New Market Research: Music Streaming Services Halve Illegal Downloads

For a long time, the copyright industries have taken the position that they won't launch new digital music services until piracy is "solved" – or at least punished. The inevitable consequence of that position is obvious to everyone outside the copyright industries – people turn to other, unauthorized sources to satisfy their musical needs. Fortunately, a few startups have launched pioneering digital music offerings and some, like Spotify, look like they might succeed. 

On Techdirt.

Spot(ify) the Trend

One of the reasons that digital music will be free - whether the recording companies want it or not - is basic economics: the marginal cost is practically zero, which means that the price will tend to that point, too. And now we have this:

Spotify is slashing the cost of its advert-free music streaming in the UK and Europe, in a bid to win more paying customers besides just mobile users. It comes in two new tariffs Spotify’s introducing…

—Spotify Unlimited: £4.99pm/ for no-ads music, but no mobile access, no offline or MP3 play and no higher-bitrate quality.

—Spotify Open: Free, with ads, no invite required, but no mobile, no offline or MP3 play, no higher-quality and limited to 20 hours a month.

What's interesting here is that Spotify has already been accused of not paying artists much for each play: this new pricing scheme is likely to mean their fees won't be going up anytime soon. The sooner artists use free digital music to enable them to make money from analogue scarcity, the better.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Putting Spotify on the Spot

There has been some criticism that Spotify doesn't really bring in much money for the artists concerned (the labels, of course, do fine). But here's an interesting point that's worth bearing in mind more generally:

Moving on, the data claims that to make minimum wage, an artist would need 4.6M plays on a streaming service like Spotify. While that might be technically true, it's a pretty meaningless calculation. It does not take into account the promotional value of streaming -- and unlike selling 143 CDs, getting 4.6M plays of a digital track would certainly lead to significant revenue elsewhere. Surely an artist would be able to translate that much attention into successful live shows or their own CwF+RtB offering. After all, we've seen time and time again that focusing on something as narrow as money earned per track sold (or streamed play) is a limited way to view a musician's earning potential.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Copyright Infringement: A Modest Proposal

The UK government's Canute-like efforts to stem the tide of online copyright infringement have plumbed new depths, it seems:

Proposals to suspend the internet connections of those who repeatedly share music and films online will leave consumers with a bill for £500 million, ministers have admitted.

The Digital Economy Bill would force internet service providers (ISPs) to send warning letters to anyone caught swapping copyright material illegally, and to suspend or slow the connections of those who refused to stop. ISPs say that such interference with their customers’ connections would add £25 a year to a broadband subscription.

As Mike Masnick points out:

Note, of course, that the music industry itself claims that £200 million worth of music is downloaded in the UK per year (and, of course, that's only "losses" if you use the ridiculous and obviously incorrect calculation that each download is a "lost sale").

So this absurd approach will actually cost far more than it will save, even accepting the grossly-inflated and self-serving figures from the music industry.

Against that background, I have a suggestion.

Given that the UK government seems happy for huge sums of money to be spent on this fool's errand, why not spend it more effectively, in a way that sustains businesses, rather than penalising them, and which actually encourages people not to download copyrighted material from unauthorised sources?

This can be done quite simply: by giving everyone who wants it a free Spotify Premium subscription. These normally cost £120 per year, but buying a national licence for the 10 million families or so who are online would presumably garner a generous discount - say, of 50% - bringing the total price of the scheme to around £600 million, pretty much the expected cost of the current plans.

As I can attest, once you get the Spotify Premium habit, you really don't want to bother with downloading files and managing them: having everything there, in the cloud, nicely organised, is just *so* convenient (well, provided you don't lose your connection). I'm sure that my scheme would lead to falls in the levels of file sharing that the government is looking for; and anyway, it could hardly be worse than the proposals in the Digital Economy bill.

Update: On Twitter, Barbara Cookson suggested a clever tweak to this idea: "absolution for ISPs who include #spotify as part of package". Nice.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

BBC: No Comment is Good Comment

Graham Steel has asked me what I think about this:

BBC shows including EastEnders, Heroes and Never Mind The Buzzcocks will be available to watch live online from next week, the BBC has announced.

BBC One and BBC Two will be streamed live - just as BBC Three, BBC Four, CBBC, CBeebies and BBC News are already broadcast on their channel websites.

And the answer is: nothing. I have zero to say on the subject.

And that's good, because it means that despite my deep concerns about the BBC in general, there doesn't seem to be a problem with live streaming (assuming it works on GNU/Linux like the stuff currently available.) Since there are no DRM issues here, there aren't any issues about the BBC not fully supporting free software.

Of course, they are still one or two *other* problemettes with the scheme, but at least they are platform-agnostic problemettes....

The (I)Meem They've Been Waiting for

The music industry has finally found an online music model it can live with:

Imeem, a social networking site that was in the recording industry's crosshairs earlier this year for allowing file-sharing on its network, has pulled off an impressive feat. This summer it settled its lawsuit with Warner Music by promising to give Warner a cut of advertising revenues from the site. Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that it's signed similar deals with all four major labels, meaning that Imeem is now the first website whose users have the music industry's blessing to share music for free.

But wait, even though it's a streaming site, it's not actually much different from all the download sites the music industry professes to hate:

it's quite easy to download music files from Imeem using third-party tools. And because Imeem's site doesn't use DRM, Imeem downloading tools are probably legal under the DMCA. So what we have here is the de facto legalization of Napster-like sites, as long as the record labels get a cut of the advertising revenue. It's an exciting development, albeit one that should have happened seven years ago.

Platform-Independent Petitioners

One of the great things about the Internet is that it lets people take the initiative in all sorts of ways. Take, for example, the current brouhaha over the live streaming service of the Council of the European Union - or rather, the lack of it for certain users:

On which platforms can I view the live streaming media service of the Council of the European Union?

The live streaming media service of the Council of the European Union can be viewed on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh platforms. We cannot support Linux in a legal way. So the answer is: No support for Linux.

The question is, what can be done? The answer - maybe not a lot, but petitions have a long and honourable history in the democratic tradition; such things certainly won't hurt, and at the very least provide a practical demonstration that some people care. If you're an EU taxpayer, I urge you to add your voice - all you need to give is a name and an email, and the latter is not displayed.

And remember: the Internet is platform independent, so there's no excuse not to....