I’ve been following Bandcamp for a little while now (see earlier post) and I noticed today that the company made some revisions to its home page. Most notably, Bandcamp created a “features” page which lists the entire suite of tools and services. I was also delighted to learn that Bandcamp now provides Creative Commons licensing designations:
Under the Creative Commons licensing designations, artists who make their music public, in this case via Bandcamp, are providing limited rights to other artists and music fans who wish to remix, share, or use the music in a variety of ways without having to formally ask permission.
Music search engine, SeeqPod, that has already indexed (but not stored) 12 million songs, has been handed a formal complaint from EMI following a lawsuit from Warner last year. Unlike Pandora and Imeem, the company has not pursued licenses to provide “playable search results” maintaining that they are not responsible for content sources and, therefore, free from any obligation to the copyright holder. Legally questionable, Seeqpod has become very successful and the two major labels are probably going after it to settle on a mutual business model rather than to shut it down. The news prompted me to play with the system a little and I enjoyed learning about their artist-centric advertising progamme that’s highly targeted and cost competitive. Providing 5000 “exposures” (i.e. impressions) a month for $19.95, SeeqPod Echo is a nicely put together search-oriented advertising interface which may very well generate some relevant traffic for artists and music promoters who wish to tap into SeeqPod’s massive music listening community. I’m curious to learn how the conversion rates stack up.
Stephen Budd, a council member of the Music Manager’s Forum and founder of Stephen Budd Management, the producer management agency which looks after one of We Are Listening’s esteemed panelists, producer KK (Bjork, Dido, Nelly Furtado), commented on the devaluation of professional music producers at a summit of music producer managers in London this week.
Budd, and his peers, are calling for change in producer agreements due to unreasonable expectations and progressive devaluation of producers’ work, often subject to “on spec” agreements where the financial risk rests on the producers’ shoulders and their agents, no less.
The summit represented a concerted industry effort to brainstorm new business models to ensure the futures of professional producers through a restructuring of royalty shares in a number of areas where producers are professionally and creatively involved.
Google’s VP of Content Partnership, David Eun, said that YouTube “is not screwing the labels, and, if anything, needs to partner more closely with them”, in response to Warner Music Group’s demand that YouTube remove every video from WMG’s catalogue.
Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in an all-stock transaction. It has since been working closely with record labels and independent rights owners on a number of mechanical royalty models for balanced and mutual content monetization, at which point, it struck a ‘blanket license’ deal with Warner. However, Warner has not been able to re-negoatiate terms with Google who, resultantly, had to remove videos under WMG’s authorship or which contain copyright associated with WMG’s publishing. As this amounts to a great many clips which are now ‘unplayable’, YouTube, the world’s largest video portal, can no longer claim to provide “infinite choice”, at least under the music category which will no longer include Madonna, REM and Eric Clapton, to name a few. Quite a blow.
The feud has snowballed and YouTube users are documenting their frustration on the video portal. Here’s one version I enjoyed watching:
Pandora’s founder, Tim Westergren, appealed for public support this week in response to the US Copyright Royalty Board’s decision for a whopping 140% escalation in internet radio royalty fees over the next four years, denouncing the decision in a letter that has rapidly snow balled on the web.
“The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy..”, Westergren starts. “The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays, and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every internet radio site, including Pandora.”
Such news brings back a bitter taste from the days of ubiquitous filesharing and the mixed signals aired by a struggling record industry. Ironically, this sharp increase in rent may drive the small timers to operate illegally and the leaders, such as Pandora, to charge for something most of us won’t pay for anyway after having it so good for so long. Who wants another dose of the majors going after pirate radio? Boring.
I don’t believe the Copyright Royalty Board is asking whether [most] artists are being compensated fairly for their work nor do I believe that this decision addresses a gray area in tracking and reporting streaming media. I do believe, however, that the musician community at large would opt for coverage before higher royalty rates and the leverage college radio receives (as opposed to Top 40) should be considered for individuals and parties with certain services online. After all, if we don’t protect the little people – those who start a blog, host a podcast and generate content – we will be ‘surfing’ the dial from one Clear Channel to another.
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