Showing posts with label Spotify. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spotify. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Proposed EU Copyright Rules Could Aid Pandora, Spotify, Netflix, Lovefilm, In Fact Every Streaming Firm; Forbes, 12/10/13
Tim Worstall, Forbes; Proposed EU Copyright Rules Could Aid Pandora, Spotify, Netflix, Lovefilm, In Fact Every Streaming Firm:
"The European Union is proposing some changes to how copyright works inside the bloc and one of the things they’re discussing could make it much easier for the streaming companies like Netflix NFLX +2.1%, Spotify, Pandora and all the rest. This is just, in this area at least, something under discussion, open for commentary, but it is one of those things that sounds like a good idea. The problem is that the EU market for copyright is extremely fragmented: to put it in US terms it’s almost as if each State offers copyright on things in that State."
Thursday, January 31, 2013
As Music Streaming Grows, Royalties Slow to a Trickle; New York Times, 1/28/13
Ben Sisario, New York Times; As Music Streaming Grows, Royalties Slow to a Trickle:
"A decade after Apple revolutionized the music world with its iTunes store, the music industry is undergoing another, even more radical, digital transformation as listeners begin to move from CDs and downloads to streaming services like Spotify, Pandora and YouTube.
As purveyors of legally licensed music, they have been largely welcomed by an industry still buffeted by piracy. But as the companies behind these digital services swell into multibillion-dollar enterprises, the relative trickle of money that has made its way to artists is causing anxiety at every level of the business."
Monday, September 5, 2011
O.K., Downloaders, Let’s Try This Song Again; New York Times, 9/3/11
Janet Morrissey, New York Times; O.K., Downloaders, Let’s Try This Song Again:
"Still, Qtrax is relying primarily on the ads linked to the music player to finance licensing fees and to make the company profitable — a business model that many industry experts are skeptical can work. They point to previous hopefuls like Napster, which was sued by the record labels over copyright laws and is now a shadow of its former self (and now charges subscription fees for music) and to SpiralFrog and Ruckus, which had some backing from the major labels but collapsed after failing to raise enough cash to cover royalties to the record companies."
"Still, Qtrax is relying primarily on the ads linked to the music player to finance licensing fees and to make the company profitable — a business model that many industry experts are skeptical can work. They point to previous hopefuls like Napster, which was sued by the record labels over copyright laws and is now a shadow of its former self (and now charges subscription fees for music) and to SpiralFrog and Ruckus, which had some backing from the major labels but collapsed after failing to raise enough cash to cover royalties to the record companies."
Monday, July 25, 2011
Why I'm Not Going Near Spotify (and Why You Shouldn't Either); Harvard Business Review, 7/22/11
James Allworth, Harvard Business Review; Why I'm Not Going Near Spotify (and Why You Shouldn't Either) :
"Netflix has become so popular that it recently surpassed the amount of Bittorrent ("pirate") traffic on the web, proving that it's compelling offerings, not lawsuits, that win customer's hearts and minds. But if Hulu and Netflix are so fantastic, what's the concern about Spotify?
Simply put: the way we consume music is fundamentally different to the way we consume movies and TV."
"Netflix has become so popular that it recently surpassed the amount of Bittorrent ("pirate") traffic on the web, proving that it's compelling offerings, not lawsuits, that win customer's hearts and minds. But if Hulu and Netflix are so fantastic, what's the concern about Spotify?
Simply put: the way we consume music is fundamentally different to the way we consume movies and TV."
Friday, February 19, 2010
Who's afraid of digital book piracy?; (London) Guardian, 2/18/10
Alastair Harper, (London) Guardian; Who's afraid of digital book piracy?:
With the iPad and e-readers on the rise, will pirated books become as common as illegal music and films?:
"For years, we have been able to combine our taste for music and film with our desire to stick it to the man, and all from the safety of our PCs. Our literary habits, however, have perforce remained largely legal. The closest we could come to the same thrill is by wearing a deep-pocketed coat to WH Smiths – which is such an analogue approach to theft. Soon, however, even the bookish will be able to frustrate Lord Mandelson because, at long last, thanks to the iPad, digital book piracy is almost upon us.
The surest sign of this is that industry figures have started producing dubious statistics to show how endemic it is. In the US, it's just been announced that 10% of books read are now pirate texts. The same report claims that piracy has cost US publishers $3bn. But the source of the statistics was a company named Attributor, who provide online piracy protection for the publishing industry. Like a plumber tutting over the state of your pipes, they have a vested interest in finding problems.
A glance at the top seeded ebooks on Pirate Bay shows that Christopher Ricks isn't about to lose much sleep over the downloaders. Filling the top slots are Windows 7 Secrets, Adobe CS4 for Photographers and, shamelessly playing up to the stereotype of all geeks being lonely boys, the Jan/Feb edition of Playboy magazine. According to Freakbits, the only non-technical or sexual downloaded book in 2009 was the Twilight series – a choice that only goes to show how masturbation and Photoshopping mess with the mind.
More mainstream books are found on Scribd, a site you might well use – it's great for finding free books, citations and excerpts. It's also home to an awful lot of copyright infringements. You can find everything: Tintin in America, Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, Alastair Campbell's The Blair Years, Richard Brautigan. Heck, there's even a bunch of Guardian book bloggers, bundled together in a self-published book of literary quotations.
The interesting thing is just how openly available these books are from the site's servers. In fact, Scribd has a very old-school approach to piracy. It pitches itself as a document-sharing service, just as Napster pitched itself as a way of sharing sound files – a euphemism as transparent as a newspaper ad offering "escorts".
Publishers' lawyers will most likely eventually compel Scribd to close, or to turn it into a legal online shop (authors such as Stephen King already sell their digital copies through the site). Certain juicy targets for piracy, such as Stephanie Meyer or JK Rowling, have already had their legal battalions ensure no illicit Potters or vegetarian vampires appear online. That the rest of the industry hasn't yet bothered shows how small the impact of piracy has been on publishers thus far. Faber clearly don't see the need to police the Alan Bennett plays available on Scribd, since most of their audience still prefer physical copies.
The blog The Millions recently hosted an amazing interview with an American book pirate who provides e-copies of books because of his open-source, anti-copyright beliefs. Dutifully, he scans and proofs every book he uploads. The thought of all that repetitive effort, a kind of digital ironing, is quaintly charming – like a farmer tending to his patch with a sickle, his back squarely turned to the rolling Google combine harvester. It's such a lot of work and, outside textbooks, it makes so little impact that publishers haven't needed to pay the lawyers' fees to stop it.
But this is about to change. As e-readers become ubiquitous, publishers know they need to go digital. And being digital, no matter how much drm you shove in, means content will be pirated. Anyone will be able to get any new book you want if you know how to look for it.
But, despite the statistics, I don't believe book piracy will ever be as endemic as it has become with music and film. We've moved on from the pre-iTunes days when the only way of getting an MP3 of a song was to find it on Napster. Publishers were keen to get on board with the iPad straight from launch because they knew it was the safest way to protect and to disseminate their product. One editor at a big publisher told me just how desperate his company have been to woo Apple over the last 18 months.
More importantly, though, publishers have a headstart on the music and film industries and already have some experience of what happens when controlled content is made widely available for free. Victorian publishers were convinced public libraries would ruin them: they didn't. Lending libraries brought books off the estates and into the tenements, and publishers were suddenly selling a lot more books to a lot more people. This happened as the result of a system that, like Spotify, allowed readers to legally obtain books for free while the authors still received some money. If the publishing industry can remember its own history, digitisation should be a doddle."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/feb/18/digital-book-piracy-copyright
With the iPad and e-readers on the rise, will pirated books become as common as illegal music and films?:
"For years, we have been able to combine our taste for music and film with our desire to stick it to the man, and all from the safety of our PCs. Our literary habits, however, have perforce remained largely legal. The closest we could come to the same thrill is by wearing a deep-pocketed coat to WH Smiths – which is such an analogue approach to theft. Soon, however, even the bookish will be able to frustrate Lord Mandelson because, at long last, thanks to the iPad, digital book piracy is almost upon us.
The surest sign of this is that industry figures have started producing dubious statistics to show how endemic it is. In the US, it's just been announced that 10% of books read are now pirate texts. The same report claims that piracy has cost US publishers $3bn. But the source of the statistics was a company named Attributor, who provide online piracy protection for the publishing industry. Like a plumber tutting over the state of your pipes, they have a vested interest in finding problems.
A glance at the top seeded ebooks on Pirate Bay shows that Christopher Ricks isn't about to lose much sleep over the downloaders. Filling the top slots are Windows 7 Secrets, Adobe CS4 for Photographers and, shamelessly playing up to the stereotype of all geeks being lonely boys, the Jan/Feb edition of Playboy magazine. According to Freakbits, the only non-technical or sexual downloaded book in 2009 was the Twilight series – a choice that only goes to show how masturbation and Photoshopping mess with the mind.
More mainstream books are found on Scribd, a site you might well use – it's great for finding free books, citations and excerpts. It's also home to an awful lot of copyright infringements. You can find everything: Tintin in America, Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, Alastair Campbell's The Blair Years, Richard Brautigan. Heck, there's even a bunch of Guardian book bloggers, bundled together in a self-published book of literary quotations.
The interesting thing is just how openly available these books are from the site's servers. In fact, Scribd has a very old-school approach to piracy. It pitches itself as a document-sharing service, just as Napster pitched itself as a way of sharing sound files – a euphemism as transparent as a newspaper ad offering "escorts".
Publishers' lawyers will most likely eventually compel Scribd to close, or to turn it into a legal online shop (authors such as Stephen King already sell their digital copies through the site). Certain juicy targets for piracy, such as Stephanie Meyer or JK Rowling, have already had their legal battalions ensure no illicit Potters or vegetarian vampires appear online. That the rest of the industry hasn't yet bothered shows how small the impact of piracy has been on publishers thus far. Faber clearly don't see the need to police the Alan Bennett plays available on Scribd, since most of their audience still prefer physical copies.
The blog The Millions recently hosted an amazing interview with an American book pirate who provides e-copies of books because of his open-source, anti-copyright beliefs. Dutifully, he scans and proofs every book he uploads. The thought of all that repetitive effort, a kind of digital ironing, is quaintly charming – like a farmer tending to his patch with a sickle, his back squarely turned to the rolling Google combine harvester. It's such a lot of work and, outside textbooks, it makes so little impact that publishers haven't needed to pay the lawyers' fees to stop it.
But this is about to change. As e-readers become ubiquitous, publishers know they need to go digital. And being digital, no matter how much drm you shove in, means content will be pirated. Anyone will be able to get any new book you want if you know how to look for it.
But, despite the statistics, I don't believe book piracy will ever be as endemic as it has become with music and film. We've moved on from the pre-iTunes days when the only way of getting an MP3 of a song was to find it on Napster. Publishers were keen to get on board with the iPad straight from launch because they knew it was the safest way to protect and to disseminate their product. One editor at a big publisher told me just how desperate his company have been to woo Apple over the last 18 months.
More importantly, though, publishers have a headstart on the music and film industries and already have some experience of what happens when controlled content is made widely available for free. Victorian publishers were convinced public libraries would ruin them: they didn't. Lending libraries brought books off the estates and into the tenements, and publishers were suddenly selling a lot more books to a lot more people. This happened as the result of a system that, like Spotify, allowed readers to legally obtain books for free while the authors still received some money. If the publishing industry can remember its own history, digitisation should be a doddle."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/feb/18/digital-book-piracy-copyright
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Music Business Heads Into Virtual World; New York Times; 12/16/09
Brad Stone and Claire Cain Miller, New York Times; Music Business Heads Into Virtual World:
"It seems likely that the idea of music ownership will never go away, and that newer methods of accessing music will exist alongside old ones. Bobby Mohr, a 23-year-old music fan from Brooklyn who has accumulated 100 gigabytes of songs, keeps some of them on free Web-based storage services, so he can download tracks when he travels and burn them onto CDs to play in the car.
But Mr. Mohr is hesitant to abandon the idea of owning music altogether, citing the unreliability of wireless networks and the fact that his collection would be inaccessible at his job at a police oversight agency, where he is not allowed to use the Internet.
“I like having external hard drives that are troves of my music,” he said. “You just collect it, you have this library. You discover new genres every year and you go through it and look at what you have, and that’s nice.”
Bob Lefsetz, who writes an influential music industry newsletter, the Lefsetz Letter, acknowledged that some people bristle at the idea of not owning their music, but he compared them to people who once said they would never rent a videotape.
“If you ask anybody today, they’ll tell you, ‘I need to own it.’ But once you have these services, you get to the point of, ‘Why would I own it, because I have access to everything?’”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/technology/internet/16tune.html?em
"It seems likely that the idea of music ownership will never go away, and that newer methods of accessing music will exist alongside old ones. Bobby Mohr, a 23-year-old music fan from Brooklyn who has accumulated 100 gigabytes of songs, keeps some of them on free Web-based storage services, so he can download tracks when he travels and burn them onto CDs to play in the car.
But Mr. Mohr is hesitant to abandon the idea of owning music altogether, citing the unreliability of wireless networks and the fact that his collection would be inaccessible at his job at a police oversight agency, where he is not allowed to use the Internet.
“I like having external hard drives that are troves of my music,” he said. “You just collect it, you have this library. You discover new genres every year and you go through it and look at what you have, and that’s nice.”
Bob Lefsetz, who writes an influential music industry newsletter, the Lefsetz Letter, acknowledged that some people bristle at the idea of not owning their music, but he compared them to people who once said they would never rent a videotape.
“If you ask anybody today, they’ll tell you, ‘I need to own it.’ But once you have these services, you get to the point of, ‘Why would I own it, because I have access to everything?’”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/technology/internet/16tune.html?em
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Singing a different tune; Economist, 11/12/09
Economist; Singing a different tune:
The battle against online music piracy is turning. A return to growth will take a good deal longer
"While it is by no means over, the struggle against music piracy is going better than at any point since the appearance of Napster, a file-sharing service, ten years ago.
It has been a brutal decade. In many countries music sales to consumers have fallen by more than a third...
The music business is now doing two things right. First, it has built a better stick. Most countries have virtually abandoned the practice of suing people for downloading copyrighted files. The favoured approach these days is known as “graduated response” or “three strikes and you’re out”. People who are suspected of trading media illegally are sent warnings. If they fail to stop, their internet-service provider (ISP) may slow their connection. If that fails to deter, they may be temporarily cut off...
Almost everywhere in the developed world, such laws are being debated. Even where they are not (America, for example), ISPs are working quietly with the record industry to similar ends.
The trouble with the old practice of suing people for swapping music is that it is slow, expensive and limited. In most countries, being prosecuted for file-sharing is a little like being struck by lightning. The exception is Germany, where a cheap, efficient legal system has made it possible to launch some 100,000 prosecutions. In the past two years the proportion of German internet users who share files illegally has dropped significantly. It now stands at 6%, according to Jupiter Research—less than in any other big European country...
The second change is that the industry is offering tastier carrots. These days the music associations talk less about lawsuits and more about cultivating alternatives to piracy. The past year has seen rapid growth of digital music services that accept the post-Napster consensus that music should be free, or at least appear to be free...
The recorded-music business is not about to lurch into growth. A big proportion of revenues—more than half just about everywhere—still comes from CD albums, which are gradually falling out of favour. Start-ups like Spotify need to turn more freeloaders into paying subscribers if they are to survive and start providing a serious income stream to record companies and artists. And there are still plenty of ways of sneakily copying music.
John Kennedy, head of the IFPI, points out that piracy was rife even before file-sharing. The goal is not to eradicate it—that is impossible—but to tilt the playing field towards legitimate services. That finally seems to be happening. "
http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14845087
The battle against online music piracy is turning. A return to growth will take a good deal longer
"While it is by no means over, the struggle against music piracy is going better than at any point since the appearance of Napster, a file-sharing service, ten years ago.
It has been a brutal decade. In many countries music sales to consumers have fallen by more than a third...
The music business is now doing two things right. First, it has built a better stick. Most countries have virtually abandoned the practice of suing people for downloading copyrighted files. The favoured approach these days is known as “graduated response” or “three strikes and you’re out”. People who are suspected of trading media illegally are sent warnings. If they fail to stop, their internet-service provider (ISP) may slow their connection. If that fails to deter, they may be temporarily cut off...
Almost everywhere in the developed world, such laws are being debated. Even where they are not (America, for example), ISPs are working quietly with the record industry to similar ends.
The trouble with the old practice of suing people for swapping music is that it is slow, expensive and limited. In most countries, being prosecuted for file-sharing is a little like being struck by lightning. The exception is Germany, where a cheap, efficient legal system has made it possible to launch some 100,000 prosecutions. In the past two years the proportion of German internet users who share files illegally has dropped significantly. It now stands at 6%, according to Jupiter Research—less than in any other big European country...
The second change is that the industry is offering tastier carrots. These days the music associations talk less about lawsuits and more about cultivating alternatives to piracy. The past year has seen rapid growth of digital music services that accept the post-Napster consensus that music should be free, or at least appear to be free...
The recorded-music business is not about to lurch into growth. A big proportion of revenues—more than half just about everywhere—still comes from CD albums, which are gradually falling out of favour. Start-ups like Spotify need to turn more freeloaders into paying subscribers if they are to survive and start providing a serious income stream to record companies and artists. And there are still plenty of ways of sneakily copying music.
John Kennedy, head of the IFPI, points out that piracy was rife even before file-sharing. The goal is not to eradicate it—that is impossible—but to tilt the playing field towards legitimate services. That finally seems to be happening. "
http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14845087
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Music Industry Lures ‘Casual’ Pirates to Legal Sites; New York Times, 7/19/09
Eric Pfanner via New York Times; Music Industry Lures ‘Casual’ Pirates to Legal Sites:
"Record company executives say there are three kinds of music fans. There are those who buy music, and those who get a kick out of never paying for it. And then there are those whom Rob Wells at Universal Music Group calls “dinner party pirates”: the vast majority of listeners, those who copy music illegally because it is more convenient than buying it.
If those low-level copyright cheats could be converted to using legal music services, the digital music business would get much-needed help. Yet even industry executives acknowledge that until recently, they were not giving those listeners many ways to do what they wanted: to sample new music and to play it back anytime, at little or no cost."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/technology/internet/20stream.html?_r=1&hpw
"Record company executives say there are three kinds of music fans. There are those who buy music, and those who get a kick out of never paying for it. And then there are those whom Rob Wells at Universal Music Group calls “dinner party pirates”: the vast majority of listeners, those who copy music illegally because it is more convenient than buying it.
If those low-level copyright cheats could be converted to using legal music services, the digital music business would get much-needed help. Yet even industry executives acknowledge that until recently, they were not giving those listeners many ways to do what they wanted: to sample new music and to play it back anytime, at little or no cost."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/technology/internet/20stream.html?_r=1&hpw
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