This post represents my own (Alexandre Enkerli’s) personal views and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone at CriticalWorld.<—adb9f2cb44d2840fd025a29ff88330b6—>

• Apple hides account info in DRM-free music, too
  


• Will music industry dance again to Apple’s tune? | CNET News.com
  


• Studies: music industry overstating threat of P2P piracy
  

It now sounds possible that this is the time major labels are starting to “get a clue” about what online activities can bring to them.

At this point, the project hasn’t really been launched but the main ideas are there.

Personally, I would say that the site is low on features. The tracks themselves are interesting but the “value proposition” of downloading tracks for free on such a relatively simple site may push people toward sites which focus on music communities. Which might be a good thing for independent music.<—75080996242ad97bb6fd653e29121fdd—>

Ironically, with its numerous pirated downloads available, the whole album has not leaked yet. According to a source, the only leaks are the ones Reznor approved himself. And whether he realizes it or not, Reznor may be building a new option for presenting music that augments the existing CD/tour scenario. “It’s not about slapping something on top of an existing experience,” the source says. “It must be its own entity. Make the experience as immersive as possible for fans.”

Nicoli cited internal EMI tests in which higher-quality, DRM-free songs outsold its lower-quality, copy-protected counterparts 10-to-1.

Many people, including Steve Jobs and the Canadian Music Creators Coalition, have been calling for the end of DRM. EMI’s move is a bit less gutzy but it does sound like a move in the right direction, at least from a technological standpoint. Let’s hope Universal, Sony-BMG, and even Edgar Bronfman’s Warner Music will follow suit.<—d8a0b9e0e6800061e3d8af2c4fa06434—>

Bertelsmann settles over naughty Napster | The Register

DMCA architect lambasts music moguls | The Register

Not that these items really prefigure what might happen from this point on, but the winds are slowly shifting.<—908b52d9b89efbf1b3d8cc391c432aa7—><—146c0b37716af8ae3a40e5e01fc09f97—>

“We can’t think of it as counting unit sales anymore,” said Kenswil. “We have to license … and think like the publishers.”

What remains to be seen is whether this is a desperate strategy of a group of zombies or the announcement of a seachange in the global music industry.

Sony Music and Universal Music Group are marking certain artists of theirs as “prohibited” for sharing

it looks like it’s roughly 40-50 percent of artist that fall under this prohibited banner

Erm… What? You gotta be kidding, right?
How can this beneficial to any artist? Oh, I know! By blocking access to certain artists, you make sure that those who are not blocked get more exposure… Where the plan fails is that Zune is crippled enough from the start that music lovers are unlikely to use it very extensively to help their peers discover music.
Sorry, recording industry. Better luck next time—4e9d4a47862aa0b92f31ab31e8f195b1—>

If you purchase a track with Microsoft® Points, you can sync it to your Zune, rip it to a CD, or even send it to a friend’s Zune so they can see if they like it.[1]

[1] The Zune to Zune sharing feature may not be available for all audio files on your device, and works only between Zune devices within wireless range of each other. This feature allows recipients to play full-length sample tracks up to 3 times in 3 days. Recipients cannot re-send music that they have received via the sharing feature.

There you have it.

Seems like Calabash Music’s "Fair-Trade Music" concept has been on my mind lately. A bit of context…

I had mentioned Calabash Music here before. It’s an online music store which specialises in what people tend to call "World Music." I have been downloading their free singles for quite a while but haven’t yet purchased music from the service. I do hope that Madou Diarra and Dakan (the band in which I play) will sell its music through Calabash Music.

Yesterday, after having listened to a podcast about online music stores which sell tracks without copy protection, I posted an entry right here and another on my personal blog. Though I didn’t mention Calabash Music specifically, it was clearly at the back of my mind when I wrote one of my crazier posts about music, coffee, beer, and glocalisation.

Thinking about it a bit more, and thanks to fellow Critical World member Pascal, I now feel that this concept of "fair-trade music" is especially relevant for Critical World, whose mission is to Think Globalisation Through Music.

Through a cursory look at Calabash Music’s Q&A for musicians and Artist Terms of Agreement, it does seem like they care about artists. IANAL but it does sound like their conditions are rather "good for artists." This part is rather telling:

Q. How does the money work?

A. Our customers may purchase downloads of your music at a price range between 75 and 99 cents per song. Your music is sold by the downloadable track. You will receive 50% of the net revenues from your music downloads sold. Net revenues are determined as the gross revenues less merchant fees. Artists can expect to earn an average of 44 cents per track sold. We pay you four times a year (every quarter) for your downloads. (If the amount we owe you is less than $50 then we will hold the amount until the amount is greater than $50.) We give you an account with a user name and password that allows you to look at reports of how many downloads your songs have received and how much money you have earned.

Apart from the actual royalty structure, the very fact that Calabash Music prominently displays this explanation on their website implies a direct relationship with artists. You get the impression that you don’t even need an agent to sell music through Calabash Music. Of course, agents are still extremely important for artists but in this "fair-trade" model, they don’t hold all the cards. Because coffee is the best-known case for fair-trade, the notion of a "direct relationship coffee" is quite appropriate here:

Absolution in Your Cup. The real meaning of Fair Trade coffee

Farmers were being squeezed by middlemen, known as coyotes, so that even the dismal profits from cheap mass-produced coffee failed to reach them. Growers lacked basic information about what their crop was worth, how to maximize production, and how to market their beans, and it was to the coyotes’ advantage to keep it that way. Fair Traders, by contrast, sought a direct relationship between coffee farmers and coffee drinkers: clean, just, transparent transactions.

In "fair-trade music," the agent is less of a middleman and more of a consultant, helping artists to negotiate deals in their own terms. Calabash Music serves as middleman to a certain extent but mostly as a distributor, not as a gatekeeper. The notion is that this model is more ethical than "free-trade" because it gives control to those who produce what is being sold. It’s especially compelling an idea in a global context. Musicians from around the Globe are able to sell their own music to listeners from around the Globe. Control is distributed, to a certain extent.

One of the most basic characteristics of fair-trade coffee is that there is a floor price ($1.26/lbs.) for green coffee beans. Calabash Music’s royalty scheme uses a similar principle in that musicians are getting a "fair share" of the profits, allegedly much higher than the net artist royalty on other online music stores. It undercuts the law of supply and demand to ensure that those who did the work get a "fair share." Of course, this "fair share" is decided by the "fair trade system" itself. In anti-globalization/alter-mondialisme terms, those in "developing countries" still get their business decisions made by those in "industrial countries." But to the consumer, buying "fair-trade" seems like "the ethical thing to do": selling a clear conscience at a premium.

Of course, not all is good with "fair-trade."

You’d think this confluence of social responsibility and double lattes, good business practices and lefty politics, would make [coffee activist] Katzeff a happy man. But he and a growing number of roasters say the Fair Trade movement has lost its way. The movement has always aroused suspicion on the right, where free traders object to its price floors and anti-globalization rhetoric. Yet critics from the left are more vocal and more angry by half; they point to unhappy farmers, duped consumers, an entrenched Fair Trade bureaucracy, and a grassroots campaign gone corporate.

Calabash Music is too small to get the same treatment as TransFair (the regulatory body for fair-trade coffee in the U.S.). But it doesn’t mean that the disadvantages of the fair-trade model won’t hit the music industry.

There are major differences between "fair-trade coffee" and a fair-trade model applied to music. One is that, contrary to coffee, music is not a commodity. In the online distribution of audio files, supply is unlimited in that you don’t suddenly run out of a specific MP3 file. Online distribution is still costly, but the costs scale much differently from the distribution of physical goods.

A related issue is that "music consumption" is affordable, almost anywhere on the planet. While coffee growers may be too poor to afford brewed coffee, the poorest musician in Mali can listen to music. There is a huge imbalance between The Rich and The Poor, between The Core and The Periphery, but this imbalance cannot be described in a similar way.

The injustice in music has a lot to do with issues in what so-called "Intellectual Property." An important dimension of an "ethical" music model would be that it doesn’t prevent music listeners from privately using music as they wish. Ethical music would also ensure that musicians are the ones who get the better part of the profits instead of large-scale pirates, producers, or retailers. The whole "protect the artists" stance, applied to the actual artists (not the record labels). A new business model which actually compensates musicians for their work. That, most might agree, would be fair.

Though some music productions may sound indistinguishable from one another, music is quite distinctive. While some coffee consumers may not care about the coffee they drink, music listeners select music according to their tastes. With this distinctiveness comes a sense of "brand," to think in marketing terms, but also a sense of shared experience. Fans of a given Indie Rock band may feel a bond which can extend far beyond the "consumption" of the music. In coffee, even the most enthusiastic connoisseur will never remain loyal to a single type of coffee bean or even a single coffee "origin." In globalised music, a Polish accountant can become fanatic about an Argentinian band the same way a Thai mechanic can listen to Canadian singer Céline Dion.

So it is possible that Calabash Music may benefit from the "fair-trade mentality" without being hit from the disadvantages. Simply thinking about the connections between globalised markets may give us the key.

Audio Lunchbox

eMusic

DMusic

purevolume

Magnatune

(Electromancer is now defunct and CommonTunes seems to have changed its vocation)

My favourite so far has been Calabash Music, which has an excellent selection of music from around the world and gives away free tracks every week.<—e7228deea7aa72ac1580066b0acda278—>

“The tecno-brega DJ’s usually acknowledge in their live presentations the presence of people from various neighborhoods, and this acknowledgement is of great value to the audience, leading thousands of buy copies of the recorded live presentation.”

In honour of the Day Against DRM, Cory Doctorow appeared on CNET’s The Real Deal podcast with Tom Merritt. Doctorow mentioned Tecno Brega in his discussion of DRM and the notion that those artists are not discouraging others from getting paid by selling recordings of their music. Like radio in other contexts, inexpensive recordings are promotional items for these artists. Contrary to radio, this promotion is done without control from labels (in a payola or other playlist scheme).
What strikes me even more, though, is the phenomenon of mentioning neighborhoods in these recordings. As is the case with hunters associations in Mali, musical acknowledgement represents a cultural value which may, in turn, bring about commercial value. In fact, in Mali, people who sponsor performance events for the hunters associations are often people linked to hunters without being hunters themselves. They simply want the musicians to talk about them.
Who said that Jessica Simpson’s customized “A Public Affair” was innovative?<—8aaefc15baed3937bf76d099efce10ac—>

Via Slashdot. The RIAA has insufficient evidence against at least one of the people it has brought to trial.

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Thanks, Marsha, for the heads-up—7a7bd624ff78ec154515f2dc52c5375c—>

Wonder what Bronfman has to say about this…<—6d502746ab48791678da7cdd428eac58—>

As part of JSTOR’s mission to create an archive of scholarly literature and extend access to the archive as broadly as possible, we are proud to announce that JSTOR has adopted a plan to waive participation fees for any academic or not-for-profit institution on the continent of Africa. This plan affects new participants, as well as institutions that currently participate in JSTOR.

JSTOR is one of the most important electronic repositories of academic articles. It covers a wide range of journals from most academic disciplines and from a long period of time. While Internet access itself is often costly in Africa, this could greatly benefit the collaboration between African scholars and their colleagues outside of Africa.<—ca683579eef4251bb63f423e9db9501b—>

Under a blanket (or ‘compulsory’ license) for consumer downloads, record labels fear they would lose control of their hard-fought grip on physical distribution channels, and lose control over pricing. In fact, they’d simply have to work harder to gain a bigger share of the pie, and innovate to find new outlets for their copyrighted material.

the staff at the RIAA are thoughtful, good people who work hard to protect their constituency

Why is French music from Quebec almost entirely absent from most Canadian online music services?

It’d be interesting to determine the effects of Canadian Content rules (“CanCon”) on the state of Quebec’s musics. It’s quite possible that CanCon has been one of the reasons behind the vitality of Francophone music in Quebec, especially when considering airplay on Anglophone radio stations. Yet, it seems to me that the current state of the “music industry” in Quebec is much less dependent on CanCon than it might have been in the past. This is not a full-fledged analysis on my part and I might be completely off-base. But this preliminary hypothesis is based on a few observations as a French-speaking Quebecker, a «Canadien errant» (an itinerant French-Canadian), and a fan of Francophone musics. My emphasis here is on «chanson», the type of music done by «auteurs compositeurs interprètes» (“singers-songwriters”). In terms of sales, it’s a relatively important market but it’s mostly significant as part of Québécois identity.
Through a significant period of Quebec’s recent history, there was a perception that musicians, especially singers, had to succeed in Paris to be recognized in Quebec. France was, and still remains to some extent, the main reference for Quebec’s “cultural institutions” and there was a sense that Quebec culture was dependent on French recognition. Many actors in Quebec’s music scenes looked up to France as a significant source of prestige. Obviously, Quebec artists were also influenced by British and American cultures. But pride in “our artists” was most often triggered by the accolades they would receive in France.
Quebec’s singers are now much less dependent on France. For instance, Daniel Bélanger, Ariane Moffatt, and other musicians on the Audiogram independent label have achieved significant success in Quebec before ever performing in France. In fact, a few French artists even achieve recognition in Quebec before they do so in France, partly because of large musicals like Plamondon and Cocciante’s adaptation of Notre-Dame de Paris. Some could say that Quebec culture is now much more inward-looking and insular than it ever was. The effect is a relative autonomy in the world of “cultural industries” (arts and entertainment, media, etc.).
Which brings another point, often bemoaned by many Quebeckers but clearly central to Quebec’s current situation: media convergence. In Quebec, “convergence” is often used as a buzzword to designate (and often decry) the practises of large corporations like Quebecor which own several media outlets and use this type of integration to cross-promote the people with whom they sign contract (or, as some put it, “to plug the artists they own”). Quebecor itself, seen as a giant, argues that it is in fact much smaller and more benevolent than the real threat of international media conglomerates (typically coming from the United States). Whatever the case may be, this discourse plays on cultural identity. No matter how evil or monopolistic it may be, Quebecor is still a Quebec institution (it says so in its name). And the contents they push are identified as part of Quebec culture, whether they’re original Quebec content or are adaptated from content which has worked in France and the United States.
By to the CRTC and content rules. Quebec content (QueCon) is covered in part by CanCon, at least through language-specific rules (Acadian and Franco-Ontarian musics are different though connected stories). Cultural protectionism does titillate cultural identity. Québécois don’t typically think of Canada’s federal agencies like the CRTC as defenders of Quebec’s distinct culture. In fact, some Québécois critics see the CRTC almost as a threat to Quebec culture, perhaps even more so than anything coming from the United States. This perception might be completely inaccurate but it does inform the attitudes of many Québécois on culture and media.
In such a context, how important is it for the CRTC to “protect” Quebec content?<—0e1e868329cb81e3a22a710f726d685e—>

Steven makes the case that record labels still need to learn that music is not a commodity, and marketing it in that way alienates fans who view it in an almost spiritual sense. Music is a touchstone in our lives – it’s the soundtrack of our past, tied directly to our emotions and memories. The impression of fans is that the recording industry wants to control what most people consider to be something very personal.

Page is part of the Canadian Music Creators Coalition which has a simple message based on three principles:

1. Suing Our Fans is Destructive and Hypocritical


2. Digital Locks are Risky and Counterproductive


3. Cultural Policy Should Support Actual Canadian Artists

Members of that coalition include such disparate musicians as Chantal Kreviazuk, Sam Roberts, Avril Lavigne, and Sarah McLachlan. While this coalition’s meant as a movement for Canadian artists, its message goes much further than Canadian exceptionalism.
Material available on the site and press coverage of the movement is surprisingly insightful and clear. While they may oversimplify some issues, their voice is loud and clear.

So, is podcasting a way to globalise orality? <—33d3f4b6c2a265833b5c1e4241a251bc—><—1eee2c2127a635ad6486c5b520775b8c—>

From “The World’s First Fair Trade Music Company,” some potentially very interesting music.
Also linked to a blog and, supposedly, giving back to artists.<—9e25b5adb2830584f761a230750f00ff—>

exploiting the niches, and offering consumers more freedom