TwitDoc may be an excellent, lightweight addition to your music marketing arsenal on Twitter… in the future. The upload process is as simple as can be as is the recipient’s experience: click and download. It’s a one-to-many file distribution solution which is perfect for a free music release or teaser, and perhaps a means to gratify potential fans for following you? It’s like a stripped down SoundCloud for Twitter… potentially. For now, it’s limited to document files (PDF, DOC, XLS) and image files (JPG, GIF, PNG), as the name suggests but I imagine that MP3s will soon be added to TwitDoc’s competence.
The marketing potential of Twitter and the feels-like-free music paradigm converge in a collaborative effort by Blink-182’s drummer, Travis Barker, and turntablist, DJ-AM, Techcrunch’s Robin Wauters posted yesterday. “Fix Your Face Vol. 2 – Coachella ‘09? is available for free download in exchange for a Twitter message. Ah, but wait! The transaction involves granting access to a third-party application via this website, allowing the app administrators to access and update your data on Twitter. Okay, okay, this is still a good deal and an honest attempt at making music available without charging for it, although it’s more of a ‘barter’ than a ‘giveaway’ in my mind. The almost daily emergence of new and creative methods to distribute music is testament to how difficult it has become to get music out there, let alone charge for it. God forbid.
In a thought-provoking post on the MidemNet Blog, Peter Jenner, President of the UK’s International Music Managers Forum (IMMF), explores the personification of music piracy, underscoring key distinctions between ‘piracy’ and ‘theft’ that have largely been ignored or rejected by the music industry and, perhaps, even concealed to a pragmatic and moral music sharing public.
“If you steal my money I don’t have that money anymore. If you copy my music I still have it, and so does everyone else who has it. No one loses anything, the supply of copies just increases.”
ReverbNation, now home to almost 400,000 artists, agents, venue promoters, and indie labels, announced on Thursday that the company will select up to 1000 of its artists to participate in a “Sponsored Songs” program. Under the terms of this initiative, participating artists will earn a sponsorship fee of $0.50 per “qualified” download acquired by their fans. Each song will display the sponsor’s branded message as part of the digital cover artwork, visible each time the track is played on a music device. As the sponsored songs spread virally, from fan to fan and to new prospects, the sponsor will be able to track every unique impression and gauge the ultimate value of his campaign.
“Sponsored Songs is one of several new programs that offer musicians a new revenue stream, capitalizing on the strength of their fan relationships and offering advertisers a better way to reach potential consumers” ? Michael Doernberg, CEO of ReverbNation
Adding insult to injury, the founders of The Pirate Bay have been promoting a scheme in protest of the recent ruling against their questionable P2P music service and to spite the law firm representing the plaintiff. Distributed Denial of Dollars (or DDo$) is a method of attacking the victim with many micro-payments which, in turn, causes disproportional transaction fees and an overload in administration for the recipient. This gets very interesting… and equally absurd from here.
Whatever your position on file-sharing may be, it will most certainly be skewed when you learn that a mega-band such as Radiohead, who famously distributed their last record with a pay-what-you-like model, are taking the stand against the RIAA.
In the case of file-sharer Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University student, versus the RIAA, Radiohead will testify against the RIAA as part of a protest against unnecessary preying on filesharers, according to Tenenbaum’s legal team which consists of Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson and student members of his class.
Radiohead has publically spoken out against the major labels’ agenda to profit from questionable sharing of music in the legal arena, and specifically the lobby groups that represent them such as the RIAA and IFPI. In fact, Radiohead is one of several A-list artists that have embraced file-sharing culture in one way or another to propel their independent marketing of their music and, to a certain extent, have proven that the very labels that made them what they are today have been rendered obsolete.
All this comes to a head just after the founders of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent search platform, were found guilty in a landmark file-sharing case spearheaded by Swedish anti-piracy lobbyists, preceded by the public crackdown of the popular music streaming service, SeeqPod, which was forced to close.
Linking the decline in music sales to illegal filesharing carries very little water in this day and age as there are so many other contributing factors to the manner in which music is consumed and the availability of media to the public in general. The fact is that, for the major labels, going to court is profitable. In the cases where it’s not, it sets a precedence for future cases that will turn over handsome settlements. The attitude toward file-sharing, and the laws around it no less, will not change until the investment in the judicial system will no longer yield rewards for the copyright holders, the majority of which are represented by only four corporate institutions worldwide.
A Swedish court has sentenced the four founders of The Pirate Bay for one year and ordered them to pay damages to the tune of $4.5m after the most high profile filesharing crackdown since Shawn Fanning’s Napster came to ruling. In spite of the hefty punishment, The Pirate Bay website, a BitTorrent search platform (BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer program used for uploading and downloading files), contains video footage of the founders’ amusement by the verdict, which they intend to appeal.
SoundCloud, an online music collaboration and large music file management platform, has secured a €2.5 million ($3.3 million) funding round led by Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures. Details on TechCrunch.
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