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.

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.