Now I’m back­track­ing some­what. Almost.

I blow hot and cold on stream­ing services.

Hot: I love them. In par­tic­u­lar, Spo­tify (Pre­mium — not sure how one can use this with the poorly tar­geted adverts for Justin Bieber et al.) is per­son­ally indis­pens­able for a vari­ety of rea­sons. One of which is the inevitable ‘oh! what does that sound like?’ I do that a lot and I think many peo­ple do (accept­ing that just as many also use it sim­ply for back­ground noise — like radio).

I don’t use it for pure ‘dis­cov­ery’ though and I doubt many do — I’m not dri­ven to ‘check out’ sim­i­lar artist rec­om­men­da­tions ever really, mostly because what­ever algo­rithm is being used to chan­nel these to me is decid­edly bro­ken. It does not fol­low that because I like The Clash and Wire, I’m demo­graph­i­cally likely to enjoy 2012 Swedish Death Metal. And yet that’s the sort of thing I get if I let it. This part of the mech­a­nism remains as bro­ken as the iTunes Genius. Lis­ten­ing to Lit­tle Willie John doesn’t mean that I should be forced to endure, god help — any­one help — a ‘radio’ sta­tion filled with Reo Speed­wagon, Dire Straits and Boston. I was.

I men­tally assumed it was white noise com­ing through the wall from the Sin­ga­porean stu­dents next door (spend time in a CD store in Sin­ga­pore — they love this shite). Then I realised it was me. The Spo­tify pub­lic log­ging remains OFF. To live that down — how?

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A text­book def­i­n­i­tion of delu­sions of self-importance?

.… the Com­merce Com­mis­sion in New Zealand ear­lier today invited inter­ested par­ties to make sub­mis­sions to its inquiry into Uni­ver­sal Music’s pro­posed takeover of the EMI record companies.

As reported here, the New Zealand Com­merce Com­mis­sion is to make a deci­sion by May the 13th as to whether the EMI/Universal merger will be allowed to pro­ceed. Now, unless you’ve been swim­ming under­wa­ter for the last six months or so, you are likely to be aware that the very large multi-national media cor­po­ra­tion, Uni­ver­sal Music Group — head­quar­tered in France —  has decided it wishes to pur­chase the smaller multi-national media group, EMI — head­quar­tered in the UK.

This may or may not go ahead.

The deci­sion that decides this will likely be made in Brus­sels, at the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion (the US equiv­a­lent is more likely to green-stamp — anti-monopolistic law seem­ingly long dead in the water in the USA). It will not be made in New Zealand. Noth­ing that is con­sid­ered or decided in New Zealand will have any bear­ing, nor will it even be noticed.

Maybe this is the Kim Il Dot Com effect — we think the world is watch­ing (they’re really not, at least not beyond Kim).

And con­sider a cou­ple of poten­tially ludi­crous outcomes:

1. The NZ Com­merce Com­mis­sion says no merger. The EC says yes. Do the two com­pa­nies really merge every­where aside from New Zealand?

2. The NZ Com­merce Com­mis­sion says yes. The EC says no. The two merge fully — but only in New Zealand?

Per­haps they’re obliged to look at this — if so one could rea­son­ably argue that law is ridicu­lously bro­ken. Either way, it’s an extra­or­di­nary waste of New Zealand tax­payer money.

It’s also really embarrassing.

A tweet from David McLaugh­lin found me think­ing, silently reflect­ing I sup­pose (and that’s mostly what this post is — an attempt to put those down), about the very (at least to me) inter­est­ing place the music indus­try has found itself in as we head – already – into the sec­ond month of the sec­ond year of the sec­ond decade of the sec­ond millennium.

I retweeted David’s Forbes link as it’s a pretty fas­ci­nat­ing read that hand­ily sum­marises the [rene­gade] rise of the-soon-to-be-household-name, Daniel Ek from geek to owner and vision­ary behind one of the most impor­tant musi­cal deliv­ery plat­forms on the planet right now, Spotify.

Essen­tially it’s a story which has been repeated hun­dreds of times over the cen­turies: man/woman, often odd, dri­ven or a loner, has a wacky idea comes from way out on the fringes, from a place where all the cor­po­rate or estab­lish­ment R&D bucks in the world can’t or won’t reach. He or she runs with the idea and it finds both its time and its audi­ence and changes the world.

Think Guten­berg (and I’d refer you to this piece in The NZ Lis­tener (not online yet) and by exten­sion the book, which I’ve yet to read but will, although I hav­ing a nig­gling feel­ing it may annoy rather than illu­mi­nate in places), Henry Ford, The Wright Broth­ers and you get the idea. Bill Gates was one, despite the fact he ‘bor­rowed’ much of the frame­work needed to achieve his grand vision. Jobs too of course, but I think that both dig­i­tal enter­tain­ment and the hand­held com­put­ing device, despite the fact that he too bor­rowed much of the con­cep­tual frame­work, will be his endur­ing legacy, rather than the com­puter I’m writ­ing this on now.

So we have Spo­tify and it arrives, bril­liantly, at a time when we have the tech­ni­cal deliv­ery mech­a­nisms and – finally – the arrival of a mind­set rooted closer to com­mon­sense on the part major con­tent owners.

Spo­tify offers cheap (read ‘free’ in most of the world) access via 21^st Cen­tury tech­nol­ogy (read fast unlim­ited – apart from NZ but I guess it will get there even­tu­ally – inter­net) access to almost every­thing musi­cal. And it will grow from there.

It’s a radio sta­tion, and one that the user/s pro­grammes. Wel­come to the even­tual death of com­mer­cial radio as we now know it. Yep, peo­ple still lis­ten to radio, and in some num­bers, and radio folks will tell you of grow­ing audi­ences and more, but this tech­nol­ogy – along with the other arriv­ing vari­ants on the theme – have drawn the line in the sand. Tai­lored audio will even­tu­ally dom­i­nate pri­vate lis­ten­ing, fac­to­ries, retail and just about every­where else where we cur­rently lis­ten to things from a radio broad­cast. And algo­rithms will ensure that we get what we want and the tai­lored broad­cast will evolve as our tastes and desires evolve.

It’s a tun­ing knob, XFM, pod­casts and niche radio all rolled into one. It has only just begun. It may take a while but that’s where it will end up. And, mostly, major con­tent hold­ers and cor­po­ra­tions will con­trol it — the RIAA’s dom­i­nant voices already own 18+ % of Spo­tify, thus the noise - jus­ti­fi­able - about dou­ble dip­ping by com­pa­nies who already pay their acts a fairly lowly amount under con­trac­tual terms which are often less than generous.

But, man, did these same con­tent hold­ers fight it tooth and nail. Five years back record com­pa­nies were hol­ler­ing in hor­ror at any­thing close to the world they now live in — and are now doing rather well in.

Remem­ber Peter Jenner’s words, back in 2006:

.…. I think in two or three years blan­ket licenses will be with us in most countries.

It was Jen­ner, for­mer man­ager back in the dis­tant past of Pink Floyd (early days), Ian Dury, and The Clash (it was he who tried to save the band from them­selves and their errant destruc­tive but inspired orig­i­nal and suc­ces­sor man­ager, Bernie Rhodes with­out suc­cess) who both touted sub­scrip­tion and was heav­ily shot down by the estab­lish­ment for doing exactly that.

And yet he was (mostly) right, although it took a year or two more than he pre­dicted in that inter­view. ¹

Half a decade on we have found our­selves in the obvi­ous place where all-you-can-eat audio comes from both a free model (sup­ported by ads on your desk­top) and a sub­scrip­tion model (on mobile devices).

And that’s not all. As shown in this (incom­plete) data from Techdirt’s Mike Mas­nick, the enter­tain­ment indus­tries are doing, despite the end­less howls of col­lapse, pretty darn tidily. The news in there is noth­ing new of course. I was blog­ging some­thing sim­i­lar a cou­ple of years back — income was ris­ing and we had been scammed by half-truths, par­tial stats and more to pro­duce a pic­ture that was mostly smoke.

If you looked beyond IFPI, MPAA and RIAA media then the stuff you’ll see below was there for the curi­ous to find.

Emerg­ing from the shock of Nap­ster, from the col­lapse of CD sales, to the arrival of iTunes and the war the music con­tent indus­tries fought against the mod­ern world, and lost, came an indus­try that some­how had been blud­geoned so many times that they even­tu­ally were forced to adapt.

The indus­try had been dying from the death of a thou­sand cuts: not only dig­i­tal piracy (which was and is a far lessor vil­lain than you are sup­posed to think it is, but I won’t go into that here), but the rise of the track as the pri­mary unit of music, alter­na­tive demands on dis­pos­able income, reces­sion, relent­less mostly self induced bad press, awful A&R, accoun­tancy trump­ing cre­ativ­ity and so on.

Some­where, slowly and with some inspired new blood mostly dri­ven by the indie sec­tor which has both boomed and is soon to dom­i­nate, as the big­ger indies evolve into the new majors ² the death of a thou­sand cuts has become the life of a thou­sand cuts.

Wit­ness YouTube. We all do — all the time.

Once you get past the first few pages and the fact that it reads like an extended ver­sion of the open­ing scene of The Empire Strikes Back, the Megaupload/ Kim Dot­com indict­ment refers sev­eral times to the copy­ing of files from YouTube to fill up the MegaVideo site. If you read through to page 30 you get this detail:

In approx­i­mately April 2006, mem­bers of the Mega Con­spir­acy copied videos directly from Youtube.com to make them avail­able on Megavideo.com.

The irony in this — which seems to have escaped the Feds — is that almost every­thing con­tain­ing third party copy­righted mate­r­ial on YouTube in April 2006 was deemed by the own­ers to be pirated. It wasn’t until the Via­com case in 2007 and the con­tent ID sys­tem intro­duced that year fol­lowed by pro­gres­sive licens­ing through to 2009 that the songs and music were legit­imised on the Google site. That aside, I guess scrap­ing copy­right mate­r­ial tech­ni­cally hosted ille­gally is still tak­ing copy­right mate­r­ial — it’s almost like steal­ing from a fence.

That ques­tion aside, and it’s noth­ing more than an aside to this, the point is that the things you now watch on YouTube are more or less legit now and the indus­tries found a way to mon­e­tise that ‘piracy’ (read the Via­com link above — it’s no more or less vir­u­lent, wide rang­ing and some­what irra­tional than the MegaU­pload indict­ment) and extract cents from every play.

And extract cents from count­less other sources — video, sync, games, stream­ing, soft­ware, toys, per­for­mance and so much more — to slowly rebuild the col­laps­ing walls of the house that Ahmet, Gef­fen, Black­well, Gordy, Davis and so many oth­ers built in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

And so it sur­vives, albeit rad­i­cally changed — the days of the mas­sive super­star acts are draw­ing to a close despite Adele (the excep­tion that proves the rule — even Lana Del Rey’s num­ber two US chart entry fig­ure is, for all the fuss, way less than an album would have achieved if it had entered in the 20s a decade or so back), as is the dom­i­nance the sur­viv­ing trio of majors.

Which brings us to to Megau­pload and it’s alleged share of the inter­net. Given that, really, its offences seem to be lit­tle dif­fer­ent in scope to the rogue YouTube, as doc­u­mented in that Via­com indict­ment, one won­ders why the ‘man’ is so keen to stomp so vis­i­bly and bru­tally on the founder and face of the site.

The indict­ment seems to be both ridicu­lous and absurdly insup­port­able in much of its con­tent and any court out­come, even just the extra­di­tion case, is likely to take years to play out as con­vinc­ingly explained by Rick Shera here.

Clearly Kim doesn’t have a mas­sive US cor­po­ra­tion as a par­ent as YouTube did by 2007, and he has rubbed all the Mega­Corps severely up the wrong way in so many doc­u­mented ways. Boy has he pissed them off. He’s the rogue geek that never came in from the cold and couldn’t believe his luck when all that cash began arriv­ing. He’s not that clever, obvi­ously. If he had been, he would’ve taken the oppor­tu­nity to ensure that he was for­ever safe and loaded. It was do-able.

How­ever, for all that I can’t quite work out exactly why no real attempt has been, or is vis­i­bly being made, to mon­e­tise the fact the site clearly makes lots of money by attract­ing mil­lions of peo­ple who like both music and film. Indeed, it’s long been doc­u­mented that the peo­ple most likely to steal music are the same peo­ple most likely to buy music. They are fans. It is sim­ple commonsense.

So, if an algo­rithm can be con­structed to iden­tify and reward for con­tent watched  on YouTube, why is doing some­thing sim­i­lar not being done for the cyberlockers?

Or do they still want to hang on for the off-chance that it really will some­how return to 1998 and all will be fine.

I’m still not sure they quite get it, Mr. Jenner.