The Mandelbear's Musings

Wired is running a couple of stories involving well-known musician David Byrne. The first is an interview with Thom Yorke from Radiohead, where he confirms what a huge success the "name your own price" offering was, contrary to CNN's editors calling it dumb. According to Yorke: "In terms of digital income, we've made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever." Yorke also confirms other things that we've said about new business models, where touring can be a big part of the model (contrary to people who insist that's impossible). Yorke notes: "at the moment we make money principally from touring."

Rubin [the new head of Columbia Records] has a bigger idea. To combat the devastating impact of file sharing, he, like others in the music business (Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine at Universal, for instance), says that the future of the industry is a subscription model, much like paid cable on a television set. "You would subscribe to music," Rubin explained, as he settled on the velvet couch in his library. "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere. The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home. You'll say, 'Today I want to listen to ... Simon and Garfunkel,' and there they are. The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now."

From Napster to the iPod, the music business has been wrong about how much it can dictate to its audience. "Steve Jobs understood Napster better than the record business did," David Geffen told me. "IPods made it easy for people to share music, and Apple took a big percentage of the business that once belonged to the record companies. The subscription model is the only way to save the music business. If music is easily available at a price of five or six dollars a month, then nobody will steal it."

For this model to be effective, all the record companies will have to agree. "It's like getting the heads of the five families together," said Mark DiDia, referencing "The Godfather." "It will be very difficult, but what else are we going to do?"

Rubin sees no other solution. "Either all the record companies will get together or the industry will fall apart and someone like Microsoft will come in and buy one of the companies at wholesale and do what needs to be done," he said. "The future technology companies will either wait for the record companies to smarten up, or they'll let them sink until they can buy them for 10 cents on the dollar and own the whole thing."

Interview Few people know the music industry better than Peter Jenner. Pink Floyd's first manager, who subsequently managed Syd Barrett's solo career, Jenner has also looked after T.Rex, The Clash, Ian Dury, Disposable Heroes and Billy Bragg - who he manages today. He's also secretary general of the International Music Managers Forum.

And he doesn't pull his punches.

The major four music labels today are "fucked", he says. Digital music pricing has been a scam where the consumer pays for manufacturing, distribution, and does all the work - and still has to pay more. Labels should outsource everything except finance and licensing.

Weird Al Yankovic Says Digital Is a Raw Deal For Some Artists - The Digital Music Weblog

King of comic rock, Weird Al Yankovic says digital is a raw deal for artists like himself. When asked by a fan whether purchasing a conventional CD or buying a digital file via iTunes would net Yankovic more pocket money the artist answered on his website.

"I am extremely grateful for your support, no matter which format you choose to legally obtain my music in, so you should do whatever makes the most sense for you personally. But since you ASKED... I actually do get significantly more money from CD sales, as opposed to downloads. This is the one thing about my renegotiated record contract that never made much sense to me. It costs the label NOTHING for somebody to download an album (no manufacturing costs, shipping, or really any overhead of any kind) and yet the artist (me) winds up making less from it. Go figure."

The article goes on to explain that Apple pays, not Weird Al, but his publisher; they in turn pass a pittance on to Al -- significantly less than the mechanical license fee that he gets for a CD, which isn't much to begin with. Some of the comments (after you filter out the flames) go into even more detail.

It's worth noting that the economics change considerably if you're not going through a record label. In that case, you own not only the copyright on the songs, but the copyright on the performance, which is where the label is taking its huge cut. <

The Truth: Recording Music is Basically Free (posted a few days ago by Shane Workman of Syrius Jones) goes perhaps a little too far towards doing it all yourself, but all their music is under a Creative Commons license and they don't seem to be losing money.

Overall, technology has changed the economics of the music industry. Music is now cheap to record and free to acquire. Ignoring this point is just insane. If the music is good, people will come to the shows and we’ll make enough money to keep doing this.

Sony's DRM-enforcing rootkit apparently includes the LAME MP3 library, which is published under the LGPL. (A blog article can be found here) So not only do their CDs illegally trespass on your PC, but they violate LAME's copyright at the same time (by failing to make the source available)!

F-Secure's description and blog posting. Note that, according to this posting, this is an independent confirmation of Mark Russinovich's analysis that I posted about yesterday and the day before.

(From autographedcat.)

Slashdot and BoingBoing both point to this article dissecting the rootkit that Sony installs in the name of DRM on their recent audio CDs. It hides registry entries and processes, and hooks into drivers and system calls, and creates a hidden directory. It's a rootkit -- one of the nastiest forms of malware out there.

It'll be a cold day in Hell the next time I buy a Sony product. Too bad for them; I was thinking of getting another pair of headphones. Anybody know of something roughly equivalent to the Sony MDR 7509's?