Saturday, March 10, 2007
Semple makes it simple
They have answers, we have questions
At the ProjectVRM Blog: How about a VRM approach to paying artists through radio stations? A sample:
Let’s create a tool that will tell listeners exactly the costs borne by stations for playing the music they listen to — and for paying a sum in excess of that for listening to those tunes? (The stations could also mark up the royalties on their side first. Works either way.) Stations such as Radio Paradise identify every song and artist they play. They also keep track of how many listeners are tuned in for each of those songs. We could create a simple protocol that would allow a tool on the listening side to store unique identifiers for each song played, on each station listened to. Another tool could look at the data store and either make a payout to the station or escrow the data for use in a variety of other ways, including voluntary payout at the user’s discretion.
Bonus linkage from Mike Taht: I think a world full of anonymous monopolists is a really painful one to live in and create in...
Another bonus. All before I read this.
Strange distractions
First, in case you missed it, the FCC has required that four of the largest radio station chain owners (Clear Channel, CBS, Entercom and Citadel) set aside 8,400 half hour slots for artists on independent record labels and for local music. This is in addition to $12.8 million in fines and new "rules of engagement" between labels and stations, to discourage the "payola" (pay for play) that has been common in the radio business for the duration.
In FCC/Independents, however, veteran music analyst (and now blogger — though one who refuses to link) Bob Lefsetz heaps scorn on independent music labels for keeping their eyes on the wrong balls:
So why do the indies want to fuck with terrestrial radio? Try to turn back the hands of time and level the playing field when the grass is dying there and growing elsewhere?
The big decision this week wasn’t about the FCC mandating that terrestrial radio stations play independent music, but the new Net radio royalties. Oops, the indie labels are getting paid there, so maybe that’s why they’ve been silent so far.
Funny about the indie labels. They really want to be just like the majors. They’re envious. Instead of thinking about their ADVANTAGES, they’re constantly crying for a level playing field. Like IMPALA. What a fucked up group that is. By merging all their properties the majors are going to CREATE OPPORTUNITIES for the indies. But instead of seeing this, IMPALA is trying to hold back the hands of time, keep themselves imprisoned.
The majors’ stranglehold was distribution. That’s now been broken. But don’t tell IMPALA. Then again, are the IMPALA guys positively OLD SCHOOL? Not realizing that to profit in the future you’ve got to be more of a manager, participating in all revenue streams?
Indie music on terrestrial radio. Isn’t that the opposite of the desire? Isn’t that like Top Forty music on free format FM? Why not let the majors ghettoize the terrestrial stations, which are losing listeners, and dominate THE NEW SPHERES! Talk to satellite, they have trouble being served by majors, supposedly there aren’t enough listeners, not enough money. This is a natural niche for indies. But no, they want to fuck with the majors...
You don’t win by trying to change the rules of the old game, you create a NEW GAME!
...
It’s a golden age of music. With everybody able to produce and distribute. But these mini-fat cats, who’ve been in the game for eons, are using the changed reality as an excuse to get back at dying dinosaurs. They should be ignored, their efforts should be laughed at. Like you want to deal with the old tastemakers, who are sold out whores no matter WHOSE music they play, when you can go directly to the fan on the Net? You want to argue about consolidation when you can’t get paid for acquisition of your product ANYWAY? CD sales are down in both the MAJOR and INDIE spheres. But rather than worry about this, independents are trying to get on stilted, dying, terrestrial radio. Create something FANS want to spread, don’t worry about trying to impress fortysomething programmers who may no longer take cash for airplay, but will be beholden to those who DO offer something. Like the big indies won’t fuck with the little indies? Like we’ve got a new equitable world?
Suddenly, when nothing is stopping innovation, independent labels want to redraw the rules on the old map. Utterly amazing.
Well, Internet radio was one of those new games, but perhaps, as Dave Slusher might say (see below), it wasn't new enough.
By the way, I'd never heard of IMPALA before reading this piece. Neither had the first page of Google results. It's got your Crevrolet, your wildlife species, your Informal Mobile Podcasting and Learning Adaptation project, your MHEG promotion alliance... But not impalasite.org, the website of the Independent Music ComPAnies (where's the L?) Association. To find that you need to guess right and add "Independent Music" to your search. Seems IMPALA doesn't link any more than Bob Lefsetz does. Except, of course, to itself.
Big thanks to old pal Mary Lu for pointage to Bob's piece. Also for the story of the Iraqi dude who tried to board a plane at LAX with a magnet up his ass. Among other things.
More like a plague
One reason I don't podcast is that I find it hard not to use the music I know. In fact, if there's one kind of podcast I would love to do, it would be a music-oriented one. I'm a talker who saturates himself already in talk radio and talk podcasts. And while I love 'casts of podsafe music (especially Tony Steidler-Denison's The Roadhouse podcast), the music I know best is RIAA-licensed. Unless I launder my podcasts through a friendly terrestrial radio station, I'm out of legal luck because I'd have to "clear rights" for everything I play. You can imagine.
Of course this is at odds with what friends in the music podcasting world have been saying for years. Here's Dave Slusher, in Features, Not Bugs:
Since the early days of podcasting I’ve been arguing that basing your show around RIAA music is not merely legally questionable, but kind of artistically lame. Why not dig a little deeper in finding the music that the musicians actually want you to play?
Apparently there are internet radio businesses that are going to go out of business new under this fee structure, did not see this coming and have no backup plans. Doc has linked to several of them. That seems like some seriously poor risk management. This eventuality is one the music business has been throwing huge resources into for years, so it didn’t take a crystal ball to predict it. So, the idea of switching to music licensed under Creative Commons or from labels that are friendly to internet promotion has never occurred to these internet radio stations? Podcasters have been working on building out various networks of pre-licensed music for years, but these internet radio guys never thought about it? You’ve got to be kidding me. I find it hard to shed a tear for that kind of lack of vision.
Friends, these are features not bugs. The Big Machine Music wants nothing to do with the internet, so let’s have some reciprocity. The internet, in the form of podcasters, internet radio, MP3 blogs and such should have nothing to do with the Big Machine. Fuck those douchebags. Find internet friendly musicians, labels and organizations and play them. 90% or more of the music being produced is not under control of the RIAA. If you can’t find something you like in that vast majority, you just aren’t trying. If your business fails from your lack of effort, don’t come crying to me.
I'm not crying. I'm just listening. Tony and Dave and lots of music podcasters are doing a great job of finding that music for me. But I'm not motivated to duplicate their efforts. If I'm going to podcast about music, I'll want to play and talk about music from the whole of music history that's post-classical and pre-podsafe.
Practically speaking, that music is outlawed for podcasters. We can trivialize it as old-skool and unhip, but it's hardly trivial.
But still, it's being outlawed in the U.S. for all but the largest, most mainstream Internet radio stations. And it's not even a given that those big boys will stay in the game. (Even though the medium went from 45 to 72 million monthly listeners last year.)
That may be a feature for Dave, but it's a bug for me.
[Later...] I notice here that Dave likes listening to WREK from Atlanta. I guess it'll be okay with Dave when WREK's streams go down, because maybe they'll keep podcasting. Or maybe not. For years there has been a carve-out that allows non-commercial terrestrial radio stations to pay one third the rates of commercial webcasters. (In fact, NPR cut its own deal with SoundExchange, for its own stations, in 2001 — a matter about which the participating parties were pledged to a silence that was finally broken by the CRB decision released last week.) From my own reading of CRB decision, the commercial/noncommercial distinction goes out the window (start reading at page 49 of the last link). WREK will be obliged to do the same kind of accounting, and pay the same steadily-increasing rates for playing RIAA-licensed music, as every other webcaster. Will WREK switch to exclusively podsafe music for listeners to its signal on 91.1fm around Atlanta? Or will it simply drop the streams? Will it do like KCRW and podcast only podsafe music? If so, what will that sound like? A good answer comes from the example of Nick Harcourt's Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW. There isn't a more independent show, host or selection of music anywhere. But the podcast version of the show is a subset of the live one. My subscription to that podcast includes only two of the live shows from February, and none yet from March. That's because the majority of independent music still isn't podsafe, and because the rights-clearing hurdle for podcasts is still much higher than the rising hurdle for streams.
By the way, Internet radio has at least two friends in Congress: Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.). At least one of those (Eshoo) is tying the cause to Net Neutrality, which has largely become a partisan (Democrats for, Republicans against) issue. As I said here, however, the issue ought to be bi-partisan:
Internet radio is a canary in the coal mine of an insane Net-hostile Regulatorium that stretches from the cableco/telco duopoly to the copyright oligarchs who are strangling what Professor Lessig calls Free Culture. That Regulatorium should be the enemy of every free-market Republican and every free-speech Democrat. It's slowing down the U.S. and its businesses as competitors in the World Wide Marketplace we call the Net.
And it should be the enemy of podcasters too.