Category Archives: Thinking

Why We Are Debating Free

The answer’s easy: it does­n’t work for music. Unless you were liv­ing under a rock on Fri­day, you prob­a­bly read Techcrunch’s post, “The Sor­ry State of Music Star­tups.” With­out going into great detail, Arring­ton’s com­plete­ly right, and for once, he does­n’t resort to the whole “music just wants to be free” argu­ment so com­mon among Web 2.0 types. Instead, he writes that “free stream­ing music” is about as sen­si­ble as try­ing to douse a burn­ing pile of mon­ey with a gal­lon of gasoline.

With all due respect to Bruce Houghton at Hype­bot and Andrew Dub­ber at New Music Strate­gies, the dream is over. It’s time to wake up and smell the cof­fee.Con­tin­ue read­ing “Why We Are Debat­ing Free”

Music 2.0’s Blue Sky Mines Collapsing

Blender’s print edi­tion is fin­ished. You prob­a­bly already know this if you spent any time on the Inter­net yes­ter­day, but it’s just anoth­er instance where a music mag com­plete­ly changes its appear­ance to remain “rel­e­vant” (what­ev­er that means now) and ends up clos­ing shop any­way. As Matos wrote on his blog, “It’s hot, it’s sexy, it’s dead,” which sounds like the sort of thing one might say about the pre­ma­ture death of a rock star.

Part of my music cru­sade has been to say how impact­ful events like this are for the music indus­try. There’s a great com­ment in the Idol­a­tor post on Blender’s clos­ing from the friend of an anony­mous flack who does­n’t know which out­lets will be left to pitch by year’s end. It’s that bad. That out­look, cou­pled with the indus­try’s retreat from pro­mo­tion in the name of rev­enue, viz. videos holed up on Youtube with no embed­ding priv­i­leges and the like, music will soon be hard­er to find than bin Laden!

Heck, even the thing peo­ple seem to enjoy most about music online is chang­ing. Last.fm announced this week that they’ll be chang­ing their stream­ing poli­cies in many parts of the world, set­ting off a tidal wave of out­rage. Pow­er­ful music search engine See­q­pod will begin charg­ing devel­op­ers for its data, too. Omi­nous nois­es are com­ing out of the Imeem camp, too, no mat­ter what they’re telling Michael Arring­ton at Techcrunch.

Those of us who fore­saw the end of Music 2.0 can only shake our heads. Chris Ander­son­’s “freemi­um” dream is over. The blue sky mines are col­laps­ing around our ears.

What’s ahead? No one knows. I’m talk­ing to my friend Jason Her­skowitz almost dai­ly about the future of music on the web, espe­cial­ly around music dis­cov­ery. He’s been work­ing on some cool stuff late­ly, most recent­ly Play­dar, an idea I urge you to check out. Nev­er­the­less, he fears that Dark­net will soon replace any­thing remote­ly legit­i­mate for con­tent shar­ing online. It’s a fright­en­ing propo­si­tion for rights hold­ers who have any inter­est in pro­tect­ing their prop­er­ties in this brave new world, and equal­ly scary for those of us who care about music as part of our cul­tur­al fabric.

Pandora’s Box

Scott Ten­nent makes an emo­tion­al plea for music fans to ignore leaks over at  Pret­ty Goes with Pret­ty. We’ve all seen vari­a­tions of this argu­ment before. The MPAA even made spots that echoed this sen­ti­ment. It’s heart­felt, but hope­less. Count­less clich­es could be used to describe what’s hap­pened, but I’ll use this one: you can’t get the tooth­paste back into the tube.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Pandora’s Box”

They’re Just Not That into You

I know insid­ers claim that peo­ple are lis­ten­ing to music now more than ever before, but what if peo­ple are just not as inter­est­ed in new music as they used to be? Has per­ceived demand for new prod­uct out­stripped con­sumer interest?

The answer is easy. Search your heart. Every­thing will be eas­i­er if you can just admit what you know to be true.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “They’re Just Not That into You”

Tragic Tuesdays

Tobias Car­roll and I have been hav­ing a spir­it­ed back and forth over at his blog, the Scowl, where we’ve been dis­cussing how best to incor­po­rate leaks into the edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar. I argue that leaks are an indus­try norm that need to be treat­ed as such, rather than an aber­ran­t behav­ior bet­ter ignored.

He writes:

And giv­en that release dates still have an effect — their rela­tion­ship to tour­ing comes to mind — I don’t know that there’s an easy way to make this work. Also wor­ri­some is the fact that it essen­tial­ly hands over con­trol of the process to par­tic­i­pants in what could at best be called an eth­i­cal­ly grey activ­i­ty, which, while arguably prag­mat­ic, doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly seem like some­thing to be encouraged.

As far as I’m con­cerned, so-called pirates have hijacked the dis­course sur­round­ing the music indus­try for over ten years. This “eth­i­cal­ly grey activ­i­ty” threat­ens to sun­der an indus­try that failed to accept tech­nol­o­gy into its busi­ness mod­el, and a con­sumer base that does­n’t seem to care one way or the oth­er what hap­pens to it.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Trag­ic Tuesdays”