Fixing everything, really slowly

Regular readers will note my interest in how much artists get paid for their music. Essentially I’d like to see total transparency and realistic options for musicians to make it big without signing to a major record label.

This is just an uninformed ideal of mine, so I was really interested to find this article about the prices musicians are paid for online music streaming.

It seems we have a long long way to go:

We7 does indeed pay the 0.085p per stream rate that the PRS set. I ask him why, according to their press release, 1m streams can generate anything from £2,000 to £4,000. Is it because different record labels have different deals with We7?

“Yes, the range is indicative of unsigned artists (but registered with the PRS), small labels through to significant labels,” Purdham said. “Most of the music on We7 is popular music so on average we tend to pay at the higher rate of the scale.” In other words, songs by major-label artists get a higher per-stream rate (this does not apply to songwriters, however).

via Behind the music: We7′s streaming success | Music | guardian.co.uk.

I’ve not used we7, but I am a big user of spotify and last.fm. I thought it would be interesting to work out how much revenue I might have given to some of my favourite artists assuming they’d been paid 0.085p per track and they were all streamed online. Neither of these assumptions are true but these days I’m almost exclusively using spotify so it’s an interesting statistic.

Since October 2006 I’ve been logging most of the music I’ve played through last.fm. I’ve played 36438 tracks since then. You can view what I’ve played here. At 0.085p per track that would be 3097.23p or £30.97. A CD might have 12 tracks so thats roughly 1p per album to the artist each time I play the record.

That seems a pretty small, but really it’s very hard to tell if that is better or worse than the traditional model of CD’s and radio play. A key advantage of internet music technology is it should enable much greater transparency around pricing. But it just isn’t happening. I think less people would buy from iTunes or stream from Spotify if they knew how much the middlemen were making compared to the artists. I guess this is why the pricing discussed openly …

The Dilemma

It’s summer here in the Northern hemisphere, and evenings are perfect for grilling. But as you head out the back door with a plate of veggie burgers and kebabs, is it more sustainable to light up some charcoal, or use a propane tank?

via Sustainability Showdown: Gas vs Charcoal by Steven Skoczen – SixLinks.org.

Great bit of green geekery, I like the level and tone of the analysis:

The CO2 production in beef or pork far outstrips the CO2 you make cooking the food. So if you’re looking to be more sustainable, the most important place to start is with what’s on your grill.

According to multiple music industry sources, Google could launch a music service that offers song downloads and streaming music as early as this fall.

Google has already signaled that it wishes to give users of phones equipped with Google’s Android operating system a better music offering. At Google’s I/O conference last month, the search engine offered attendees a demonstration of a Web-based iTunes competitor.

via Google music store could launch this fall – CNET News.

I really hope they do this in a more open and fair way than Apple, Spotify etc have done.

It would be great to see more transparency around pricing, especially what % goes to the artists vs the labels vs google. It would be a great opportunity to change the model to an open music music service behind an API where applications and not just users could access any track. The artists/labels should be able to charge what they want and the users/applications/aggregators/radio stations should be able to decide whether a given track is worth the price … you know, like an open market ….

Had some fun today!

I’m now writing about technology, but not showing it on the main web page or in my existing feed. If you want to read this new, exciting, extra-geeky content you need to:

• Subscribe to the technical-only feed (an ignore the occasional cross posting).

or

• Subscribe to the everything feed (and unsubscribe from this feed)

The technical content looks like this.

If you are interested in why I’ve done this then read on, otherwise, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy/ignore the new content!

Background

One of the reasons I blogged so intermittently in the past is I was never clear what my audience was. I didn’t want to aliente the few readers I had by suddenly writing about geeky stuff like programming, operating systems, IT security and mobile phones when previously I’d been writing about the environment, sustainability, music and things that make me laugh. I always ended up thinking that people wouldn’t be interested in some topics and, having no where to write them, I would just never bother to post.

Some people have multiple blogs to solve this problem but I feel that sometimes an overlap between the things that interest me and I want to easily cross post to one blog. Maybe I’ll live to regret this change, but as of now I have two categories of posting on this site, Technical and General.

The technical content is intended for technology professionals and geeks. It’s mainly a new audience and I’m looking forward to writing about another area of interest. Technical articles won’t shown on the front page and aren’t included in the existing feed that I’ve had for many years. I hope this works out.

General articles includes everything I’ve previously written. Hopefully this content will appeal to a wider audience of non-geeks and I’ll feel freer to write about more general subjects. My key requirement is to be able to write about environmental stories on the front page and not have them lost in a load of geeky stuff.

Thanks for trying to access the microsite for Sigh No More – Mumford & Sons

Unfortunately due to contractual restrictions, access to this promotion is not available to residents of Finland.

From Push Entertainment (if you are in finland).

Yet another case of legal nonsense stopping fans listening to music. This is particularly stupid since I was trying to access “bonus content” for those that “own a copy of sigh no more”.

Before signing to a major label (Island) Mumford and sons did a good job of promoting themselves using sites like myspace and rawrip. The latter lets them give away tracks to fans or sell them and take 100% of the money. I was hoping they might get big without a major label to help.

I’d downloaded their first two singles and listened to the tracks tons (as well as the tracks on myspace) all for free. When the album came out I bought it straight away. I’ve paid to see the band at least 5 times. I’m a fan that wants to support some musicians trying to earn a living.

Its sad to see large corporations continue to screw it up like this.

Island records: The internet is global and so is your market. Adapt or die.

BTW: Sigh no more is an amazing album!

I’ve read so many of these now it feels like I’m cheating and, but I’ll do it anyway!
Sadly I’ve not done predictions before, so I can’t share with you how wrong I was last year.
Hopefully this will be entertaining in some other, as yet undermined, way.

Google Chrome will overtake Firefox in browser market share

Many of the users that hated IE and switched to Firefox will switch to Chrome. They will then do the same on their parents and grandparents computers. By next Christmas Chrome will overtake Firefox and will start to eat into IE’s market share too.

Reasons for change will be: Stability, transparent updates (no nagging), ease of use (especially for the older generations)

Wave goodbye: relic of the IT industry

Dispite all the wizzy demos, Google Wave solves a problem most people don’t have (or don’t know they have). The effort of switching to Wave outweighs the benefits.

Remeber Microsoft Bob? Wave will die, but unlike Bob we will see it copied elsewhere, and soon. It will be viewed as a grand proof of concept of what social networks can become. Facebook and maybe twitter will borrow some of the better ideas and Google themselves may integrate Wave into some of their existing communities (YouTube? Orkut?).

Tablets and Google Chrome OS will not take off in 2010

Tablets remind me of the … oh yeah Tablet PC. I just don’t see what has changed that makes this a viable platform. People don’t like voice or handwriting recognition, they don’t much like onsreen keyboards either. I’m not sure even Apple’s hype machine will get people excited about this form factor for it to take off.

Phones will continue to stay small and get more powerful. Laptops will get cheaper and more portable. Tablets will be squeezed into an ever decreasing gap.

Chrome OS looks really, really good, but I’m not sure it will become popular this year either. For one the device will be seen as almost useless without internet connection. No Chrome OS will need more time, and it won’t sell many Tablets.

People who read blogs rather than a daily newspaper might like one of these, but they will probably carry on using their laptop and “wait till the get cheaper”.

Google will get further into the music business.

As a music fan I’ve realised google sucks for music. It’s one of the few things I don’t search for much directly (I use last.fm or discogs.com or spotify). Google will address this firstly by rolling out their music search previews internationally leveraging their partners (which rather interestingly includes LaLa whom Apple recently acquired), then maybe by aquiring or developing an iTunes-like desktop media player/library.

I suspect they are as frustrated by the lawyer run music industry as consumers are (don’t you just love it when spotify has the track, but it can’t be played in your country). I suspect they are as frustrated by the music industry as they are with the telco industry and regulators.Till now they have stayed out of music sales and out of mp3′s and devices. Now with Android they have a bit of a gap.

Apple has iTunes, iTunes music store and the iPod/iPhone. Amazon has a direct store and their store is integrated into doubletwist and songbird both of which sync your music to lots of devices. Napster is integrated into Windows Media Player which syncs many devices. Spotify Mobile lets you play music on iPhones and Android mobiles.

Google just has an okish mp3 player on Android phones, and little ecosystem: no desktop player, no means of syncing devices. In one way it’s a nice situation for consumers since there is none of the lock-in of the iTunes/iPod world (which is what happens when you let lawyers design technology), but its not straightforward enough for people to plug in their phones and sync music to them.

Google has in the past bought companies to bridge gaps in their offerings. Picasa filled a similar sized gap when google bought them a few years back, letting you pull photo’s off your device and onto the internet.

If Picassa is Googles answer to iPhoto where is there answer to iTunes?

The iTunes/iTunes Music Store/iPod/iPhone dominance will begin to decline.

Competition and consumer awareness will force Apple to adapt and it will no longer set the pace in this area. More consumers will realise how restrictive iTunes is start using other music library tools.

The iTunes Music Store will be forced to lower prices further and will launch a stand alone website where users can buy music without iTunes. The new iTunes store will offer full track streaming audio like spotify does, but probably only for tracks you have purchased or a monthly subscription – no ads. Users will stop buying iPods by default and instead use a wider range of devices to play music, especially mobile phones. This diversification and openness will benefit everyone and Apple will remain a major player albeit not always leading the industry.

The other iTunes store products like movies and mobile applications will prove less sticky and users will get this content from other providers. Movies and TV shows will begin to be sold direct from the studios, applications will be downloaded directly to phones without centralised control (like Android does).

Android (google’s open source mobile phone operating system) will become the #1 mobile operating system

The sheer number of vendors selling Android devices will drive the platform to a leading position. Several vendors (Motorola?) will go Android-only for their high end phones, saving on development costs by using the free and open source platform. Nokia will continue to do it’s own thing and struggle to compete as a result.

Low cost Android phones will appear as free upgrades to many people on phone contracts. This new audience will get the app bug and a whole new wave of useless fart applications will flood the Android store.

Interesting apps will then start to be released/updated on Android first and then ported to iPhone, Blackberry etc later.

As the Android open source project gains momentum more ‘distributions’ of Android will emerge. Some will come from the vendors who will lump extra crap on top of the stock OS (HTC Sense is an early example of this). This will mirror the situation of buying Windows laptops where vendors “add value” by installing the Yahoo toolbar. The Android technical community will continue to produce lightweight distributions which run faster than the stock OS and these will become well known (like linux distributions are today) in the technical community.

Ultimately consumers will want less crap on their phones, but only the geeks and power users will care enough this year to change their phone’s OS and the rapid acceleration in mobile CPUs will mask the worse effects at the expense of battery life.

Argumented Reality (AR) won’t take off, local search will.

I read much hype about AR, but it won’t be used much. It’s fun to play with for 5 minutes, but it doesn’t really help you find stuff.

Instead I think Google maps (and the decent copies of it) will be what people use. Because it works well and you can see where stuff is. One or more popular mobile searches like “pizza”, “bar” or “toilet” will be in the top ten overall searches of 2010.

Apple will begin to be viewed in the same light as Microsoft (i.e. disliked)

Come on! Bundling everything including a browser and music/movie/TV/application shop with the OS? Isn’t this way worse than what the US and EU sued Microsoft over? Expensive hardware. Lock in. Desktops, laptops and mp3 players that only work with their stuff.

Why do we tolerate this? It looks nice. It works (mostly).

I can’t see this goodwill lasting (and I use a MacBook and an iPod).

A new popular TV series will be distributed solely on-line

The Wire, Lost, The Sopranos, 24 … these are stronger brands than most TV stations and music/media stores. With social networks it is now possible to promote a new show very cheaply and effectively. It will take a brave studio or production company and some genuinely good content and then we can begin to take out the middlemen. This will start to end the nonsense which is geographically staggered releases and 40 minutes of good TV interrupted every 10 mins with loud adverts selling crap I don’t need.

Heck people are already downloading stuff on bittorrent just to see it before its on TV and then they go out and buy the box set. We citizens are good people who would like to give money to creative people who make good content!

Update: I made a mistake in my original post about who bought LaLa the music streaming company. I said it was Google that bought the company, but it was in fact Apple. Google partner with LaLa among others for their US-only music-streaming-search. I guess this a partnership which might not last given the souring relationship between Apple and Google.

I’m pleased to see the online music is now largely DRM-free (and WMA seems dead too). Consumers can now buy music online and play it on any decent mp3 player.

In the past I thought mp3 downloads were a rip-off, now that this is changing I think there is a bigger problem.

Tunechecker (and no doubt countless others) allow you to shop around and find the best price for a given track or album (I’m far more interested in the latter BTW). It’s great the see the market finally squeezing the big record companies on price.

So things are looking better for the consumer but what worries me is the artists … especially the emerging artists. What percentage of the, now heavily competitive downloaded album price, are they getting? I bet it’s not much. I bet the situation is getting worse as the record companies try to squeeze more money out of their broken business models.

I would like to see a site where consumers can choose to buy music (and gig tickets, t-shirts and other merchandise) where the artists get the biggest share of the purchase price. I’d like artists (not their record labels) to be able to point their fans to the best retailer for a given track/album/ticket.

Failing that maybe it’s better to download illegally and “donate” money to your favourite bands? I wonder when we will start to see paypal “donate” buttons on myspace pages like we see on good free software pages today?

One of my favourite bands, Los Campesinos! has made the odd attempt to point fans to the cheapest ticket agency for upcoming gigs and reading between the lines of their excellent blog it’s clear they aren’t making much of a living from selling music and playing gigs despite being fairly successful. It should be easier for artists to get paid for what they do.

Meanwhile I think I’ll continue to do the following:

1. Listen to stuff before I buy using spotify, last.fm, myspace (and file2hd as necessary), download stuff illegally if it can’t be found legally.
2. Try to get money to the artists of the good stuff by buying stuff they make including CDs, DVDs, legal downloads, gig tickets, t-shirts and anything else they do (Björk makes cool books!).

This was my route to work this morning:

View Route to work in a larger map

I used Google’s http://mytracks.appspot.com/ app for my new android based HTC Hero. I’m pretty impressed with the results and it was easy to clean the initial mess caused by the poor GPS reception in my flat using google maps. I left the rest of the journey un-modified … it’s quite amusing to see how much the taller buildings disrupt the GPS signal!

Everything here should be back to normal … please let me know if you find any broken links etc!