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……