SONG CONTEST BLOG

Music discovery and playlist service, Grooveshark, was selected as one of ten winners in CNET’s 2009 Webware 100 in the “Audio & Music” category, sharing the spotlight with the formidable usual suspects including iTunes, AmazonMP3, and Pandora.  This is indeed a privilege for the Floridian upstart which triumphed over CD Baby, iLike, Sellaband, Jango, and other well publicized and funded music dotcoms.  Nearly 630,000 votes were cast this year.

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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.”

Read the entire entry here.

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Radiohead Against the RIAA
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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.

Related Post: Copyright Laws and Issues on the Colbert Report

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.

Related Post: SeeqPod Shuts Down

Spotify, the streaming music service, announced last Thursday that Paul Brown will take on the role as the company’s UK Managing Director on April 20th.  It appears as if Brown was headhunted from Pandora where he served as Managing Director International.  Formerly at Sony Music UK where he contributed to the company’s digital music expansion and currently a Non-Executive Director at artist funding site, Slicethepie, Brown is the ideal candidate to spearhead Spotify’s operations in the UK where the uptake to the service has been “phenomenal”, Spotify noted on their blog.

P2P streaming music service, Grooveshark, has launched an artist promotion initiative – much like the track placement scheme Jango conceived of – as a means for artists and music promoters to purchase plays on its platform, a direct advertising approach that makes sense.  The Gainesville, Florida, company of approximately 40 young entrepreneurs has created a music service that rivals that of Last.fm and Pandora, the two major players in legal music discovery and ‘free’ music streaming.

Grooveshark claims to have deployed a legal music discovery and consumption model, providing its users with a financial incentive to share music, compensating artist/labels for their respective share of ‘broadcasts’, and maximizing illegal file sharing by financing its original sources.  Whether this service is actually legal or not is questionable and it appears that the company has created an expensive model to sustain on ad revenues alone.  However, they’re coming through on some very interesting marketing features for small budget music marketing campaigns.  At its core, Grooveshark Artists offers pay-for-play audio realestate matched to its existing track recommendations and provides analytics tools for track placement optimization. 

In addition, it has partnered up with some of the most talked about music tech startups for music retail, licensing, funding, and more, including Bandcamp, Sellaband and TheNextBigSound, all under the Grooveshark banner which already includes a number of subsidiary services including Tinysong, a track link generating tool for viral distribution, and  Twisten.fm, a Twitter crawler that finds music-related tweets and links them to playable tracks.  All of this put together amounts to a powerful enterprise of do-it-yourself marketing and a 360 indie approach akin to ReverbNation.

SpiralFrog, the highly profiled ad-supported download service, has shut its doors after a lukewarm reception in the UK and endless content licensing and upper management strife in the US prior.  The company was the first to deploy a ‘feels-like-free’ music download service in 2006 and secured both Universal and EMI, with competitors Qtrax and We7 following suit with similar ad-supported download services, before spiraling to its demise.

Digital music distribution is a hot item on this blog and those who read it know that I keep a close eye on the three major players catering to small independents, namely ReverbNation, TuneCore, and CD Baby.  All three have lowered the barrier of entry for indie artists and small labels to distribute their catalogues to iTunes and other major online retailers for upfront fees as opposed to hefty commissions by the likes of The Orchard, INgrooves, IODA, IRIS, and others, who generally avoid small players anyway.  Now, a new digital music distribution dotcom has emerged but with an ad-supported business model.  WaTunes aims to thrive on ad revenue by providing artists and labels with a free (no frontend fees, no backend commissions) distribution channel to online retailers such as iTunes, Napster, and eMusic.

The slightly questionable website service description and makeshift appearance promises to provide the same level of content marketing and distribution as its rivals, and much more.  In theory, WaTunes is offering a very attractive service to a huge potential market, but is it sustainable?  SpiralFrog, We7 and Qtrax have yet to prove that their ad-supported download services have legs.  In this economy, I’m not sure that any upstart can scale on advertising revenue alone.

Business models aside, I’m somewhat concerned about WaTunes’ cryptic service description and the fact that their web pages are riddled with spelling mistakes and poor marketing copy.  It’s a bit like walking into a fancy restaurant only to notice that the toilets are overflowing with shit halfway through your dinner.  Going with my gut here (no pun intended), I feel that the musician-led platform may be biting off more than they can chew… but I would love to be proven otherwise.  I like free.  Who doesn’t?

Ad-supported music service, Qtrax, hopes to differentiate itself by offering downloads previously only available as bootlegs.  This move may position the company atop of 25 million tracks under this category alone, assuming that that copyright clearance hurdles can be overcome.  In the mean time, Peter Gabriel’s competing ad-supported music service, We7, has announced a partnership with NME.com.  The strategy is geared toward increasing the value of advertising real estate by diverting traffic to the popular British indie music zine which is likely to improve the combined user time spent online and, resultantly, drive more ad revenue.  The two music services have been in the works for some time now and have faced great difficulty in both securing all the major catalogues and financing their operations through advertising alone, a model that will meet further challenges during the present economic downturn when advertisers are being particularly frugal.