Linux for example) are frozen out of the first key won't unlock anything other than a MS OS, of if when it does it locks the rest of the keys away - it means I can buy hardware that belongs to me - but be locked out of part of it by some 3rd party who wants to force me to keep secrets
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Thanks for pointing out the Blam Blam Blam stream Russell. I'm a little disappointed some of the songs were cut (Call for Help, Doctor Who off the top of my head). Do you know if there's any chance this stuff will see greater release? Should I feel bad about "archiving" the stream? Will there be some way I can pay for the tracks? Who do I ask?
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I thought it worth exploring the consequences of DRM chipped music technology.
Sooo *TING* the digital fairy grants Robbery’s wish.If we assume that the sort of deal discussed will be like the one that operates for HDMI/Blu-Ray (whatever !) then we would expect the provision and implementation to reflect the needs of the majors, up steps Sony Universal etc. In effect the majors will once more have control over media distribution (sound familiar ?). Should we then expect a format war ? Would we end up with a decent format ? In any case we can also assume that the majors will not share key technology with independents, rather they will charge what they see fit to allow independents to join the party. If we take the Sky approach any attempt by small consortia to compete will be defeated one way or another (Sky vs. Canal+ is a very interesting read btw). In this scenario I don’t see any artist getting a great deal richer and the independents wouldn’t be able to give stuff away if there was a lock out implemented through the use of proprietary media formats. Be careful what you wish for. The great blessing of the compact cassette was that it was an open patent and open format which led to a widely accepted growth in music (sound familiar ?).
Speaking as a minor music fan - Of the 12,000 mp3’s on my media server all but 40 or so were ripped from CD’s I own, transcribed from LP’s I own, or downloaded from e-music. None of which have been fed to torrents, more than half of which reflect the collection that I pirated in the 70’s and 80’s when I couldn’t afford stuff. With no less than 15 possible media players upon which to enjoy my musical delights I would be interested to see if music copyright holders would have the nerve to charge me for tracks that in some cases already appear 5 times in my hard collection.
Speaking as a (particularly catty) psychologist – There is a fair body of evidence which suggests that people who spend large amounts of time blaming their woes on the activities of others, are usually unhappy, and sometimes end up quite mentally ill. I would hate to see anyone on the music industry end up that way.
Speaking as a sarcastic fantasist – Dear digital fairy can you figure out how to fit people with a chip that makes them pay to see me for services that I usually end up providing for free. Despite devoting my life to my particular specialism and being pretty rare in my field, I didn’t get paid once last year for actually doing what I am best qualified to do. I might add I was not short of people asking for my help either.
P.S. can you make another chip that just allows good journo's to write for a living.
Finally - Can anyone explain to me (justify ?) why some NZ artists on independent labels charge nearly $2 per track for MP3 downloads ?
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Finally - Can anyone explain to me (justify ?) why some NZ artists on independent labels charge nearly $2 per track for MP3 downloads ?
Because they're filthy capitalists who're raking it in at the expense of the public?
(Or perhaps because music is a woefully-underpaid activity in which few people ever break even, let alone make any money? FFS, you're asking why a song should cost 2/3rds of the price of a coffee...)
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Ooh, two in a row...
I would suggest the idea DRM was one that knows it is playing for the original purchaser and knows so without any interaction with the client (purchaser).
Would that actually be ideal? Let's apply your ideal model to the music industry as a whole. Magically, nobody is able to listen to any music unless they've already paid for it. You can listen to the radio, but unless you've licensed a track already you just get dead air. You can put the TV on, but C4 is scrambled unless you've paid for the specific video that is screening. Your mate can listen to his music all he wants, but if he tries to lend it to you so you can listen to it then it won't play. Music in cafes and bars disappears, because individual people haven't paid to hear it.
All of a sudden, music vanishes from popular culture. Why? Because music is a social activity which people enjoy sharing and bonding with as groups. Just look at all the "Emo kids" or "punk kids" or any other popular music/image combo throughout the history of pop music. Do you really think that these kids get into music by... uh.. their mate saying "buy this track" and them going to buy it? No, it develops into an identity through sharing and group dynamics.
I don't see why you'd want to be a strict believer in user-pays for one aspect of music (digital downloads) when there are already a number of situations where it has been accepted that public visibility and availability is a massive net benefit to the music industry. That's not to say that we shouldn't be paying, but why are you so fervent about the model being one of strict buy-to-listen? It doesn't accurately reflect how people like to develop their musical tastes at all.
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FFS, you're asking why a song should cost 2/3rds of the price of a coffee...
Or one quarter the price of a beer at the Rising Sun. Now that's a scandal ...
Point of interest: I've mentioned this before, but when you buy a paid download from any service, if it's on an independent label, you can safely assume the actual artist is receiving about twice a big a share as his or her major-label counterpart.
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Thanks for pointing out the Blam Blam Blam stream Russell. I'm a little disappointed some of the songs were cut (Call for Help, Doctor Who off the top of my head). Do you know if there's any chance this stuff will see greater release? Should I feel bad about "archiving" the stream? Will there be some way I can pay for the tracks? Who do I ask?
There's a chance I'll be able to make one or two of the tracks available for download, but everyone's on holiday at the moment. Stay tuned.
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Interesting post at RWW here about DRM and downloads, including the following quote from someone "close to the industry":
Value is ascribed to things that people covet- at one point people coveted what they downloaded. They still do to some extent (ie, dimeadozen and the bootleg market, which is a nice self regulating distribution system) but with rapid adoption of one behavior, the commodity behind it shifts and goes toward ubiquity, ie free. You just have to shift what people will covet. It's the same way with books, newspapers, TV, movies, memory, CPU, etc - every free market system follows this path. Intellectual capital complicates it but can also provide more impetus to be innovative.
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Point of interest: I've mentioned this before, but when you buy a paid download from any service, if it's on an independent label, you can safely assume the actual artist is receiving about twice a big a share as his or her major-label counterpart.
that's a bit of a broad generalisation. some major label acts negotiated very favourable contracts for themselves, and the labels that represent them don't screw them over. others get royally shafted as in any business. That whole evil major label schtick as a means to justify theft is a little tired and people should know better than to perpetuate it. Its just a diversion from the real issue. one of ownership and the right to control that which they own, be they small time artists or major label wankers.
If the situation was really as bad as some people like to infer then you wouldn't get people like bic runga et all working with them.
Interestingly with downloads the percentage cut to the supplier (be it amplifier, itunes or one of the phone companies) is still dis proportionally high for what they actually do.
They are essentially the retail outlet but the shop is self check out, automated, you do the payment transaction, and the physical movement of the file to your hard drive,
there are no physical goods to store, get damaged, move etc, yet they still take a good whack of the total take. (can't remember exactly but its something in the region of 40-50%, I'll grab the real figures when I'm next at my work computer)I think a download purchase for a song should be under NZ$1
At present each real sale is covering for a multitude of pirated copies. ie if you buy it and give it to your mate and his mates you're paying for their copies. if they all bought their own then the price could afford to come down.
If everyone was paying for their music then I don't see why 50 cents wouldn't be a reasonable price and when it got down to that price then people wouldn't feel so bad about spending the legit dollars.
good drm would strengthen that possibility.
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