RIAA Does not Pay Artists Post Lawsuits

Despite collecting an estimated several hundred million dollars in P2P related settlements from the likes of Napster, KaZaA and Bolt, prominent artists’ managers are complaining that so far, they haven’t received any compensation. According to a lawyer, some are considering legal action.

When EMI, Universal Music and Warner music reached settlement agreements with the likes of Napster, KaZaA and Bolt, they collected hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation - money that was supposed to go to artists whose rights had been allegedly infringed upon when the networks were operating with unlicensed music.

Now, according to an article, the managers of some major artists are getting very impatient, as it appears the very people who were supposed to be compensated - the artists - haven’t received anything from the massive settlements. They say the cash - estimated to be as much as $400m - hasn’t filtered through to their clients and understandably they’re getting very impatient.
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It’s being claimed that after legal bills were subtracted from the hundreds of millions in settlements, there wasn’t much left over to hand out.

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Apple is Now Second Largest Music Store

From the Electronista:

Apple's iTunes Store has climbed to second place among all legal US music stores and is second only to Wal-Mart, according to a new study by The NPD Group. The research firm notes that about 29 million users, or 10 percent of all people acquiring music in the US, turned to paid download services throughout the course of 2007 and more often shopped at iTunes than through any other service. The total figure represented a jump of about five million versus 2006 and saw most sales go to buyers between 36 and 50 years old. This same segment largely drove sales of portable media players like the iPod.

This success, however, comes amidst falling sales among younger buyers. Analysts note that while the amount of music added to listeners' collections climbed by 6 percent in 2007, the overall plunge in CD sales actually dropped the amount of actual spending by 10 percent, with most spending just $40 on legal music for the entire year. As many as one million people stopped buying CDs altogether in the last year, with nearly half of all teenagers -- 48 percent -- never having bought their music in the physical medium.

Not by a long shot can you say Apple's Music Business has been successful. If there are 29M users, and they've sold 100M ipods, it means at the same time that their iPod business is booming (well, duh...) and that their music business sucks, with only one account for every three iPods (what?!). Plus, the amount of music climbed while overall music sales dropped... Let me repeat it again, Apple makes money off of Piracy! Their music business is unsustainable except as a sidekick to the iPod business. On the long run, Apple is not out to help the musicians or even the consumers with better (quality) products (iPods nor music). Their sole objective is to make a shinier gadget to make people throw away their old iPods in favor of new ones.

Badi Assad/ New York Guitar Festival

This is absolutely inspiring.
Here's an article about a recent event in New York featuring her and several other Brazilian Guitar luminaries such as Sergio and Odair Assad; my cousin Arthur Kampela; Romero Lubambo with his wife, the singer Pamela Driggs; Celso Machado; Fabio Zanon; and Yamandu Costa.

No disrespect to Argentina and Uruguay and Paraguay and all those other South American countries. They’ve all produced some excellent guitarists and some fine music. But I wouldn’t have made that drive down, and then a six-hour drive back up the following evening, if the traditional Guitar Marathon of the New York Guitar Festival had been eight hours of Argentine guitarists, or Uruguayan guitarists, or for that matter guitarists from almost any other country in the world. So what is it about Brazil, and Brazilian music, and especially Brazilian guitar music?

During the sound check next morning, while the 92nd Street Y echoed with Portuguese (which sounds like Italian being spoken by Russians), I asked the Brazilians themselves.

“Anthropophagy,” said Arthur Kampela—a man worth listening to, as he (a) was born and brought up in Brazil, (b) he has a Ph. D. in composition from Columbia, and (c) he’s a wild man. Anthropophagy means cannibalism.

EU: Singers and Musicians Should Earn Copyright Fees for 95 Years

BRUSSELS, Belgium: Singers and musicians should earn royalty fees for 95 years — almost double the current 50-year limit, a European Union official said Thursday as he promised to draft new copyright protection rules.

"If nothing is done, thousands of European performers who recorded in the late 1950s and 1960s will lose all of their airplay royalties over the next ten years," said EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, the union's internal market chief. "These royalties are often their sole pension."

People are living longer and 50 years of copyright protection no longer give lifetime income to artists who recorded hits in their late teens or early twenties, he said.

Most European composers and lyricists currently receive lifetime copyright protection which is passed on to their descendants for another 70 years. The new EU rules would not change that.

But the change would mean that performers would get the same 95-year copyright period enjoyed by their U.S. counterparts.

Record companies that refuse to rerelease a record during the extended copyright period should not be able to prevent artists from moving to a new label, he said.

The EU executive also wants to look again at reforming copyright levies charged on blank discs, data storage and music and video players to compensate artists and copyright holders for legal copying when listeners burn an extra version of an album to play one at home and one in the car.

More.

RealNetworks Senior Exec: The Market Has Voted Against DRM

From The Hollywood Reporter:

The digital rights management debate moved to the mobile space Tuesday as delegates at the GSMA Mobile World Congress heard a RealNetworks senior executive call for DRM-free music to be made more widely available.

While all four major labels have experimented with DRM-free music online, most mobile downloads still come with some form of the technology.

"DRM remains important for subscription models, but the issue is when you buy (an a la carte) track from Verizon or Vodafone it's very difficult to get it to play on something else," Larry Moores, senior vp global product management at Real, said during the "Fight for the Right to Make Money" panel. "If you want to fully enjoy the experience (of that track), you have to buy it three times. Well, the market's voted (against that) by stealing music."

However, Brian Levy, vp and chief technology officer for communications, media and entertainment at Hewlett-Packard, said going completely DRM-free would be "an over-reaction" (...)

Levy predicted that the model of locking in users to one device eventually will prove "unsustainable."

"DRM-free is only an interim solution," he said.

"The problem should have been solved last year," Moores said. "But it's a business problem, not a technology one. DRM-free content is an ongoing experiment, and the expectation is that (sales) volume is going to increase and start mitigating for declining physical sales. If that isn't occurring a year from now and free sharing of music is running rampant, DRM could come back. The dream won't happen unless we generate revenue today."

Obviously the industry wants to make money, but has no clue as to how to prevent piracy and DRM-free tracks from cannibalizing their market.

Amazon Beats iTunes at Usability

David Walker writes:

I have to admit, I'm a bit of an Apple fanboy. I've owned three different Macs, currently have 4 iPods in or around the house, use the Airport Extreme Router and my wife and I both own iPhones (both an 8 and 16GB). I plan on buying the AppleTV shortly and intend on purchasing my 4th Mac - either a Mac Pro or Macbook Pro - within the next few months. I even stood in-line for the Leopard launch. Why share all of that? Because, without a doubt, I will catch flack for what I'm about to say and will probably be called an Apple-hater, which I am not. But the truth is, after this weekend, I don't think I'll ever buy another song from iTunes again. And it's all because of Amazon.

To be clear, I normally purchase CDs and rip them myself. On average, I probably buy 7 or 8 CDs for every album I purchase online. But, whenever I have bought online music, I've always done it from the comfort of the iTunes interface. Having owned several iPods, I was very comfortable with the knowledge that the music I wanted could be found and purchased easily. Certainly, the fact that the music was DRM-laced was a negative for me, but it was never a big enough one so as to deter me. But, if the choice was there, I'd certainly go DRM-free if given the option.

Well, this weekend marked a first for me. I heard some old songs that I really enjoyed and went looking for the original CDs. As is usually the case, I couldn't find these titles in any brick and mortar store. So, I immediately jumped into iTunes and found them. However, before I hit purchase, it dawned on me - I wonder if Amazon also has these albums and I wonder how much they are? Quickly, I launched my browser and within a minute, found both albums on Amazon. Even better? The albums cost less than what I had almost paid on the iTunes Music Store. Before I knew it, I had clicked on Buy Now and had begun my separation from IMS.

So why switch? Why make the change and abandon the store of one of the companies I frequent the most? Here's why:

1. DRM-free MP3s
2. High Bit-Rate Files
3. Variable Pricing
4. Great Downloader with Automatic iTunes Import

Though my love for Apple products has not wavered, my contempt for DRM has grown. Knowing that the MP3s I purchased can be put onto any player I choose and burned to as many CDs as I like is not something I'm willing to compromise on anymore. Until Apple can find a way to compete with Amazon on these points, I'll never buy music from iTunes again.

Just another example. It's about usability and convenience, and that will always trump shoving DRM down people's throats.

Don't Ruin Users’ Experience. Innovate

Eran Writes:

We’ve all been saying this to the music and movie industries for quite a while. More DRM does not translate to more sales, Innovation does. It seems that the gaming industry is now learning a similar lesson:

As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale.

Though many of the pirates may be simply shifting to another source of games for their illegal activities, the number is nonetheless striking and poignant. The sales to download ratio found on Reflexive implies that a pirated copy is more similar to the loss of a download (a poorly converting one!) than the loss of a sale.

It’s good to see another company learning that the standard rhetoric about how piracy equals lost revenue is almost completely false. Most people who pirate your product would probably never have bought it in the first place. So why ruin your paying users’ experience by more limitations? Instead innovate.

Well said. Let me repeat that:

Why ruin your paying users’ experience by more limitations? Innovate Instead.

School Gives Students Names to RIAA, Now What?

Hours after a federal court judge ordered Oklahoma State University to show cause why it shouldn't be held in contempt for failing to respond to an RIAA subpoena, attorneys for the school e-mailed a list of students' names to the RIAA's attorneys. But now that the RIAA has what it wanted, the group is unsure about how to go about sending out its prelitigation settlement letters. Some of the students are represented by an attorney, meaning that the RIAA is barred from contacting them directly.

More details here.

Apple Behaves Worse than the RIAA

The RIAA always claims that its looking out for the livelihood of artists when it sues the hell out of alleged pirates, but in reality it's really fighting to keep record industry executives rich by defending an outdated and unsustainable business model. While before the PR team at least made an attempt to make it seem like artists were priority #1, they seem to have given up: the RIAA is now trying to cut down artist's royalties on digital downloads.

Yes, the RIAA doesn't think the record companies are making enough and that musicians are clearly making too much. I mean, they get 13% now. Like they deserve 13% for writing and creating the music that people are paying for. Hogwash! Someone had to, you know, encode it. That's worth at least 40%. And hey, these shoes don't shine themselves! So they're pushing to get that rate cut down to a shameful 9%, giving artists even less of a slice of the pie than before.

Of course, Apple, Napster and other large online retailers make the RIAA look like a charity in comparison, with Apple pushing to cut the royalty rate down to an insulting 4%. Yes, Apple wants artists to get a 4% of wholesale royalty rate. Really looking out for those artists, aren't you Steve?

So... instead of the industry evolving so that the products are better and the artists make more money the industry is mutating into a monopoly that is even worse for the artist, worse for the consumer and with crappier product quality, right? Oh, the humanities.
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