EMI Sues Music Site Offering Beatles MP3s

from the no-surprise-there dept

Last last week, a bunch of music blogs started noticing that a previously unknown site called Bluebeat.com was selling MP3s for $0.25, including numerous acts that still haven't officially authorized online sales -- such as The Beatles and AC/DC. There was a lot of headscratching among bloggers and reporters who wondered how this could possibly be legal. The answer, of course, is that it wasn't. The site didn't even make any attempt whatsoever to claim that they had licensed this music. They just said they thought that $0.25 was a better price for music. Not surprisingly, it took just a few days before EMI sued the site, and I'd imagine other lawsuits will quickly follow as well. It's not clear what the folks at Bluebeat were thinking -- other than that they were about to get a ton of publicity in the form of lawsuits, but it's hard to see what good that publicity is if the site is forced out of business.

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Free MP3s... If You Sit Through An Ad

from the interesting-model...-but... dept

I've seen all sorts of business models involving "free, but ad supported" music, but none of them really seem sustainable. This latest one is different, but I'm still not sure it has a chance. Rather than the typical "play music and have ads off to the side somewhere" model that most take, Free All Music, gives you a chance to download DRM-free MP3s... if you first watch a video ad. They even let you pick what sponsor you want to let "buy you" the music (and then, that advertiser gets to put your user name in future ads, noting that you downloaded the music).

While this is a more creative use of advertising that probably has more value to the advertiser than the typical ad-supported music sites (where most people just ignore the ads), it still seems likely to have some serious problems. First, the site is betting that consumption habits on such a site would be the same as iTunes -- 15 songs over the course of three months -- and is looking for ad deals to support that. But... that assumes that as the price drops from $1 to "time spent watching an ad" consumption wouldn't go up. Without the monetary barrier, it seems likely that consumption would increase significantly.

On top of that, I don't really see how the economics work, given traditional models in both the music and ad industry. It's not that those models necessarily make sense (in fact, I'd argue neither make sense), but it's what both sides will expect. On that front, you've got the record labels, who are used to getting approximately $0.67 per downloaded song. Assuming that needs to be made up by the ad (and even ignoring any profit for the site), then every single ad shown needs to cost that same $0.67. Translated into traditional ad terms, that's a CPM of $670. Yikes. I don't know any advertiser will to pay anything close to that -- even if it's targeted and you have a half decent chance of the person paying attention. Most CPM ad rates online these days are in the sub-$5 area. Convincing advertisers to jump to a $670 CPM on an unproven model? Good luck.

Finally, even if it's "free" it sounds pretty inconvenient. The fact is that people do have alternatives, such as file sharing networks. While they're not legal, they don't require you to waste a bunch of time before you can get the music you want to listen to. I'm sure some people would use it, but not enough to really matter long term.

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Michael Robertson Wants To Crowdsource Proof Of EMI's Lies: You Lie EMI Bookmarklet Available

from the have-fun-with-it dept

EMI has been involved in a lawsuit with MP3Tunes for a while now. The whole lawsuit seems weird, since MP3Tunes is about creating a storage locker for the songs you already have. But one of the points that MP3Tunes made in response to EMI's claims is that EMI was lying in saying that it has never authorized MP3s to be available online. Yet, MP3Tunes had found plenty of promotional tracks that EMI had clearly put online, and it was wondering why others were allowed to link to them, but EMI claimed it was infringement for MP3Tunes to point to those same songs. In presenting this point in court, MP3Tunes has been looking for more evidence of authorized EMI mp3s, and Michael Robertson has announced the "You Lie EMI" bookmarklet (found via Hypebot), that lets anyone help MP3Tunes find more authorized EMI mp3s. Basically, as you surf around, if you come across authorized songs that are available, you can click the bookmarklet, and it checks to see if the artists is an EMI artist, and then lets you submit the details. Whatever happens with the lawsuit itself, it's cool to see someone crowdsourcing data for their defense.

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If Downloading A Song Is Just Like Stealing A CD, Why Won't The RIAA Allow Reselling MP3s?

from the either-it-is-or-it-isn't dept

When you hear RIAA defenders insist that an unauthorized download is "just like stealing a CD" or something along those lines, it's worth noting even they don't really mean it. After all, if a digital file really was no different than a physical goods purchase, then you'd be able to do other things with it -- such as resell it. And yet, as you read through Eliot Van Buskirk's article about new online services trying to create marketplaces for people to sell their "used" MP3s, you'll see the scenario is quite different. After all, it's perfectly legal to sell your used CDs, but now when it comes to selling used MP3s you need a record label's permission? Why? Well, because even the record labels seem to inherently know that a CD is quite different from a download. So when the RIAA claims they're the same, what they really mean is "only the stuff we like is the same."

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How About Paying Bands $0.50 For Every Free Dowload?

from the can't-make-money-off-free? dept

We were just talking about how there are more and more new startups in the market to help bands do everything they need to do to both make music and make money these days -- and one of the most successful has been ReverbNation, who has created a variety of tools for musicians to help them both distribute music and connect with fans in new and compelling ways. And, now, the company has announced that it not only wants to help bands give away DRM-free mp3 music for free, but it will pay some of them $0.50 per download. Who says free can't pay? Of course, as always, there is a money-making business model involved. In this case, it's that ReverbNation will get to include a small ad in the cover art that appears with the album. Also, it's only open to a 1,000 bands. I'm not convinced this is a sustainable model, as "ad supported" music strikes me as a market where it will be tough to get enough ad revenue to make it worthwhile -- but it's still a neat experiment to watch and see how it evolves. It certainly may help get more indie bands over the fear of putting their music out there for free on purpose -- and hopefully some of those bands will recognize the other benefits of doing so, beyond just the $0.50 per download from ReverbNation.

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Amazon's Best Selling MP3 Album For 2008 Was Available Legally For Free

from the give-people-a-reason-to-buy dept

As some of you may know, in a week and a half I'm giving a presentation at the music industry MidemNet conference, focusing on how Trent Reznor's various business model experiments highlight the future of the music industry. I'll be putting the final touches on my presentation this week, and it's great to find one additional data point: the top selling MP3 download on Amazon last year was Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV album, which you probably know Reznor put under a pretty open Creative Commons license (and even gave away a bunch of the tracks himself). In other words, you could go on pretty much any file sharing system out there and legally download the music for personal use... and yet it was still the top selling downloadable album (this is on top of all the money earned by Reznor's other business models associated with this album). Certainly puts a nice little cherry on top of the theme of my presentation.

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A Market For Used MP3s... Or A Parody To Prove A Point?

from the this-can't-be-serious dept

ChurchHatesTucker was the first of a few readers to send in the news about a new website claiming to have set up an online system for selling "used" or secondhand MP3s. The whole idea, of course, is fairly ridiculous, which leads me (and CHT) to believe that this is more making a statement to show just how silly it is whenever recording industry types try to treat digital copies as if they were physical objects, or declare that "downloading an MP3 is no different than walking out of a shop with a CD you haven't paid for." If so, bravo for the satire. If, however, this actually is real, I imagine it will survive all of about a day, before it gets shut down.

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Will The RIAA Sue Judge Kozinski For Sharing MP3s?

from the just-wondering dept

While judge Alex Kozinski is getting a ton of press for accidentally sharing pornographic images from his webserver, Justin Levine notes that the report concerning what was on the server also found music MP3s from musicians like Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Weird Al Yankovic. Levine wonders if the RIAA will now sue this federal judge as well. In fact, things could get tricky in that some research suggests not only was Kozinski storing MP3s, he may have actively been sharing some of those MP3s as well. That same link mentions that in one of many copyright infringement lawsuits concerning the company Perfect 10, Kozinski wrote a dissenting opinion suggesting that facilitating copyright infringement should be seen as infringement as well:

"When it comes to traffic in material that violates the Copyright Act, the policy of the United States is embedded in the FBI warning we see at the start of every lawfully purchased or rented video: Infringers are to be stopped and prosecuted."

There's a lot more involved in his opinion, which really focuses on credit card companies profiting from infringement -- but considering how he much he writes against those who help others infringe, it's probably not a wise idea that he was out there sharing music files himself.

However, to be fair, as the details come out, this whole thing is quite clearly a witch hunt by someone who seriously dislikes the judge. As we noted when the story broke, it's perfectly ridiculous to try to suggest this makes him any less qualified to judge cases. And, indeed, as the details come out about the content on his server, it's becoming clear that it is, as he noted "funny" stuff. It's all basically the sort of silly viral content that gets passed around all the time, much more for the amusement factor than any sort of titillation.

This post certainly isn't to slam Kozinski, who seems like a genuinely thoughtful judge -- with a sense of humor to boot (he famously nominated himself for a mocking "Judicial Hottie" contest run by a blog, noting: "While I think the list of female candidates is excellent, the list of male candidates is, frankly, lacking. And what it's lacking is me.... I have it on very good authority that discerning females and gay men find graying, pudgy, middle-aged men with an accent close to Gov. Schwarzenegger's almost totally irresistible." The fact that he was also sharing MP3s, again, is just yet another reminder that, contrary to the entertainment's claim that "education" will solve music sharing, many people just think it's perfectly natural and reasonable to share a song with some friends.

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Collapse of Music DRM Continues; DRM Customers Still Screwed

from the we're-shocked dept

Support for DRM in the recording industry is in freefall. On Tuesday, Napster released a new version of its music store offering 6 million DRM-free tracks. Napster is a relative latecomer to this party, joining Apple, Amazon, and Wal-Mart, all of whom have had at least some DRM-free, major-label music available for about a year. One difference, though, is that Napster is coming out of the chute with support from all four major labels and thousands of smaller labels as well. At this point, any music store that doesn't offer DRM-free tracks is going to look like a real laggard. This story wasn't too surprising given the way things have been going over the last year. But even less surprising is the fact that customers who were foolish enough to purchase DRMed content from previous versions of Napster are stuck with their decision. They don't get to update their content to MP3 format, and while Napster has decided to continue running its "license servers" for now, it's only a matter of time before Napster decides running those servers is more trouble than it's worth and shuts them off, cutting customers off from their music libraries entirely.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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RIAA Now Decides That Not Enough People Have Heard Of Project Playlist

from the reverse-attention-whores dept

There they go again. The RIAA and MPAA keep picking totally random, mostly unknown, startups and suing them -- giving them all sorts of free publicity. They did it years ago with Napster and more recently with The Pirate Bay. And yet... they keep doing it. In the latest example, the RIAA is suing a company called Project Playlist, which offers apps for MySpace and Facebook that let you play music found elsewhere online. There are a bunch of similar offerings out there (some of which I think are even more well known). If this case goes forward, it could be quite interesting, as again it's hard to see how Project Playlist is the liable party. It just lets users point its player to mp3 files that are found on other sites. Those files may be infringing, but Project Playlist is just the player. It would be like suing Sony for making a Walkman on the assumption that most tapes used in Walkmen include infringing copies of songs.

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RIAA NOT Saying That Personal Copies Are Illegal (Yet)

from the no-need-to-exaggerate dept

I believe that lawyer Ray Beckerman has done some wonderful things in defending people being bullied by the RIAA and accused of infringing on copyrights with very little evidence. He also does a fantastic job keeping people informed on the issues with his Recording Industry vs. The People blog. However, his latest post about the RIAA changing their argument to say that making personal copies to one's own computer is infringement is misleading at best. And, worse, many big sites are repeating the claim. Unfortunately, it's not quite true and it seriously hurts the arguments of those who think the RIAA is going too far to mislead in this way. What the RIAA's lawyers clearly seem to be saying is that putting mp3 files that you legally ripped into a shared Kazaa folder makes them no longer authorized. In other words, this is simply an extension of their old standby, the argument that "making available" is infringement. The RIAA's argument here seems to be that putting content in a shared Kazaa folder is "making available," and if making available is infringement, then clearly these files infringe.

Now, it's quite fair to argue that point (and argue it we should, because there are troublesome implications if a shared folder is all you need to create infringing content). However, that is not, in any way, saying that simply ripping your CDs is infringement, and it weakens the arguments of Beckerman and other supporters to take the RIAA's argument out of context and present it as something it is not. The RIAA certainly takes others' arguments out of context and exaggerates statements to suggest that anyone questioning their strategy is just a "pirate." However, that's no reason to sink to the RIAA's level. Instead, why can't we be intellectually honest and focus on what the RIAA is actually saying and why that is problematic? There's no reason to exaggerate the RIAA's stance or take it out of context. It's troublesome enough in real life without having to twist it further.

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Western Digital Decides That You Shouldn't Be Allowed To Share Any MP3

from the why-is-that-WD's-decision? dept

Rich Kulawiec writes in to let us know about a Boing Boing post about some fairly ridiculous limitations on Western Digital's networked drives. Apparently, once you've set up the drive, you can subscribe to a service that will allow others to access your drive from the internet (rather than on the local network). You can set up accounts for specific people, including highlighting what is available to be shared with that person. However, Western Digital has simply decided that under no circumstance can you share a variety of multimedia filetypes, such as mp3s, wmvs, aac or others. Its reasoning is that this is "due to unverifiable media license authentication," which is basically a gibberish way of saying that you might be infringing on someone's copyright. Of course, you might not be either. There are an awful lot of media files out there that are perfectly legitimate to share with others. Certainly, this sort of action makes this service useless to a musician who records tracks and makes them available to his record label using such a drive. The key question, though, is why Western Digital should bother at all. There's certainly no legal reason for Western Digital to do such a thing -- and all it does is make their drives a lot less useful for perfectly legitimate activities.

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Blaming MP3s And iPods For Ruining Music

from the gotta-love-the-audiophiles dept

It seems that with every new generation of music delivery, there are going to be people who complain that the quality just isn't up to par with what came before. Remember when CDs first came out, there were quite a few upturned noses who insisted the sound quality just couldn't compete with vinyl LPs. And now that mp3s are becoming the standard, folks are complaining that the quality simply can't live up to CDs. This has certainly gone on for a while, as we've noted there are even online stores that cater to audiophiles who believe that compressed mp3s just aren't worth listening to. However, now it's going even further, as the WSJ claims that some audio engineers are saying that the popularity of mp3s and iPods is ruining music. The theory is that audio engineers are using iPods and mp3s as the lowest common denominator for recordings. Since they know that so many people are going to end up hearing the song just through the cheap white earbuds of an iPod, that they don't bother to make a high quality recording that would sound better on high end stereo equipment. Thus, the claim goes, pretty much all music is sounding somewhat crappy, and it's turning people off from the latest crop of new songs. In other words, music is less popular today, because the songs are engineered to sound like crap. This seems silly. It's certainly a different argument than the industry's typical claim that downloads are killing the music business -- but it's equally ridiculous. Sure, there may be some engineers who are doing a cruddy job in engineering the music, but as one audio engineer in the story notes, there's no reason to ever engineer a song "down" to mp3 levels. Instead, you should just engineer it to a higher level and it'll sound fine on a CD as well on an iPod. However, to put the whole thing in perspective: songs compressed to mp3 level certainly do lose some quality at the margin, but there's only a small group of audiophiles who really care or will notice on a regular basis. At the same time, compare that to how much more music is being produced today thanks to cheaper production tools and easier distribution of music through the internet, and I think you could make the case that the mp3 and the iPod has done a lot more to improve music than to hurt it.

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Judge Says Jury Screwed Up In Awarding Alcatel-Lucent $1.5 Billion From Microsoft For MP3 Patents

from the so-sorry-about-that dept

Back in February, a jury told Microsoft to pay Alcatel-Lucent $1.5 billion for supposedly violating some patents Alcatel-Lucent held on MP3 technology. The case helped highlight the patent thicket around MP3 technologies, as Microsoft had licensed the technology from the creator of the MP3 technology, Fraunhofer. Back in May, as the judge was considering what to do about the jury's award, Alcatel-Lucent actually claimed that $1.5 billion wasn't enough. It appears the judge not only didn't buy that story, but didn't buy the jury's reasoning either. Today he threw out the jury's ruling, noting that Microsoft doesn't even infringe on one of the patents in question, and the other one is jointly owned by Fraunhofer, and therefore Microsoft has a legitimate license to it already. As the judge said, "The jury's verdict was against the clear weight of the evidence." As you might imagine, Alcatel-Lucent is not happy about this, calling the ruling "shocking and disturbing." So, there is likely going to be a long appeals process. However, this is the second time in recent weeks that we're seeing courts take a more reasonable approach on patents. Hopefully, it's the start of a trend.

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