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.

Hugely recommended, this interview with Martin Mills, owner of the most important independent record label in the world (and the bloke who released some of my favourite records ever and still does):

The internet has revived interest in music, thinks Mills, by encouraging people to experiment.

“It’s made so much more possible – a greater and deeper love of music. It’s re-stimulated my own involvement in music generally, rather than just my business. The links people send you allow you to go off down a path and discover something great.

“People who in their 30s a few years ago who may have stopped listening to new music, or were listening to iterations of music they heard in their late teens or early twenties, are now able to discover entirely new things. You’ve got new artists being discovered by 30, 40, 50 and 60 year olds. You’ll now have a group of friends talking about music and sending links. I think that comes from the integration of the laptop into both our working and our personal lives, the internet is so great at spreading the word.”

[From Indie music mogul: The net's great for us • The Register]

This post, originally from August, 2006, in reply to a question from Robbie Siataga on an earlier post, linked, still seems to work for me. I thought I’d repost it for NZ Music Month, and because of the ongoing discussion on Public Address:

————————————

This was a question I received from Dubmugga;

where do you see New Zealand music going and what measures would you implement to ensure it’s continued relevance in the standardised global media market ???

This is not somewhere I really wanted, as I said, the previous two posts about this topic, to end up. I don’t want to dig myself a hole here I can’t easily get out of, but I suspect I’m about to.

So a qualifier again: this post is not trying to offer definitive answers, rather it’s a series of random thoughts, written as they occur. My opinion is just that and I don’t pretend to have any answers or pretend to be able to predict anything. I’m no seer, and I’m no self proclaimed expert.

DM…you expressed your fairly strongly held, feelings about NZ on Air and the way they administer the brief they have from the people of NZ, via the current government, to promote the nation’s music across the broadcasting spectrums. Your opinions are not uncommonly held and are regularly expressed on various forums and elsewhere.

Whilst I have my problems too with some of this they’re not nearly as pronounced as yours and others’ are. It is a topic, however, that a lot of people, musicians especially, feel very strongly about.

Myself, I think NZ on Air is trapped a little between the need to promote something with a strong indigenous flavour (i.e. the cultural side of its brief) and the commercial radio stations who, despite lip service have no desire to play any real percentage of New Zealand music and would, if the political environment was right, drop most of it as fast as they possibly could. It’s a tough place for Brendan to be and for this reason, and a few others, I am of two minds about the concept of a quota. On a clear downside, and evidenced in NZ recently, the quota (and I’ve said this many times) strips the music of its identity, especially its cultural identity, in the mad drive to get songs on a radio system that is obliged to play a percentage but only wants to play songs that fit easily.

They don’t want songs that quirkily stand out, they want songs that blandly sell ads, songs from acts like Breaks Co-op, the new Stellar and Brooke Fraser which are facelessly unthreatening. I’m not saying they’re bad…Breaks Co-op are quite pleasant. But that, sadly, is not what the NZ music industry, if it is to thrive and survive, needs. It needs raw and rough originality, music that sounds different to that global mass released daily. I think Scribe had that, it was so wonderfully Newzild despite its pretensions to being otherwise.

However, I have to say, it’s an ominous sign that his new, massively overdue, album is being recorded (partially with DJ Premier, a bit of a hero of mine) in NYC. But that’s what the soulless bulldozer that is Australian A&R (which has had a shitty record in recent years) does I’m afraid, as I know from personal experience.

The US music industry is in massive trouble and yet these acts strive to sound like it, where the hell is the logic in that. The most influential NZ music in recent decades, the music which has had an international presence (with the exception of Haley, but that’s another whole thing) is music that sounded drastically different to everything else out there, and was, with the exception of How Bizarre, deemed to be decidedly radio unfriendly (and HB was deemed to be unsuitable for radio in NZ by every programmer but one originally). I’m talking about early Split Enz and the Flying Nun catalogue of the eighties. Nothing else out of NZ has had the musical influence of those three outside the country.

Up against that is the need for hits. Pop music is driven by hits which traditionally are driven by radio and video, hence the two main targeted focal points for NZOA. And I agree with that focus generally. Without hits, underground or overground, no sales. You can’t survive on credibility, as Flying Nun found, being forced to bring in Mushroom as a partner (which started the process where NZ’s most important catalogue disappeared into an American corporate which will inevitably eventually forget it exists).

But that formula…radio, video, hits…is changing and will change in future years (and not too future…very few predicted Youtube five years ago, although the pointers were there) in ways we can’t imagine yet. How the hits will come will change and that change has already begun. Digital access to everything, unbelievable interactivity in our entertainment and the sheer amount of material available to each and every one of us is inevitably going to force a sea-change in musical entertainment as radical as the one the planet endured when recorded music first became widely available about 90 years ago.

Already one thing is obvious. The album as such is more or less in its death throes. It’s going to take a while but it’s inevitable. The song, which is where this all started, is where it’s all going back to, and the delivery medium is a form of digital or the suchlike. It’s easy to forget that the album as a force is less than 40 years old. And there are very few successful albums that haven’t been driven by one or two key songs. Even the iPod and its equivalent is just an interim step…already music capable phones are dealing to standalone MP3 players in the more technologically advanced societies of Asia.

This inevitable step makes the major record companies largely redundant. All they really offer now is the means of distribution and the money to record and make videos. The last two requirements have more or less already slipped out of their hands as the means to do both are to a releasable level are within the means of virtually anyone.

The video delivery process too is in the process of being democratised. The means of distribution offered by the majors will still be a strength as long as people want to buy CDs from brick and mortar shops, but the end of that is in sight too, perhaps not in the next couple of years but sooner than most people realise. And any requirement for physical CDs will be fulfilled by central warehousing linked to shops that are little more than ordering and listening booths, mostly in Wal-mart / Warehouse type operations. Already the hardcore artist fanbases are almost exclusively catered for on-line.

The only other thing the big boys can offer traditionally is marketing muscle. Once again the digital revolution, right now the likes of MySpace and the p2p sites and MP3 blogs are removing that from the domain of the majors and placing it in the hands of the artists or their switched on management. Ever wondered why the big boys are so violently against the P2P sharers. They’ve been screwing people for decades without a conscious ethical murmur, so the righteousness of their position is questionable. No it’s because it removes another layer of control, of need for their services. The majors will soon be reduced to little more than catalogues to be licensed, and a few mega acts that can’t survive outside the machinery of those companies.

In 2006 over 20% of the music sold globally now comes from sources outside the majors. As that creeps more and more on-line it means that a larger percentage of the return from the sales of music will return to the makers. A record or CD will no longer need to have a massive comfort zone in the pricing (about $10 per CD on a full priced NZ disc) to cover the majors’ bloated costs, or the “warehousing”. The artist will, hopefully, no longer have to suffer punitive recording contracts. Even the role of the publisher is reduced to little more than a bank and a sync negotiator as the digital age and various performing rights organisations provide all the services a writer really needs. The balance shifts.

So what has this got to do with the future of NZ music. Everything, actually. It’s a reasonable assumption that in the medium term multinational labels will cease to invest in local music. Australia has already seen a huge drop in local signing in the past couple of years and the same is evident in NZ.

In my previous post I talked about the digital divide between New Zealand and the rest of the planet. On the NZ Radio list I was lambasted a while back by someone for saying that NZ has no hotspots. The argument was that NZ did not have the population of support such technology. That, of course is nonsense. Here in Bali, with a population of 3.5 million, they are everywhere, in the tourist areas, in the domestic areas, in the malls, the food halls; and it’s the same across much of the world. That’s a little thing but it’s important as it signifies the gulf that has developed between New Zealand and much of the world. I now reside in a third world country but I feel that, visiting New Zealand regularly, as I do, I’m going into a technology vacuum there. The technological gulf has tempered the music buying habit that we took so much for granted in previous years. And for kids to buy music, especially NZ music it has to be two things, exciting and accessible. The quota has largely removed the exciting bit, and the difficulty of getting local music beyond the traditional means (which means buying an album, not the songs you want) has dampened accessibility.

As the digital move is made away from majors and multinationals, so NZ on Air’s role will have to change. How exactly I’m not sure, but a return to their grassroots seems obvious, supporting the smaller, cutting edge, more innovative music being made at that level. I think the export drive, the funding of such and the relentless talking, committees, and reports are and were a waste of space and time. Unless of course you have something viable to sell. No one was doing Fat Freddies abroad but there are 200 Brooke Frasers. Which one makes more sense to push. And yet the whole NZOA system has been dedicated to the likes of that latter because it made our radio happy and worked for the quota. FFD on the other hand were made by the fans, both in NZ and abroad, and, like Split Enz, in 1979, driven to radio by the public.

So as I said earlier, the mad rush to radio removed the things that made so much music identifiably ours. The industry got caught up in the whole “kiwi music” thing and “kiwi music month” so much that it lost track of what was special in the first place. I think we do our best musicians a disservice too by putting all “kiwi music” on such a pedestal, forever saying that we have so much talent in NZ, implying that it is somewhat more advantaged than the rest of the world.

Of course we have talent, but no more so than a city of four million people anywhere else in the world. There are some, no make that, many, truly awful musicians and bands in the country too. Being “kiwi” doesn’t make the 50% of stuff on most “Kiwi Hit Discs” that is un-listenable, any better than it is in the real world.

Our edge and the ability to sell New Zealand music elsewhere doesn’t rely on where we come from, to most of the world, it matters little. They don’t care and don’t want to care when they hear Six Months in A Leaky Boat or How Bizarre, on the radio, where it was recorded. Lets not be parochial and arrogant about this. Our edge comes from the fact that these songs sounded completely, radically, different to whatever else was on the dial. A difference that the quota has dulled, with tangible results now.

Ok, that’s enough from me…I’ve said my bit, probably a bit too much. Some of the opinions expressed are probably rather crudely put and need fleshing out somewhat but I think I need a Bintang……

There were two great scams in the 2000s (assuming the decade is over..it’s technically not of course).

One, it almost goes without saying, was the drive to war scam pulled fairly successfully by the Bush administration in concert with a few compliant governments (the UK and Australia come to mind) whereupon clear and known fraudulent data was placed in front of not only the public as a whole, but whole layers of elected officials and lawmakers across the US and the UK. It was the WMD scam and arguments continue as to whether it cost the lives of 100,000 or a up to million Iraqis (as if the lower figure is somehow better) and the wholesale dispossession for millions more. From a US perspective, I guess it was hugely successful.

The second, whilst it existed on another, less deadly, level altogether, was no less successful, and involved the large media companies, many smaller media companies and assorted copyright administration bodies. This we will call the Piracy Scam.

Why am I revisiting this now? Well the piece briefly excerpted below pissed me off:

How to help prop up the ailing music industry? Tax Google, suggests a new report commissioned by the French government.

I’m close to speechless at the stupidity of this.

It will make no difference. None at all. Nothing will boost the revenues of the wholesale industries beyond a complete 180 on the part of the customer back to the buying habits they, in increasing numbers, left behind during this last decade. One has to remember that the folks making these rules, and the ones crying foul over the alleged lost revenues are either people in their mid-40s onwards, who if they buy music, were educated to buy it in album format, in the decades since the recording industry invented the format in the late 1940s, or they simply don’t buy music.

And they’ve been told that revenues are down (true) because people are simply stealing the music online (extremely arguable).

Are people taking music in large quantities online…yes, of course they are, there is no doubt of it. Is this causing the crash in revenues? I’d argue yes, in small part, but that’s all.

And that’s aside from the glaring and oft stated fact that a downloaded tune does not equal a lost sale, despite the rampantly loony figures the IFPI happily touts (and are gobbled up by the media).

The primary reason revenues are down is because the primary target for recorded music are people under 25. And they no longer buy albums. Mostly they don’t even know what they are. They buy MP3s..the new singles. They don’t want albums. They want tracks. And the evidence to support this is voluminous. Last year in the United States there were 1.16 billion (yep, billion) digital tracks sold. That is the equivalent of 1.16 billion singles purchased, because that’s what the MP3 is..a single..a 45, in the old language. Add to that just under 400 million albums (of which some 3.2 million were actually 14 album box sets by The Beatles, so add another 40m or so to that figure!) and you have a very, very large number of units purchased by customers in 2009…far higher, in fact, than at any time since Soundscan began recording accurate figures in 1991.

Throw into that mix two other factors, firstly that the digital figure removes the cost of manufacturing, distribution and warehousing, and secondly the huge drop in recording costs over the past decade as digital became the norm, and a rather different picture emerges.

On, and one more figure to toss into the mix: the decade long rise in performance income received by performing rights organisations as many different income streams, driven by technology, plus the massive advances in collection techniques and the sad story that both the media and the lawmakers happily trumpet without question, looks increasingly shaky. The Times did an analysis using a few, but not all, of these factors a month or two back which was interesting.

The truth is that in 2009 there was a massive jump in income from music worldwide:

Thanks to new collecting bodies, more music users buying licences, and a big rise in US revenues, global performance rights payments increased by 16% to $1.5bn (£940,000) in 2008, according to industry newsletter Music & Copyright.

Performance rights revenues come from the public playing of music across various locations and platforms, from radio stations and nightclubs to supermarkets and hair salons.

Such income has become more important in recent years as music sales have fallen. The UK is the largest territory in terms of performance rights distributions and total payments rose 11.5% to $220m (£138m) in 2008, according to Music & Copyright. It compiled its global figures through data from collecting societies worldwide, including PPL in the UK. The most played song was Mercy by Duffy.

The largest increase was in the US, with payments surging by 176% to $100m (£62.7m) as digital and internet radio services were licensed.

Mix all that together and toss in the now accepted monstrous myth that musicians are now unable to survive off their royalties (performance is up, and less than 1% of all acts likely survived from master copyright royalties, due to the inequities in the way the recording industry handles recoupment, despite what Bono and Lily Allen would have you believe) and have to struggle. They’ve always struggled.

So, yes, as we roll into three strikes legislation the world over, and labels moan poverty because the playing field and the rules have changed, a little sanity would perhaps be appropriate as we reflect on how well the Piracy Scam, has been sold, as I repeatedly hear people that should know better commenting on the Facebook generation that won’t, so they say, pay for music. That steals and destroys the livelihoods of those that make the music.

It’s bullshit.

And it didn’t even take a speech from Colin Powell.

These things are sent to sent to test us….

· A couple of days back we tried to buy some Shakespeare (do I need to put a wiki link here? After this I ain’t sure). We, naturally, went to the only English language bookstore in Bali, Periplus. Periplus is a chain here in Indonesia, and has at least a dozen branches across the island. Its most generously described as a little sad, with lots of tourist aimed coffee table books, badly printed, and odd cut-out biographies and motivation tomes, but it’s all we have. We asked at the counter and the guy studied the computer for a few minutes.

Yes we have Shakespeare..its in the Fiction section.

Oh, ok…

I guess fiction works loosely although I’m thinking that Richard III and Henry V, amongst quite a few other names subject to the quill of whoever Shakespeare may or not have been, actually have existed at one time. The very helpful girl took us over and offered us this.

Uh, no, we want any of the works of William Shakespeare…our daughter is studying him at school…its part of the national curriculum, both English and Indonesian…oh, you’ve not heard of William Shakespeare? This is a bookshop?

Yes

An English language one?

Yes

You’ve not heard of Shakespeare? Oh, only that book….But not William?

No, Pak…..

· I’ve had a series of emails from a company in Jakarta recently. They’re one of the larger fabric retailers in the city, with a turnover, I’d guess, in millions. Their Sales Manager sends his emails to me as attachments. These attachments come as Microsoft Excel worksheets. Each word takes up a separate cell……

· Here’s a company who sent me an email in their massed mail-out…their website is fairly well written and contains lots of information…but after all the effort to do that…their website is a blogspot….odd. I also received the email address of every one of their potential customers in the address field, so I imagine I’m in for a raft of other offers for things I don’t need (like the Bandung grain storage company who mail me daily the same email offering me grain hoppers). I’m tempted….

· PLN is the local power company. One of the bizarre things about the electricity system in Bali (aside from its expense and absolute unreliability) is the fact that they don’t tell you how much you owe. Elsewhere on the planet, in my experience at least, the utilities companies send you a nice letter at the end of a billing cycle, sometimes even with a wee newsletter to read on the loo, and you pay it. In Indonesia, or at least in Bali, it’s up to the consumer to actively seek out the amount due out and pay it before they cut you off. Several years in, I’m still confused by this but I think one is obliged to either stand in a queue at some office, or ring a number, or…anyway it’s bizarre. So I was pleased when I found the PLN Bali website (this I won’t link to). You go into it, enter the number of the account (which brings up the name of a person no-one I know has ever heard of and an address a little different to ours…but that’s Bali…you simply never attempt to apply logic to any situation) and up comes an amount which you can pay (a friend takes it to the office with hers). But now, we have a bit of an issue with the process: both IE7 and Firefox have detected that the web designer, who I guess is a contracted-in young-scallywag, has implanted a virus in the page’s code. A couple of links on the page to get further information on a couple of things (like how to save money on your power bill) trigger a virus download. An email to the company and the webmaster has garnered no response.

· Our emailed invoices from our suppliers in Indonesia come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some come as 6MB bitmaps ( per one page document), others are Excel spreadsheets with the print area set to 365 pages, and so on. This is extremely handy when one punches Ctl-P and wanders off to make coffee.

· We learned early on, but not early enough sadly that you don’t give your business card to Indonesian trade organisations. The end result of that folly is endless emails from companies all over the world who’ve been sold the list. The ones from Indonesia tend to be often incoherent and likely link to a website which doesn’t exist. It seems that registering and setting up a website are less important to Indo businesses than, to indicate importance, claiming to have one. Think of the money it saves….
If, on the off chance it does link to something there is a better than even chance that it will be either completely non-navigationable, with multiple dead links and / or crashing Flash 5; or has been authored with a huge variety of fonts over a wallpaper background of a similar colour to the type, with a variety of spinning and flashing applets and animated gifs. It will also say ©2003 Optimised for Netscape Navigator 2 And IE3. Email addresses on these sites are never live or clickable and exist inside a graphic to defeat any use of Ctl-c. They are often far too long to remember without writing down. You will never get a response from these emails, at least 50% of which bounce back as these companies like to change their email addresess every month or two to prove, once again, how modern they are. You are better to fax through a request as faxes are increasingly big news and look likely to supplant the typewriter and the dot-matrix printer in a few years.

· Last year we bought a printer..a mid priced Brother multi-function thingy. It came with spare ink and we topped up earlier this year in Malaysia where compatible ink sells for about $5 a cartridge. But the black ran out last week and I’ve spent half the last week trying to find it with no luck. The place we bought the printer from still sell the machines but ink is One month from Singapore! So we went to Carrefour, down there on JL. Sunset. They have the ink listed on their wall display but don’t actually stock it. Thus we decided a new printer may be the only way, as there was some urgency and they’re not overly expensive. So we saw a new Canon….do you sell the ink for this? No? Which of the dozen or so printers you have for sale here, do you have ink for? None…

· In Indonesia, banks’ websites generally look like they’ve been authored circa 1996, for Mosaic or the like. Parts of them may or may not load and they may have frames within frames. To get a simple balance on my bank, Permata’s, site, I need to go through five levels of clicking…any one of which may freeze the browser. Its interface was last updated in 2003 and does not work in Firefox. Emails to these people are never ever, ever responded to. The online transfer bit has a very, very small space for the payee’s name…too small for most names. If the full name is not given, or a comma or full stop is in the wrong place the receiving bank, depending on their mood, may reject it. Brigid can often hear me screaming at, and bashing the computer as I try to pay the phone bill online or note that the internet payment, with all details correct and mucho funds has been returned for the third time because it’s name is one letter too many for the Permata site’s space. This is their corporate profile page.

· But for all that, my biggest frustration right now has nothing to do with Indonesia. It’s, again, DHL in New Zealand, who, after three years of doing it, forgot to send the mail from our mailbox up to as on the first of the month. They claimed that they had no record of having done so in the past, and it wasn’t “something we do” said the helpful person, as she copied the email into the Global Mail Forwarding Manager. So all the things I mentioned above fade a little…they’re just a result of education and technology gaps. DHL’s error is just plain incompetence.

A lifetime ago David Byrne and Brian Eno released My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Not only was it an addictively entrancing record, it was also a musical milestone.

Its use of samples and loops was absolutely revolutionary. Sure samples had been used before but never in such a core way that it was the essence of the released recording. It quite literally opened the floodgates for a raft of innovations and pointed the way towards new roads up which thousands have trod and continue to do so almost thirty years after it was recorded.

It was one of those records…

In 2007 they reissued the album and, taking the concept one step further, encouraged others to use parts of a couple of tracks and remix them and no cost.

That concept was later picked up by the likes of Radiohead who encouraged, or allowed remixes of tracks from their last album. That album was the subject of a major flurry last year when it was, famously or notoriously, depending on where you came from, essentially offered for sale at the price you wanted to nominate, including free. Then it was later commercially released.

The, how shall we say, more traditional, arms of the recording industry took some pleasure in saying the experiment had flopped, pointing to the percentage who paid nothing, or, more recently to the numbers who, despite the offer at the band’s site, look it from P2p or Torrent sites.

All that of course rather missed the point, that being, that from Radiohead’s point of view, which really was the only one that mattered, it was a roaring, profile increasing, money making, chart topping and stadium filling success. It took them as a brand and a ban to a new level. And the recent round of publicity only added to the simple fact that they are more current now than they would ever have been if they’d resigned to EMI..a Google news search got almost 5000 hits…just on the current Radiohead news..

The analysis of the RH figures came from, predictably, the chief economist of the UK collection agency, PRS, who was unable to see the proverbial wood for the trees in his joy to release the download figures. Part, just a small part, mind you, of which was that overall numbers downloaded dwarf recent Radiohead sales, and thus the album is in that many more homes, which I’d imagine any band or manager would reasonably be happy about.

But Byrne and Eno have taken the concept one step further, as you only could in these broadband times. Their new album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, was released online yesterday, via a dedicated site which will allow you to listen to their album forever free, as long as you stream it or download a widget from either their site or via developer Topspin Media. That widget is below.

And then, having listened to the album all day (as I have), which, as an aside is quite spookily lovely..far more so than I expected, since I’ve not been a Byrne fan in recent years…I’m able to continue doing so day after day, or I can buy it in a variety of formats, hard and digital, or a mix, including lossless FLAC.

It’s hard to see how they could offer more to the consumer…how the consumer could be made to feel better about the artist and the record. And how the artist, who gets the bulk of whatever is paid for copies sold, not just a small royalty against recoupment (less packaging deductions, and a new technology deduction etc blah blah blah), could do better. It’s a mighty mighty win-win…even if 95% of folks never go beyond the stream

And the simple fact is that it’s getting harder and harder, for acts like this and many others, to see what a proper record company could add to the mix anymore, as they furry around trying to rewrite the traditional deals.

Is there anything less artist friendly than a 360 deal?

I said once before that we are at the beginning of the tip of the start of the germ of this digital delivery model, and that, as I believe, the iTunes road might eventually turn into a dead end as a wider network of search and delivery, perhaps out of the hands of huge corporations like Apple, takes hold. Especially as there is so much drive to innovate.

To quote TopSpin co-founder, Ian Rogers:

And I don’t think it’s controversial to say software will play a role in the future of music marketing. Artists, managers, and labels alike will use some sort of software to help them manage direct relationships with fans, find new listeners, measure the success of their business, pay licenses and royalties, etc.

Things like Everything That Happens Will Happen Today are a clear pointer that way.

Here’s an anniversary some would rather forget:

……..2008 marks the 10-year anniversary of two of the first MP3 players, the Eiger Labs MPMan F10, and the Rio PMP300, but chances are you didn’t listen to a first-gen MP3 player in 1998. With the first iPod still three years off, most of us were in the heights of our compact disc addiction 10 years ago, content to hear our music on portable CD players. Hell, some of us still listened to cassettes….

In early 1999 I was at a Festival Mushroom conference in Coffs Harbour, Northern NSW, with the Festival NZ team and all the discussion, well in between the stuff about how shockingly bad all the ocker bands were, was about the first generation players just hitting the market.

And about Rupert Murdoch (he owned the company and his son James ran it)  and Roger Grierson’s (he was MD) plan for an online database of music that one could download to these primitive machines.

Over a few beers, we laughed a little at the idea….