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The 100% completion rate on The Future Of Ideas is a very nice touch.

Check out this particular former pet, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, exhorting his fans to download his new album illegally.

Has anyone seen the price come down? OK, well, you know what that means: Steal it! Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealing. Because one way or another these motherfuckers will get it through their head that they’re ripping people off and that’s not right.

Powerful words from such a well established musician. But it gets better.

Very recently 50 Cent gave an interview and offered a very sensible, realist perspective on the current situation of digital piracy.

“The advances in technology impacts everyone, and we all must adapt. Most of all hip-hop, a style of music dependent upon a youthful audience. This market consists of individuals embracing innovations faster than the fans of classical and jazz music.”“What is important for the music industry to understand is that this really doesn’t hurt the artists.”

[...]

“A young fan may be just as devout and dedicated no matter if he bought it or stole it.”

[...]

“The concerts are crowded and the industry must understand that they have to manage all the 360 degrees around an artist. They, (the industry), have to maximize their income from concerts and merchandise. It is the only way they can get their marketing money back.”

This guy gets it. Now, before I go too crazy, I should mention that the interview was originally conducted in Norwegian, and was then translated for the write-up on TorrentFreak. The validity of the translation should be questioned, as a site like TorrentFreak would have a lot of reason for putting words in 50 Cent’s mouth. Although I’ve seen the TF article linked all over Technorati, I haven’t yet seen a separate translation done.

I have two stories about my experience with such sentiments by artists, if you’ll bear with me.

Anecdote The First

In March of 2007, I saw Dark Tranquillity live in Philadelphia. It was a damn good show, and they were touring for their newest album, Fiction. They came out on stage and the keyboardist opened up with a slick synth riff that has characterized the latter half of the band’s discography. The crowd erupted in cheers even before the heavy guitars came in. We all knew the song, Terminus (Where Death Is Most Alive), even though the CD hadn’t been released yet.

After the band finished the song, the vocalist, Mike Stanne asked, “Seems like you guys have heard that one before. How many of you knew it?” The whole venue went nuts. “Ahhhh, you damn pirates!” Stanne said, then laughed and introduced the next track.

When Stanne started to sing Terminus, and the crowd was with him on every word, he honestly looked surprised on stage. But there was not a hint of anger or resentment. I honestly believe that amazement gave way to feeling flattered, although I unfortunately didn’t have a chance to meet the band and ask him personally whether I understood his reaction correctly. But the obvious fact is that the majority of the fans there that night had downloaded illegal advanced copies of the album from torrent sites, in anticipation of the band playing new material at the show.

Like 80% of the fans there that night, I bought a Dark Tranquillity t-shirt for $20 to prove I’d seen them live. I wear it way more often than is healthy.

Now, Dark Tranquillity are in a somewhat unique position in the industry, given that their rhythm guitarist (and former lyricist for both Dark Tranquillity and early In Flames) Niklas Sundin is a graphic artist, and thus designs the band’s merchandise himself. This means the label doesn’t appropriate money from the band’s revenue to pay for merch. It’s self-funded and the profit margin for them is huge. Sundin has designed almost 150 album covers for various metal bands, and has released a book of his sketches that sound incredibly well among fans of Dark Tranquillity.

It’s entirely possible that onstage, Stanne was just biting the bullet and smiling at his executioners. Maybe he hates his fans for downloading that album early. But maybe, just maybe, he loves them for it. And Dark Tranquillity seems to be doing just fine, seeing as they’re still on tour for the Fiction album.

Anecdote The Second

At that same show in Philadelphia, March 24, 2007, I also had the chance to see Into Eternity live for the third time. Fortunately, I was even able to catch some of the band up in the venue’s bar later that night, and I tried my best not to giggle with joy.

I told the band’s lead guitarist and songwriter, Tim Roth, how awesome I thought it was that he was posting step-by-step instruction videos on YouTube for how to play his songs. His riffs are extremely intricate, and most of the time blazing fast, so slowing them down and piecing them together is really necessary for most people trying to learn the play along with the CD. Here’s an example of what I mean.

“That’s just stupid. Why would you go after your best fans? The last people I would want to alienate are the guys listening to my songs again and again, trying to piece together how I played a riff. Those are the guys that love the music, you know? Everybody wishes they could play this stuff, and you see them at the shows, hypnotized by the fretboard, they don’t even headbang most of the time.

“People writing out tabs to our music doesn’t hurt the band. It sure as hell isn’t stealing. It helps everybody, like the labels should support it, because it keeps the music alive.”

That resonated with me. More than anything, I came away from my conversation with Roth believing that was a passionate musician. He didn’t seem to care too much about the legal issues or want to talk about band income. He just wanted to get up on stage and shred, then cross state lines, hop an ocean or two, and do it some more. Yes, Into Eternity are a young band.

The Point

Now we come to the point of this whole post. Amazon has recently partnered with a new and wonderfully bizarre record label called Sellaband. Sellaband is different in that it tries to eschew a lot of the presence of a middleman and empowers the fans of the music to more directly influence the fate of the band.

Unsigned bands upload their music, and if fans like it, they can buy a stake in the profits of any future album sales for $10 (£4.90).

Once a $50,000 (£24,500) threshold is reached, Sellaband helps the band produce an album. A fan can buy any number of $10 investments, each of which equates to a one five thousandth stake.

When the album is made, the backers each receive a copy, which they can either keep or sell at a 10 per cent profit on their personal Sellaband page. They also receive a cut of future sales on the Sellaband or other sites, as well as of any advertising revenue when the song is streamed.

This is quite a novel idea, but I have concerns with how well it’ll manage quality. I think there will be a lot of people who don’t give a damn about the artists, and just invest in those they think will sell well. That doesn’t sound like it’s going to solve the problem of most pop music in the country being utter dreck.

Also, the focus on “making a profit” seems a bit inappropriate, especially for fans of music that can only be considered marginally popular. It’s thoroughly unrealistic that many people will ever see income from this plan. What I do like about this is that the system permits and even encourages fans to pay more money than the standard cost of a CD. This is appropriate, especially for niche music. If the band Arsis would put a PayPal link on their site, I would give them $100 easily. I’ve already bought every CD they’ve made and attended several concerts just to see them. I’ll probably rebuy their discography, because I can’t help it. They’re that good.

I think it’s time this industry stopped focusing on forcing people to pay and started concentrating on making them want to pay. I think this Amazon and Sellaband deal is a step in that direction.

I want to rebuy this CD so hard, just for those sweet, sweet bonus tracks. Bastards! I recently rebought Death Cult Armageddon, because I was planning to see Dimmu in concert, and I was sick of the 192Kbps rip of the album I’ve had since it was released. I try not to rebuy too many CDs, but sometimes you just gotta bite the bullet and love the band until you die.

[audio:thelustcalledknowledge-solo.mp3]

Mors Principium Est – The Lust Called Knowledge

In the sky the angels’ defeat
In the clouds the winds so grey…

Now that’s a solo. It’s by far the sloppiest solo I’ve ever heard out of a Finnish band, so much so that it almost sounds amateur, but that adds to the passion of it, I think. But the runs are slick and the tapping is top-notch, layered to all hell. And to hear it remixed! Damn that sounds attractive.

Editing for that clip made me realize I’m still using the abysmal 192Kbps rip I’ve had since 2003 for this album, too. What a disgrace. I guess I’ll be rebuying it when the new stipend come through.

The toolkit sets up an Apache Web server on the user’s machine. It also automatically configures all of the data and graphs gathered about activity on the local network to be displayed on a Web page, complete with ntop-generated graphics showing not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited.

Unless a school using the tool has firewalls on the borders of its network designed to block unsolicited Internet traffic — and a great many universities do not — that Web server is going to be visible and accessible by anyone with a Web browser. But wait, you say: Wouldn’t someone need to know the domain name or Internet address of the Web server that’s running the toolkit? Yes. However, anyone familiar enough with the file-naming convention used by the toolkit could use Google to search for the server.

Frightening, no? Well here’s the clincher, the way to resolving this whole mess:

The University Toolkit is essentially an operating system (xubuntu) that you can boot up from a CD-ROM. The package bundles some powerful, open-source network monitoring tools, including “Snort,” which captures detailed information about all traffic flowing across a network; as well as “ntop,” a tool used to take data feeds from tools like Snort and display the data in more user-friendly graphics and charts.

Gee, last time I checked, Xubuntu is an open source operating system distributed under the terms of the General Public License (GPL). That means that if the party utilizing the GPL’d code redistributes it without providing access to the source code, they’re in violation of license.

Do you get it? The MPAA is infringing on intellectual property rights. This is pure gold. After years of stamping their feet petulantly, demanding that consumers pay them tons of money, many times over (did you know it’s illegal to play DVDs in Linux?), they go and steal someone else’s work, completely ignoring the written license under which it was offered.

Interested parties were of course notified, and have successfully had access to the toolkit stricken from the MPAA’s website. (That’s a Slashdot summary of the event. Make sure to check out the comment threads for a few laughs.) Evidently, the MPAA was less than cooperative, so the individual—Ubuntu developer Matthew Garrett—notified the MPAA’s ISP and forced it to be removed that way.

MPAA don’t fuck with my shit.

(And yes, I did attempt to contact them by email and phone before resorting to the more obnoxious behaviour of contacting the ISP. No reply to my email, and the series of friendly receptionists I got bounced between had no idea who would be responsible but promised me someone would call back. No joy there, either.)

This is a common tactic of the MPAA and the RIAA, to serve ISPs subpoenas demanding IP addresses for individuals allegedly pirating.

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09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Oops.

Major piracy operations will still be targeted, but tracking individuals simply isn’t worthwhile. A big reason for this, which the official interviewed admits, is that it’s just too damn hard to track individuals on the internet. Of course, this guy obviously isn’t a government official in the U.S. or UK.

Torrent Freak has coverage of the news, and if you speak French, take a crack at the original interview.

I guess this is just one more reason for me to study in Canada, hm?

There are certainly lots (103,000,00 hits on Google) of digital music storage websites out there. From my cursory research, it seems that most of these sites do offer streaming as a lure to users, but that this feature is almost always provided solely to the owner of the account. This means that the storage service is advertised as a way for the user to have constant access to his or her digital music collection; it does not ostensibly facilitate filesharing, as granting someone access to the files would mean turning over the login and password to the account, essentially giving full control of the data to another party. This of course is not the case with Anywhere.FM, where only read permissions are granted to “guests” who stream from a user’s page. Under no circumstances could such a guest delete, rename, or add files to a user’s account.

It’s often been the mere act of uploading which has incriminated otherwise promising music storage services in the past. The famous MP3.com tried to offer such a service, but was quickly shut down by the major labels, who cried foul at that augury of their failure and frailty. The same man responsible for MP3.com has since bounced back with a new project called MP3Tunes, which offers storage, streaming, syncing with a desktop collection, and even DRM-free tracks for 88 cents a piece.

But even keeping the service confined to one user doesn’t at all make it legal in the eyes of the major labels. Very recently, the head of litigation for Sony BMG was quoted as saying that even ripping a CD to your computer constituted copyright infringement:

Gabriel [lead counsel for the record labels] asked if it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music which they have purchased, even just one copy. Pariser replied, “When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy’,” she said.

Read more

This is of course madness, as there’s already a legal precedent delineating a user’s rights to fair use under copyright law. Included among these rights is the right of the user to make unlimited copies of purchased media, provided that the copies are for personal use only. To quote the a statement by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on what is thought to qualify as legal under fair use:

• Space-shifting or format-shifting – that is, taking content you own in one format and putting it into another format, for personal, non-commercial use. For instance, “ripping” an audio CD (that is, making an MP3-format version of an audio CD that you already own) is considered fair use by many lawyers, based on the 1984 Betamax decision and the 1999 Rio MP3 player decision (RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia, 180 F. 3d 1072, 1079, 9th Circ. 1999.)
• Making a personal back-up copy of content you own – for instance, burning a copy of an audio CD you own.

Read more

I’ve referenced EFF before the the original wording of the law, because the text of the law was codified on April 15, 1976, I believe, and so is obviously a little outdated. All the same, here’s the fair use clause as it stands within the text of the law:

§ 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include —

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Read more

Thus it seems pretty freaking clear that digital copies for personal use is legal under present copyright law. Nonetheless, MP3.com’s locker feature never made it. The CEO of MP3.com, Michael Robertson, eventually sold the company and website to Vivendi Universal for around $400 million, netting a cool $100 million for himself. Of course, he practically had to abandoned the site under legal pressure. But as stated above, he’s launched a new project with the same goals, and by this point, he must have the friends to make it happen. I can’t imagine this character could ever again fly under the radar of the major labels.

Poking around on Robertson’s site, I came across a very recent article on his failure to launch another commercial-oriented MP3 distribution site. The name? AnywhereCD. Robertson admits he had misread the industry, and provided a service that no one really wanted–especially considering Apple had just announced DRM-free tracks from EMI. So it failed, but I can’t help but suspect that the Anywhere.FM team had been watching very closely, maybe even learning more from Robertson’s past experiences than he himself had.

I think the most valuable thing they’ve learned is that if you want to change a law, break it. That’s always the first step.

[audio:02Pestilence.mp3]

Find out more about The Faceless on MySpace, Last.fm, or Sumerian Records. Tour dates are listed on all three pages.

Last.fm offers copious streams for quite a good selection of music, but it never did have the gall to permit user uploads, surely for fear of litigation. Now that CBS has bought out Last.fm, that’s something that will surely never be added, as big companies are always more afraid of big companies than the little guys are. Plus, Last.fm stands to make a good chunk of change by maintaining control of what is streamed. If the user doesn’t get to choose what to hear, then Last.fm can sell airtime on the radio stream to record labels, who then foist their content upon the user.

I should mention that it is possible to create “playlists” Last.fm, but given that uploads are not permitted, playlists can only be built using songs which Last.fm have deemed popular enough to add to the database themselves. This means they paid royalties for them, of course, which is a cost passed onto the user in a variety of ways, whether through further restriction of content channels, copious overt advertisements, or nagging for subscription membership.

What Anywhere.FM is promising to do is jerk the reins from the hands of the labels and hand them to the users, something Last.fm seemed to be intent on doing back in its Audioscrobbler days. The question is of course whether they can remain below the radar long enough to build a substantial user base and thus dodge litigation by offering to sell data on users’ listening habits in order to hone targeted advertising.

Profit models are probably the least important thing when it comes to Web 2.0 ideas and venture capital. I’ve seen some big time money get tossed out to projects whose only possible revenue plan would have to be selling user data to advertising firms, or otherwise bundling the product with delivery of advertising content. After all, the Mozilla Foundation is receiving about $50,000,000 a year from Google, just for setting Google as the default search engine in Firefox. This chronic windfall might be leading to an early death for Thunderbird, but that’s the topic of another post.

So can Anywhere.FM live long enough to befriend the aging yet belligerent dinosaur record labels? It depends on so many things. To be sure, they have to avoid making a lot of money for a while yet. This Last.fm managed to do superbly well, as anyone who remembers the old days of the pokey Audioscrobbler servers can attest. But eventually, once it proves popular, someone somewhere is going to want to buy it, if only for the massive amounts of traffic, which can be sold to advertisers for a pretty penny.

I’m interested in how much can happen before the inevitable buyout takes place. Obviously there are going to be a lot of angry people once it’s widely known that Anywhere.FM is providing the means to stream globally for free. While it’s technically possible that the site could contract out to advertisers and forward cuts of the profits onto artists and labels, it absolutely will not happen, first because the site isn’t legally obligated to give money away like that, and second because the labels aren’t legally obligated to tolerate the streaming.

But I can’t quite accept that Anywhere.FM is bad for the music industry. I don’t believe that anything which vastly bolsters the popularity of a industry can harm that industry. I should further qualify that only the bolstering of “positive” popularity can do good to something, a distinction I find like that between fame and infamy.

There’s no question that whoever uploads music to this site is going to test out the “Share” feature by linking their friends to it. Music will be heard and neither the artist nor the label will receive compensation. I think that given the low cost–zero dollars coupled with only a bit of time and some bandwidth–consumption will climb substantially: as a result of this, people will listen to more music. How can that possibly be a bad thing?

The common argument is that artists can’t give away their work for free. They’d go broke! The stock rebuttal to that is that certain people would never pay for an album anyway, so it’s ultimately no loss to the band in terms of financial gain. The interesting dimension is that those who steal the album and wouldn’t have paid for it anyway might pass the music along to others who are willing to pay. Thus the initial infringement–zero financial loss, remember, though certainly a latent morality of strict justice might dictate that “no one rides for free”–is turned into profit in the end.

This might sound far-fetched to some, but it really doesn’t to me. Perhaps it’s absurd to suppose that the biggest consumers of music, adolescents, are going to buy CDs in this age of pervasive P2P, and quite frankly, I think that it is. The record labels waited too long to jump on board the digital bandwagon, and now they’re getting left behind. But so many opportunities remain! For instance, anyone who truly loves a band will do all that they can to see them in concert. They’ll buy merchandise, perhaps even merchandise that’s actually made by the band members, thus effectively giving them 100% of the profits. And in addition to CDs, concert tickets, and merch, there’s still the holy grail of popularity: internet traffic.

How much traffic a band earns is now such a solid indicator of success, even major labels are conceding its validity. As the acquisition of Last.fm illustrates, copious traffic is grounds enough for investment, and it’s no poignant insight that fans flock to where the media is.

So maybe this will work out for the better, and commercial music will evolve a bit. Or maybe Anywhere.FM will be stamped out like scores of other startups are every day, unable to pay to fight Goliath in court. But maybe we’ll find out soon, because when I found the site this weekend, it bragged about 5,342,227 tracks having been uploaded. As of this writing, it’s climbed to 5,362,101, and still ticking.

While we’re at it, why not check out my stream? It might not be there forever.