Note sui Bit

Video di Creative Commons su Youtube.

In occasione del Wizards of Os 4, conferenza annuale su tutto ciò che riguarda il mondo open source ed open content, è stato organizzato un panel di discussione sul fenomeno delle netlabels.

Ecco il video.

video.

Speakers:
Moritz Sauer (phlow)
Sebastian Redenz (Thinner)
John Buckman (Magnatune)

via Starfrosch

Esperti e protagonisti del settore discografico parlano delle possibilità del digitale e dei pericoli che corre (forse) la distribuzione di musica su supporti fisici.

La discussione, che ha avuto luogo in occasione del Mutek 2006, a Montreal, è disponibile qui (mp3 in inglese).
Questi i partecipanti:

RECORDS… DEAD?
David Day (Label Manager + Marketing Director, Forced Exposure, USA)
Joerg Heidemann (Owner & General Manager, MDM Distribution, DE)
Tom Hoch (Label Director for the Americas + S.N.G, Beatport.com, USA)
Jean-Patrice Rémillard (Pheek) (Artist, Archipel Label Director, CA)
Marisol Segal (Marketing Business Manager, IODA, USA)
Philip Sherburne (Pitchfork/Earplug/XLR8R, USA/SP) – moderator

Blitz della Siae alla festa multati i bimbi di Cernobyl – Local | L’espresso

La Siae ha fatto una multa di 205 euro a 14 bambini di Chernobyl per violazione del diritto d´autore. I piccoli, di età compresa tra i 7 e 12 anni, avevano preparato un piccolo spettacolo per dire grazie alle famiglie da cui erano stati ospitati. Con una canzone in bielorusso. Le piccole casse di un computer portatile diffondevano una canzone popolare. E loro, sulla base musicale, avevano iniziato a cantare le prime strofe per salutare le persone che si erano prese cura di loro per quasi un mese.Una sessantina di persone in tutto quelli presenti alla festicciola improvvisata. Del tipo: ognuno porta una cosa. Poi i bambini, che da giorni si organizzavano con le due accompagnatrici, hanno indossato abiti buffi fatti di carta igienica e piatti di plastica e dalle casse del portatile era partita la musica.

Per il titolare dell´ufficio Siae di Martina Franca i bambini bielorussi avevano violato l´articolo 17 della legge numero 633 del 1941. Il reato che gli è stato contestato è quello di esecuzioni di opera di ingegno senza preventiva autorizzazione dell´autore. Bielorusso.

da Online Developments

Drawing from an early-adopter survey conducted through Gartner, report co-authors Derek Slater, a Harvard senior and Berkman student fellow, and Mike McGuire, a Gartner Research Director, find that consumer-to-consumer recommendation tools, like playlists, enable consumers to actively present their individual tastes to each other and are becoming increasingly common. According to survey results, nearly 20 percent of online music listeners reported listening to music via playlists at least five days a week and more than 25 percent of online music listeners listened to music via playlists 1-4 days a week.

Early-adopters’ current use of recommendation tools drives Slater and McGuire to predict that by 2010 twenty-five percent of online music store transactions will be driven directly from consumer-to-consumer taste-sharing applications, such as playlist publishing and ranking tools either built into online music stores or external sites.

Liberamente scaricabile qui.

Chiunque sarà in grado di vendere mp3 su MySpace.

L’azienda Snocap, fondata da Shawn Fanning (il creatore di Napster), curerà la realizzazione del servizio.

Gli artisti e le band potranno scegliere il prezzo a cui vendere mp3 non protetti da DRM. Inoltre anche i fan (ovverro chiunque abbia una pagina personale su MySpace) potranno partecipare alla vendita dei files dei loro artisti preferiti, riuscendo così a monetizzare quella capacità di interazione many-to-many propria dei network digitali.
Snocap manterrà un registro digitale di tutte le canzoni in vendita e sarà capace di identificarle grazie ad una tecnologia di fingerprinting. L’utilizzo di tale registro non è limitato alle operazioni effettuate su MySpace, ma sarà reso disponibile anche a servizi peer-to-peer o altri servizi offerti da terzi.
I pagamenti saranno effettuati tramite Paypal.

Snocap diventa a tutti gli effetti un’alternativa alle tradizionali società di raccolta dei diritti d’autore, forse l’unica soluzione veramente efficiente per quanto riguarda la distribuzione in formato digitale.

In questo articolo su Wired si fa riferimento ai nuovi modelli di promozione e vendita della musica utilizzati da Nettwerk, azienda che si occupa del management di artisti di grande successo come Avril Lavigne, Stereophonics, The Cardigans, Dido e molti altri.

Chiaramente controcorrente la loro policy di non perseguire chi condivide files degli artisti che stampano sulle loro etichette:

Litigation is destructive, it must stop …. as per Nettwerk copyrights, we have never sued anybody and all our music is open source to encourage fans to share it with others and help us promote our Artists. As per those Artists we manage on other labels (Majors), we take issue with those labels claiming that litigating our fans is in our interest, as it clearly is not.

“Let’s give away the ProTools files on MySpace. Vocals, guitars, drums, and bass. We’ll let the fans make their own mixes.” The room falls quiet. Musicians usually record their instruments and vocals on separate tracks; the producer and mixer combine those tracks into a finished product. McBride wants to make the individual files available so that amateur DJs can use them like Lego bricks to create something all their own. The record industry likes control. McBride is proposing unfettered chaos.

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“The labels were never in the business of selling music,” says David Kusek, vice president of Boston’s Berklee College of Music and coauthor of The Future of Music. “They were in the business of selling plastic discs.”

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Musicians generally make very little from the sale of their records. The costs of production, marketing, and promotion are charged against sales, and even if they go multiplatinum and cover those costs, their cut of any extra revenue is usually less than 10 percent. On top of this, the labels typically retain the copyrights to the recordings, which allows them to profit from the musicians’ catalogs indefinitely.

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“The future of the business isn’t selling records,” McBride says. “It’s in selling music, in every form imaginable.” And by establishing a series of so-called artist-run labels, McBride is creating the next-gen music company. “We become the management company, the publishing company, and the record company rolled into one,” McBride says. “We take our 20 percent cut of the whole pie. “More important, he says, the new model frees him and his artists from the overgrown bureaucracy of the music industry, and that means more money for everyone. He can book tours, sell ringtones, peddle songs to advertising agencies and, yes, give away free downloads without any of the complex, multiparty negotiations that once gummed up the works. “It used to take months to sell a frickin’ ringtone to Bell Canada,” McBride says. “With BNL, one phone call gets the job done.”

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McBride’s success will depend on what he calls “collapsed copyright.” Nettwerk will represent artists like BNL, but the bands will record under their own labels and retain ownership of all their intellectual property, an anomaly in the industry. The bands, in turn, can expect to earn considerably more money – say, $5 to $6 from the sale of each CD instead of the standard dollar or two.

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Nettwerk is also poised to take advantage of the significant changes in music marketing wrought by social networking sites like MySpace. Radio, and the labels that provide tunes for radio playlists, are no longer the gatekeepers to stardom. Some of the most promising new bands, like Arctic Monkeys and Arcade Fire, owe their success to online word of mouth and grassroots marketing. Nettwerk has tapped this phenomenon to the fullest, offering prizes to people who sell a certain number of CDs to friends and using software to keep close tabs on its extensive network of volunteer marketers, formerly known as fans.

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“The old system kept us from imagining what a music product could be,” McBride says. “Now we can really start to have fun.”

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Eventually McBride would like to pioneer another source of revenue with even greater potential: P2P networks. Earlier this year, he sparked a music industry uproar when he announced he would pay the legal defense for a Texas man being sued for piracy by the Recording Industry Association of America. “The lawsuits are hurting my bands,” he says. “If you could monetize the peer-to-peer networks, everyone would make more money.”

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In May, President Bush signed into law a revision of the tax code that will make it easier to sell intellectual property as a stock, with profits being taxed at the same lower rate as other capital gains. “Once we have access to all the intellectual property, we’re going to offer shares in individual artists and take in equity investments,” McBride says. “Eventually, a major band could be its own public company.” The key, he adds, sounding like an overzealous investment banker, is that the value of a band would be measured like a stock and would receive capitalization in expectation of future earnings. “At that point, even a band selling 100,000 units a year becomes profitable,” McBride says.

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In 2005, Ingenious Media launched Ingenious Music, which operates more like a VC firm than a label, running several equity funds that invest in bands, managers, and small labels. “We’re not interested in making a record company; we’re making a music company,” says Duncan Reid, the firm’s commercial director. Like Nettwerk, Ingenious wants a slice of every pie, not just the increasingly small morsels from CD sales.

via Mark Mulligan

Apple have announced that they passed 200 million downloads in European iTunes Music Stores. This is a pretty impressive number and actually just 3 million below the 203 million that Jupiter had internally forecasted they would reach by August. However, despite its impressive scale the 200 million indicates that Apple have actually been selling at a relatively flat rate of a little over 11 million a month since December 2005, when they had hit 110 million. And, more pertinently, the rate of growth is lower than the over 13 million monthly downloads they had between September and December 2005. There is of course a lot of seasonality involved there, so not too much should be read into the decline. However the key take away here is that despite Apple being the dominant European digital music store, growth is solid rather than astronomic. Which partially justifies Jupiter’s conservative stance on the prospects of digital music: we don’t think that the CD is about to disappear under a wave of downloading. Also, on a global basis, the ratio between the installed base of iPods and total iTunes tracks downloaded is now a fifth lower than at the start of 2005. Which illustrates the hierarchy of importance between the iPod and the digital music market.

Non è certo una novità il fatto che in media gli ipod contengano solo poche tracce acquistate dall’ iTunes Music Store.