The Long Tail has an interesting example of the phenomenon I described a couple of weeks ago, in which bands are increasingly finding fans without the labels as intermediaries. Anderson tells the story of Birdmonster, a band fronted by a former Wired staffer. He describes their climb through the ranks of the indie music scene:
Birdmonster courted Internet radio stations, which have none of the constraints of traditional broadcast. As it happened, it was “Ted,” the owner of San Francisco’s BagelRadio.com, who convinced the booker to give Birdmonster its first big break, an opening gig for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. That (and a batle-of-the-bands contest) led to an opening for the White Stripes, which was at that moment the pinnacle of indie rock. Birdmonster had arrived.
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Variety reports that Yahoo’s lobbying effort to get the labels to ditch DRM reached another milestone:
In a first for mainstream pop music, Yahoo! will sell Jesse McCartney’s new album “Right Where You Want Me,” from Disney-owned Hollywood Records, in the unprotected MP3 format. That means consumers will be able to play it on any digital music device, including Apple’s iPod. MP3 files are the only type that will play on an iPod besides those downloaded from iTunes.
But because they have no copy protection, MP3 files can be easily traded on peer-to-peer networks, emailed to friends or burned onto an endless number of CDs.
“We’re trying to be realistic,” said Ken Bunt, senior VP of marketing at Hollywood Records. “Jesse’s single is already online and we haven’t put it out. Piracy happens regardless of what we do. So we’re going to see how Jesse’s album goes (as an MP3) and then decide on others going forward.”
Yahoo! previously sold an exclusive version of Jessica Simpson song “A Public Affair” as an MP3, but it has never offered a major-label album for sale elsewhere without copy restriction, nor have any of the other digital music stores.
That’s the most sensible quote about DRM I’ve seen from the recording industry in… well, probably ever. I’ve never heard of Jesse McCartney, but I’m tempted to buy a copy of his album on principle. If it sells well, maybe that will encourage other labels to be equally realistic.
Hat tip: Derek
Update: I poked around on Yahoo’s site for a little while, but couldn’t find an easy way to buy the album. Perhaps you have to do that through their client software, which doesn’t appear to have a Mac version. If anyone knows of a straightforward way to buy the MP3 version of the music, please let me know.
I’ve recently discovered the “Geek and Poke” site, a truly unique blog that uses cartoons to talk about technology issues and Internet policy developments. Here’s two that I really enjoyed:
… and this one about the popular online multi-player video game Second Life…
So here’s an interesting legal question that involves the First Amendment, copyright law, technology policy, and property / contractual rights: Who has the right to film videos at a professional football game? I’m not talking about the live video feed of entire games; that’s clearly copyright-protected. Instead, I’m just talking about select video clips of portions of games for journalistic purposes.
Here’s why I ask. Ten days ago, David Rehr, the head of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) sent a letter to the National Football League’s (NFL) new commissioner Roger Goodell inquiring about a recent NFL policy change regarding local television station coverage of games. Last year, for reasons I have not been able to determine, NFL team owners decided to reverse a long-standing policy that allowed local broadcasters to film video clips from the sidelines during football games. Apparently, local TV broadcasters will now have to get that footage from the TV network that broadcasts the game or from NFL Films, which is owned and operated by the National Football League.
I’m going to attempt to fairly weigh the arguments on both sides of this dispute even though I have a particular (and admittedly peculiar) bias in this matter that I will admit to at the end of the essay. (See * below).
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The FCC’s localism report has attracted massive controversy as to whether it was inappropriately scotched by the FCC. By contrast, there has been remarkably little attention on its substance. “Do Local Owners Deliver More Localism?: Some Evidence From Local Broadcast News,” was written in 2004, apparently by FCC staffers Peter Alexander and Keith Brown. Using a 1998 database from the University of Delaware, the authors looked at how the ownership of television stations affects the amount of news they deliver. The headline finding was that stations that are locally-owned have some 5.5 minutes more of local news on their half-hour news programs, and over 3 minutes more of local on-location news. Because of this finding–which points to a possible downside to national chains of TV stations– the FCC allegedly killed the study.
But, as Matthew Laser–an author and former Pacifica Radio reporter–argued today, the report is actually much more complicated than the headlines suggest. He points out that several aspects of this study undercut the advocates of strict ownership limits. The study found that television stations that also own a radio station in the same market provide more news than those without such cross-ownership. It also found that television station/newspaper cross-ownership was not found to be a significant factor in the amount of local news provided.
Perhaps most striking, the report concedes that more local news may not always be a good thing. “For example,” it suggests, “if the local [television] owners also develops real estate locally, they may cover the local zoning board in a way that favors the owners’s real estate interests.”
In fact, the report does not address perhaps the biggest question: do viewers actually want more local content? This issue is addressed only in a footnote of the study, which simply states that “non-local content may be more appealing to viewers than local content.”
In this regard, the study tracks much of the current debate: policymakers determine what content is preferred, with only occasional nods to whether consumers object. Its a topsy-turvy analysis: instead of defining success, consumer preferences are seen as potential obstacles to it. This really is more complicated than it seems.
It’s no Watergate, but the FCC is still roiling over charges made that it deep-sixed a staff study on media ownership because it didn’t like the results. The allegations–and the study–surfaced last week at a hearing on Chairman Kevin Martin’s reappointment. Sent anonymously to Sen. Barbara Boxer, the paper was reportedly written in 2004 by two commission staffers and found that locally-owned television stations aired more local news that those owned by national chains. According to former Media Bureau attorney Adam Candeub, unspecified higher-ups at the agency were appalled at the results because they undercut ongoing efforts to reform media ownership laws. As a result, Candeub said, every copy of the report was ordered destroyed. “The whole project was dropped, “end of discussion, he said.
Kevin Martin–who was a commissioner, but not chair, of the FCC at the time–was apparently blindsided by the claims. He stated that he had never heard of the study, but pledged to look into the matter. He also had the study–or at least a PDF of the copy provided by Boxer–put on the commission’s website. (Bizarrely, this copy–even as posted by the FCC–has the authors names blacked out).
The mini-scandal–perhaps it should be called Papergate–was widely reported in the press, and has led to a barrage of criticism in the blogosphere and a stream of press releases from pro-media regulation advocacy groups (Typical was a headline used by the advocacy group Free Press: “FCC Buried Evidence to Protect Friends in Big Media“.)
The reaction was understandable–the image of FCC officials ordering all traces of a study destroyed, Carthage-like, just because they don’t like the results is a disturbing one. But is the real story that simple? I’m skeptical, for several reasons. Anyone who has worked at the FCC knows that the place leaks like an Italian warship. Its simply is hard to believe that such a step would remain a secret for two years, especially given the intense outside interest in the broadcast ownership debate. That’s not to say that studies are not quietly set aside–that happens all the time. But–as described–the end of this study was anything but quiet, and it’s hard to see the noise not reaching outside the FCC’s building.
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The Washington Stock Exchange (WSX) has successfully launched! Because it uses market processes to predict electoral and legislative events, WSX promises to make political news more accurate and fun. Soon, reporters might routinely sprinkle their stories with statements like, “Traders on the Washington Stock Exchange still predict that Republicans will hold onto to the House, but the odds just got longer.” As an alternative to polls or talking heads, WSX offers the virtues of blogospheric decentralization plus hard numbers.
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So I’m having a party this evening, and while poking around the web, I discovered this tidbit: if you’ve got Airport Express, you can now play your music to multiple speakers. That means I can plug my laptop into the speakers into my bedroom, plug a second set of speakers into the Airport Express in my living room, and have perfectly synchronized music playing to both speakers simultaneously, filling the whole apartment with music.
The equipment needed to do this cost a grand total of about $200. Ten years ago, I’d guess the equipment required to do this would have cost thousands of dollars. Thirty years ago, home consumers probably couldn’t have gotten equivalent functionality at any price. The best you could have done would be to run wires through your ceiling, and even then, you would have been limited to playing records or casette tapes.
All of which is an excuse to link to my friend Will Wilkinson’s great article about inequality. Will points out that while monetary inequality is increasing, what we should be really worried about is material inequality–and by almost any measure, this has been rapidly decreasing. My $200 iTunes/Airport music setup has features that would have cost thousands of dollars a decade ago. In this sense, technological progress is the greatest egalitarian force the world has ever known. Although the financial gap between the rich and poor is growing, the gap in the material quality of life between rich and poor is shrinking, as more and more luxuries once available only to the rich become widely affordable to everyone.
Will puts all this much better than I can, so go read his article.
Update: I’ve got another story along the same vein: I’ve been to several weddings recently, and all of them have dispensed with DJs, using their iPods as electronic DJs. None of them has regretted it. Indeed, in at least one respect, the iPod is better: you get to decide exactly what’s on the playlist. No worrying about whether the DJ has good music taste, or whether your guests will request bad music. One more distinction between more-expensive and less-expensive weddings has been obliterated by technology.
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. This week our patent comes via Ars, which reported on Thursday that a company called Paltalk has sued Microsoft over allegations that its XBox Live gaming platform violates two of Paltalk’s patents.
We’ll consider the older of the two patents, which you can see here. It covers a “server-group messaging system for interactive applications.” In a nutshell, this “invention” coordinates the transmission of packets among video game players in precisely the same way that mailing list software coordinates the transmission of an email to multiple email addresses.
The patent describes a variety of functions of this “invention.” For example, it offers the ability to aggregate messages from several different sources and send them out bundled together as a single message. This is precisely analogous to what mailing lists do with their “daily digest” feature. It also includes protocols for creating groups and adding and removing computers from groups. There are, again, precise analogues to these functions in ordinary mailing list software.
Mailing list software existed years before this patent was filed in 1998. The only difference between this invention and mailing list software is that the type of message they send is different (emails versus realtime gaming notifications), and the time horizons involved are different (minutes or hours versus seconds). But neither of those difficulties really changes the technical design principles involved. This is an obvious patent.
This is a recurring problem with software patents: often someone takes a well known software design, apply it in a new context, and declare it a new, patentable invention. But although the result may look superficially different, under the hood the software is very similar. The power of computer programming comes from the ability to use a small number of well-understood software techniques to solve a wide variety of problems. We’d think it absurd to patent the idea of using a hammer on a new kind of nail. It’s no less absurd to patent the idea of using a well-known software technique in a new domain.
This week Microsoft released details about Zune, Microsoft’s purported iPod killer. Techdirt is reporting that Zune won’t be compatible with Microsoft’s previous digital rights management technology, which, ironically enough, was branded “Plays for Sure.” Microsoft’s marketing folks might want to look into changing that. In addition, nothing seems to have come of rumors that Microsoft would “buy out” iTunes users by giving them copies of the songs they’d previously purchased at the iTunes store. Which is really peculiar, given that it would have been a big win for both the labels and Microsoft.
I doubt Steve Jobs is losing over sleep over this.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.