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Links from Last week...
Posted in IPTV, Music, Advertising, News on May 3rd, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
“Year Zero” project = “the way a viral campaign should be run” (37 Signals Blog)
While record labels bemoan their sad plight, artists like Nine Inch Nails are coming up with creative ways to inject mystery and playfulness into the music promotion game.
Is There a Place for Long-form Internet TV? (NewTeeVee)
Will the web ever go longform or will it always be snacks?
Could Digg Revolt Come to Video Sites? (NewTeeVee)
Digg users, unhappy with the company’s compliance with a DMCA takedown request on the codes to break HD-DVD encryption, flooded and overwhelmed the social news site with stories containing the code, until its front page was filled entirely with references to the hack.
Apple & EMI drop DRM...
Posted in Music, News on April 3rd, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
Yesterday Apple and EMI announced they will start selling DRM free music on iTunes. Non DRM music will cost $1.29/song, or 30 cents more expensive than music with DRM, that will still be available in iTunes. With the price increase there will also be a quality increase, as DRM free music will be sold encoded at a higher bitrate than DRM music.
Although DRM protected music from EMI will still be sold at iTunes, by default the user will find the non DRM tracks if available. Also, full albums will still be priced at $9.99, so the price increase is only for single tracks. This fact will probably make it easier for Apple to sell full albums instead than single songs which, if it works, will more easily attract other studios to the non DRM music alternative.
If this move by Apple and EMI becomes a success, subscription based services actually competing with iTunes such as Napster or Real will be in trouble, as they all require DRM. Also, this would make it easier for AAC (the codec Apple uses in iTunes) to become an standard together with MP3 and in detriment of Microsoft’s WMA. (All this ideas can be found in the comments at this GigaOm post).
As Seth Godin commented in his blog in reference to DRM when the Apple & EMI annoucement was only a rumor:
(…) the idea that you can lock up ideas because they are connected to a physical object is long gone.
Related: Apple and EMI ditching DRM is good, but it’s not good enough - Engadget
Links for last week...
Posted in IPTV, Music, News on April 3rd, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
Eisner: The web doesn’t change content
Technology doesn’t change entertainment, he said, it just presents temporary uncertainty about business models and distribution platforms and intellectual property protection.
SellABand Music Gaining Traction
2700 bands from all over the world have signed up, and four have already reached the $50,000 mark and have recorded albums
Hands on with YouTube’s remixing and real time chat tools
A hands-on article on YouTube’s beta features and projects. They all can be found in TestTube, where future YouTube features are available for experimentation.
More reactions on Jobs Open Letter...
Posted in Music, News on February 19th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
Steve Jobs open letter about music (and DRM) kept on making the news with opinion and reactions from bloggers to music industry and technology executives last week. Articles on how music sales would explode without DRM (Via Digg), or how P2P sharing is “not statistically distinguishable from zero” were highlighted in Digg and in the blogesphere in general. As Thomas Hawk (Via Digg) points out, it would seem Jobs letter has become a catalyst for change regarding DRM, or at least for companies to stand by it or against it.
Steve Jobs on DRM...
Posted in Music, News on February 12th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
Apple is under pressure from the European Union. Norway wants Apple to open up their Digital Rights Management (DRM) protected songs so that the music they sell through their iTunes store can be played in any device, not only on the iPod. Last tuesday Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, answered in an open letter regarding Apple’s position on the issue.
Jobs summarizes the current situation and presents two possible alternatives for the future. On his summary he basically blames music labels for requiring Apple to DRM protect their songs, although he gives a thumbs up on the current situation, saying customers are well served. He then goes on to present his first alternative, a world where Apple’s DRM solution is licensed to the competition. He disregards this option on the grounds that licensing such well protected secrets would surely make them more vulnerable. Coordinating an answer to a breach on their protection system, Jobs goes on to say, would also be much harder. Finally Jobs presents a second alternative, a world without DRM. He states Apple would wholeheartedly adopt this solution, should the labels agree to it.
Almost one week later we can highlight the most interesting opinions from bloggers and the answers from some of the involved parties. Microsoft, for example, was quick to answer (Via Digg) they are happy with the current situation, and that Jobs was “irresponsible, or a the very least naïve”. Norway insisted that iTunes customers have their music locked in and that it’s Apple’s responsibility, not theirs, to put pressure on labels to make DRM disappear. The Register published (Via Digg) “The slow death of DRM” about the story of DRM and why we’re better without it.
Ricardo Galli’s opinions on the letter are among the most insightful. Because his post is in Spanish, we’ll summarize it here. He points out that: If Jobs is so willing to embrace a non DRM world he could start selling Pixar movies without DRM, and probably convince Disney to do the same. He could let external developers work on the iPod. He could publish standard API’s to be able to interact with iTunes, etc. Galli also points out how Jobs fails to mention other facts such as the whole reason of writing this letter, or that maintaining a DRM system in place is much less beneficial for Apple than selling DRM free songs, or the fact that although authors and small labels have asked Apple to let them sell their songs without DRM, Apple has answered they can’t do that because of technical problems.
One day after Jobs published his letter, Chris Anderson introduced The Anderson Switch. Maybe music is the first to make the switch?
Abundance And Scarcity Economics Shape Media Trends...
Posted in Music, Long Tail, News on February 4th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
The perfect example of a Long Tail industry would be the music business, as can be read in a recent article (and in it’s comments) from Chris Anderson. The article explains how abundance and scarcity economics helped some music content creators realize that giving away their music for free, while still profiting on the experience of their live shows, is not as crazy as the music labels want everyone to believe.
With time, this trend may reshape the music industry from the ground up and may catch up in other similar industries under abundance economics. For cinema, television and even the publishing industry, the equivalent of a payed, live music performance could be translated to payed (or sponsored) early/live access to contents before they reach everyone else, for free.