Backing up is now illegal

The decision of the High Court to make it illegal again to rip a CD you've purchased for money to play on a device of your choosing we've covered before. There's another sting to the judgement, though, as Consequence Of Sound have discovered. If you store your legally purchased music on your computer, and you back up your hard drive, you're a criminal, chummy:

the Government spokesperson went on to add that, “… It includes creating back-ups without permission from the copyright holder as this necessarily involves an act of copying.” In other words, if you legally purchase digital media online, you are now not legally allowed to back up that information on an external hard drive of any sort. In the long run, that means if your computer were to crash or get stolen, your only allowable course of action would be to re-purchase all your music and movies.

(I'm sure Apple and Amazon would both point out that if you buy through them, your purchase is recorded and free to download again at any time.)

Backing up your computer is now illegal. Good work, everybody.

Absolute Radio a little less absolute

Absolute Radio - the one which used to be Virgin back when it started - is starting to see its UK AM network crumble.

Listeners in Berkshire (and bits of the country that touch the county) are being advised to swap to digital after - effectively - the station was told to get orf a farmer's land:

The AM transmitters at the privately owned Manor Farm site were switched off on Friday, as the lease on the site is not being renewed.

Absolute Radio's transmissions on 1233kHz, which served Berkshire, southeastern Oxfordshire and south west Buckinghamshire were terminated on Friday morning.

Smooth Radio, which inherited the former frequencies of Gold last year has also been affected. Its service on 1421kHz from the site was switched off alongside its service on 1485kHz, which although broadcast from a different site operated under the same commercial AM radio licence serving the Thames Valley area.

Listeners to both stations are being advised to continue listening via digital radio, either via DAB digital radio, online, via mobile apps or through digital TV services.

Yes, that's right. Because someone who's listening to a music service on AM in 2015 is doing so because they have the ability to listen digitally, but are choosing not to.

Tom Watson pushes for 6 on FM

It's great that Tom Watson is such a strong supporter of 6Music, but his calls for the BBC to move the network to FM, booting Radio 3 to digital only, are flawed:

Watson said: “It does strike me if the Radio 3 audience continues to diminish and 6 Music continues to grow its audience, the BBC should seriously consider it, they must put it on their agenda.

“6 Music is a huge success story for the BBC. They tried to close it down and its audience doubled, they now have more listeners digitally than Radio 3 has got on both digital and the FM network.

“On those terms 6 Music should be knocking at the door for that FM slot and they would have an even bigger audience [on FM]. There are a lot of discriminating music listeners out there, they have built a very powerful brand and a strong offer. They only way they are going to expand is getting an FM slot and I think it’s worth the BBC considering.”

Maybe worth considering, but much more worth rejecting.

Part of the original reason for the existence of 6Music was to help drive digital listening - something that it's done rather well. Moving it across to analogue wouldn't really help with that.

Given there's a hope that the FM and AM radiospace can be handed over to other services in the not-too-distant future, any tenancy on FM would be short-lived anyway.

The idea that 6 can only grow by transferring to FM is flawed, given that it's still growing its audience on digital.

And then there's the question of what would happen to Radio 3 if it shifted to digital-only. It already has a fragile audience; even if you generously assume that half its listeners transfer across to find it - and that we can put up with the resultant drone of audiophiles complaining about sound quality on DAB forever - that low level of audience would appear to be incompatible with the current level of funding Radio 3 receives. So while Tom Watson might say he's not calling for Radio 3 to be closed down, that would effectively be the effect of moving it across before we're at the stage of analogue radio switch-off. (How it will thrive after that, of course, is another question.)

Are you ready to be heartbroken, Lloyd Cole fans?

Lloyd Cole is thinking about withdrawing his music from Spotify for artistic reasons:

“I think I am going to withdraw from Spotify and use it for what it is good for, sampling. If they (record buyers) like it they are going to need to buy it somewhere.”

It's not entirely clear how Cole fans are going to sample his music on Spotify if, erm, he takes his music off Spotify.

But then he doesn't really seem to understand how streaming works:

But is streaming good for the music business?

“So much of our culture is technology driven, it’s ‘I can, therefore I do’ but when your hard drive crashes and you have no back up you might wish you had bought those files as CDs.”

If your hard drive crashes, why would that cause a problem if you're subscribed to a service that streams music?

But it's not really that Cole is worried about the potential wiping out of people's collections. This is about money. Sorry, art. It's about art:

Downloading and then streaming just isn’t the same, he laments.

“The order people listen to a record is very important. Can you imagine Sgt Pepper’s in any other way?”

Yes, I can, because skipping Mr Kite entirely is what everyone does, Lloyd.

Lloyd remembers how he met some of his earliest band members.

“They bought ‘Never mind the bollocks’ (Sex Pistols) when I was about 14, ripped up the sleeve and then safety pinned it back together and then carried it around all day. The way it should be.”

Hmm. It sounds like your band mates had taken a product produced by an artist, and reassembled it in a way that they thought was better. Why is it so bad when people approach a tracklisting in the same way?

NME experiments with micropayments, possibly

So we know from the ABC figures that take-up of NME's digital edition is a little slow, which appears to have spurred the magazine to try a different way to monetise its digital content:

NME is to trial charging for online access to articles for the first time, asking readers to pay a modest 69p for this week's cover story on the indie four-piece Haim.

The magazine is dipping its toe in the world of online payments with the one-off experiment, but insiders insisted there are no plans to erect a full paywall around NME.com.

From Wednesday, it will cost NME readers 69p to read an "enhanced digital" version of the cover feature on Haim – 30p cheaper than one of the San Fransisco band's singles on iTunes. The rest of the website will remain free.

This makes a degree of sense - keeping the feature articles off the site to protect magazine sales has been understandable, although hasn't worked, so a different approach makes sense.

And the magazine still has some great writers and access to interesting people, so trying to leverage some money online off the back of that makes sense.

On the other hand - sixty nine pence for a single article? MediaGuardian might describe it as "modest" but it looks more like the sort of price only a fan would pay. If you could take or leave Haim, or were merely Haimcurious, you'd head off to discover their other, free interviews, surely?

And if the idea is that people who like Haim very much will happily fork over 69p to read their words, there's a bit of a threat there to the NME that I'm not sure it's thought through. Because if I managed Haim, and knew the NME was going to be making money from selling unique digital content that Haim have helped create, I might consider that my group should get a share of the profits.

It's not like the magazine, where Haim are getting exposure to the wider NME audience, and can think of it as a marketing jaunt. This is a sale which takes place, inarguably, because of the presence of Haim in the product.

It might just be a dead question though - as there's nowhere obvious on the NME website where you can buy the thing. There's no mention on the homepage; no mention on the digital download page; not a word on the Haim page or on the 'inside the NME this week' page.

Perhaps the experiment has already been abandoned; because if it's still going on, I think we can predict there's only going to be limited take-up.

Bookmarks: Spotify

Stuart Dredge has written a thoughtful bit in response to the latest shock that letting one person listen to one song on one occasion doesn't make very much money for anyone. There's a bit of straw-manning - Dredge insists that you can't call Spotify sceptics digital luddites, which feels like knocking down a different argument from a different age - but it's at its best when Dredge explores how Spotify could be used to bolster incomes in a more creative way:

my inkling is that the biggest way streaming services can help new artists make a living is to go further still, and become the bridge between people discovering music, and spending money with its creator elsewhere.

It’s happening a bit: Spotify’s new Discover tab often tells me when a band I’ve been listening to is playing nearby, via Songkick. There’s a lot more scope here to provide artists with tools to sell stuff though, including themselves.

What if everyone listening to your music on Spotify could see that you had gigs coming up, or were selling an exclusive/deluxe music bundle on Bandcamp, a DJ mix on Beatport, a limited-edition t-shirt, and so on? What if a streaming service could point all your listeners towards the Kickstarter campaign that will fund your next album?

What, in short, if Spotify (and Deezer, and Rdio, and the rest) became much better and bigger funnels towards all the other ways you’re making money from your music? But still paid you for every stream on their services.

Sky falls in as US digital sales drop for first time in recorded history

Every on the deck! Nielsen are reporting that the number of digital downloads sold in the US are falling:

For the year to date as of June 30, digital track sales have declined 2.3% to 682.2 million units from the 698 million units that tracks scanned in the first half of 2012, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

In the first quarter, track sales declined 1.34% to 356.5 million from the 361.3 million. In the second quarter the decline more than doubled to 3.3%, with track sales totaling 325.7 million units this year versus 336.7 million in the second quarter of 2012.

Hang about, hang about, put away your Lars Ulrich Was Right t-shirts, and take a breath.

First of, downloads are now competing for attention with streaming, which is going to have an impact.

But there's more than simply a drift to Spotify here - as Billboard explains:

Getting back to the softness in tracks, the decline can be attributed to a 20 million unit decrease in catalog sales, which at the mid-year point fell to 366.7 million units from the 386.9 million units that were scanned at the mid-year 2012. Meanwhile, current track sales grew slightly to 315.5 million from 311 million units.

So, as we saw with CDs, there comes a point when the mass rush to buy music already owned on a different format starts to fall away. That new songs are still selling well is pretty good news.

And there's... something else:

But with the decline in catalog sales, it’s more likely that the decline is due to the growing popularity of complete my album features at download stores, and the possible repricing of catalog sales up to 99 cents and $1.29 price points from the 69 cent tracks that was rolled out to catalog song titles when iTunes first embraced variable pricing in 2009.

Shock! Digital music tracks respond to pricing changes according to very basic laws of supply and demand!

You may now put on your Alfred Marshall Was Right t-shirts, and go about your business.

BPI hails digital

The BPI has, at least, resisted the temptation to describe the 19% of UK music buyers who only ever download as "digital natives". Let's be thankful for that.

They seem thrilled by this news, as it gives it something positive to say after a grim couple of months.

"There has rightly been a lot of focus in the past few weeks on high street music retail. That will continue – we must do all we can to serve music fans who love CDs and vinyl," said the BPI chief executive, Geoff Taylor.

I'm not sure what he means here - does he mean that high street retail will continue? Or the "focus" on it will continue? And whose focus? Ours? The BPI's?

If it's the industry's focus, last month Taylor was kind of vague when talking to Billboard about what the BPI was doing:

We're working very hard together with AIM [Association of Independent Music] in talks with the administrator of HMV. Secondly, we are talking to [U.K. collection society] PRS for Music about the way that publishers approach mechanical royalties on stock for which labels are not being paid, or only being paid a fraction of its value. It's important that the publishing community help labels ensure that HMV has a viable future and that as much of HMV can emerge as a viable ongoing concern as possible.

Obviously, you wouldn't expect Taylor to detail exactly what moves were being made, but given that's an interview with a trade magazine, you'd expect something more than "we're having chats with the people managing the decline" as a roadmap.

Still, back to today, and Taylor's embrace of the new figures:

But as well as great music stores...

You're going to have to speak up, Geoff, we can't hear you above the sound of boards being nailed over HMV windows.

...Britain is blessed with a world-beating array of digital music services, which fans rate very highly for ease of use and value for money. And this is just the beginning."

Only a puritan hides his fear of Springtime by pretending to celebrate it. There's a hollowness to this embrace of digital from an organisation whose members struggled against the tide for so long.

And the suggestion that Britain is somehow at the heart of things is surprising - perhaps he's thinking of America's iTunes or Amazon, or Sweden's Spotify. (True, Spotify is headquartered in London now, but its heart is still Scandinavian.)

And the value for money claim is surprising.

In the US, Spotify premium costs $9.99. At the moment, that's £6.38. The same package costs £9.99 here ($15.65 in USD.)

In the US, the top tier of iTunes pricing is $1.29, equivalent to 82p. In the UK, the top rate is 99p - $1.55 at current exchange rates.

When Geoff Taylor hails the value for money, it'd be nice if he could explain what the extra value UK customers are getting for this hefty mark-up.

Digital music worth more than pub and club jukeboxes

A small step towards digital music sustainability, as PRS announces that the royalties from digital streams is now worth more than royalties from pubs and clubs.

This might be a sign that digital music has become an increasingly robust business.

Or might be a reflection that there are 4,500 fewer pubs in business than 2008.

Muve on

Apparently, Cricket's US mobile-music-bundle Muve service is thriving in the US. The Guardian reports the words of John Bolton, "senior director of product":

"[O]ne year in, we have 600,000 paying subscribers, making us the second largest digital subscription service in the US."

Well, I guess if you compare your mobile phone service with, erm, digital music subscriptions - being second to Rhapsody might sound impressive. Even if you're still about half a million behind, and Rhpasody doesn't come with unlimited talk, text and data.

But how does Muve compare with products that it actually competes with? Tolerably well; it seems to be the thing that's working well for Cricket, offering lower churn rates than their traditional no-contract phone contracts. But the US has over 325 million mobile phones, so however well Muve is doing, it's still a minnow.

Cricket are proud of Muve, though - it looks like every tenth subscriber sign-up triggers a press release. So proud, in fact, it's doing most of their heavy lifting when talking up results. Given that AT&T are looking for a new target after being shut out of a T-Mobile takeover, it's probably that Cricket parent company Leap are hoping that Muve will be successful enough to fatten up a takeover offer.

Will the labels be thrilled by Muve's success, though?

Perhaps not so much. Back to Mr Bolton:

"What's powerful about this offering is that the music feels free," says John Bolton.

Isn't the idea that music is free one that runs contrary to the message the RIAA labels - all of whom are part of Muve - have been fighting against for years?

Again, though, Bolton has hit the nail on the head: the music feels free because what's driving Muve is the unlimited offering of connectivity. The music feels free because it's not what people are buying it for. Nobody will say no to Britney Spears for nothing, but you suspect Muve sign-ups wouldn't be so far off without the music element.

EMI takes its digital rights back in house

One of the problems faced by anyone hoping to sell music online is the numerous rights bodies you have to deal with. Frankly, unless you're well-resourced from the get-go, or concentrate on an impossibly small marketplace.

So it's not entirely in anyone's interests that EMI have pulled their digital rights in the US from ASCAP to deal with them themselves.

Sure, ASCAP aren't ideal, but taking a quarter of the major acts out of ASCAP and forcing groups to have a parallel set of negotiations isn't really going to help smooth the journey from physical to digital sales.

Frankly, unless you're incredibly patient, you might just give up on the legal route altogether.

Clear Channel grabs thumbs

So, the mysterious "major media company" who is set to snaffle Thumbplay - the unpopular US subscription service - is revealed: All Things D report Clear Channel Radio are paying not very much to acquire the company.

It sounds like they're less interested in the handful of subscribers, and are instead keen to use the Thumbplay technology to drive their radio business.

The good news is all staff will be kept on; existing subscribers will be able to carry on listening in their dozens but, for now, Clear Channel isn't looking to grow their numbers:

[Bob Pittman, chairman of media and entertainment at Clear] says Thumbplay’s technology will be integrated in the coming months into Clear Channel’s “iheartradio” service, which offers 750 free Web radio stations and boasts 25 million monthly uniques. He says all 65 Thumbplay employees working on music services will get jobs at Clear Channel.

Clear Channel will get into subscriptions “eventually”, Pittman says. Clear Channel says existing Thumbplay subscribers won’t notice any change, but that the company will stop marketing for new customers.

Which also suggests the rest of the world won't really notice any change, either.

Pink Floyd suddenly realise they don't mind digital after all

Last year, you'll recall, Pink Floyd took EMI to court to prevent the label from splitting up their albums to sell individual tracks as digital downloads.

The band insisted it was all about artistic integrity - their music was only to be enjoyed as part of a whole, or else as incidental music on Only Fools And Horses over photomontages of Delboy selling stuff.

But ten months is a long time in artistic integrity, it turns out, as Pink Floyd and EMI have come to a deal which will allow you to buy the odd track here and there.

So, it was never about the purity of the vision; just the size of the cheque.

[Thanks to Michael M]

Your digital download may or may not work

The BPI and Sharkey's UKMusic claim they wants to develop legal music downloads, and they love a bit of campaigning for changes in the law.

Here's a cause they could actually usefully get behind: at the moment, if you buy a digital download, you've got no rights if it doesn't work. ConsumerFocus - about to be part of the Liberal Democrat Tory shuttering of useful and valuable public services - thinks that isn't right:

Philip Cullum, deputy chief executive of Consumer Focus, said: "It's crazy to have a situation where someone who buys music on a CD has the legal right to a refund if it doesn't work, but someone who downloads the same music does not. Consumer laws on buying digital goods, whether it is streaming films, or downloading music and software, need updating to reflect the reality of 21st-century life.

"The UK should be striving to be the best place in the world for digital consumers. Giving consumers better protection when they shop online and making it clear exactly what they are getting when they buy digital products will also help boost this growing market."

It's an obvious idea, a simple change, and hard to see any objections. It's also achievable, and would improve the experience for people buying stuff.

But, hey, let's throw away cash trying to catch pirates instead, eh?

[via @beltain35]

EMI gives Bertrand Bodson, tells him to ignore the blood and the screaming

EMI has filled the hole at the top by taking on Bertrand Bodson as SVP, global digital marketing.

Bodson used to look after DVD rentals business in Europe (no, apparently they have one) before moving on to co-found Bragster. Yes, yes you do. Bragster.com. You can dare your friends on it and everything. It's like YouTube, but with everything but the show-offs removed.

It's Bodson's skill at making Bragster such a household name that has brought him to EMI, to do for old EMI songs what he did for people wanting to dare other people to see who has the cutest pet.

Good luck in your new job, Mr. Bodson. You might want to check your contract to see what happens to your remuneration package should the business be passed over to a bank in a few months' times.

Digital Beatles updates

That Beatles download site? EMI is having a cow and suing BlueBeat.

Still, if you don't want to risk the wrath of EMI, but still want the Beatles on your computer, why not piss away cash on an ugly and pointless Apple-shaped thumbdrive with all The Beatles songs on it?

There's going to be a strictly limited edition of just as many as they think they can get away with.

Making money from giving away free stuff

There are other ways to make money from free sharing of music than the proposed idea of shaking down marks. HomePageDaily finds that Hobbledehoy are doing quite nicely, thank you:

Since offering several albums for free via digital download in late July, Mr Majerczak has noticed a surge in physical sales; not just CDs but T-shirts and vinyl as well.

"Sales have definitely increased, which I'm sure in part has been a result of our new digital model," explains Mr Majerczak, 22, who started the label from his Ivanhoe bedroom in 2006.

Yes, yes, of course it doesn't follow that everyone would experience identical results, which is why there's a large number of digital models being experimented with. But it does show that there's more opportunity than threat in the world of sharing.

7Digital signs Eurodeal

If you need further evidence that the music industry is too slow to adapt, look no further than the announcement that Warners have signed a Europe-wide deal with 7Digital, allowing the company to sell their catalogue from sea to shining sea across the continent.

It's good news for 7Digital. Quite a coup. Nobody has done a deal like this before.

And there's the rub. It is 2009, and only now has a major signed a pan-European deal with a digital store.

At this rate, the music industry will be ready to fight off the Napster 1.0 challenge by sometime in the middle of 2023.

EMI hope you'll be a focus group for them

The ongoing struggle of EMI to get to grips with the digital world sees the launch of something it's calling Your Soundcheck:

Email invites began going out Friday to some registered users of EMI.com offering free access to pre-release content and an opportunity to share what they "think about new music, new bands and advise us on our music-making decisions". Opinions will, the invite promises, "go straight to the heart of one of the world's leading music companies, helping to shape tomorrow's music."

Well, it's better than nothing, but it still misses the point by a country mile: in 2009, the company thinks that building a private space and keeping control is going to work. If they want to know what people think of their acts, why not spend a tenth of the money they're wasting on this paying some staff to look on the internet in places where music fans gather voluntarily to discuss music?

The other big flag that EMI is still bumbling about in the dark is the language:

Listen to new music before it's on the radio and watch pre-release clips of music videos

The company still seems to believe that putting things on the internet is, somehow, pre-release. If they're going to put up full tracks, no matter how cunning the password protection on the YourSoundCheck site is, those tracks will be swimming round the net before the executives get their first response pie chart. If they put up bits of tracks, nobody's going to be interested.

This isn't even that new an idea - back in the 80s, the majors did this sort of thing, albeit with adverts in the pop press and tapes rather than email invites and digital files.

I can't think why they didn't try this sort of thing in 1999. I can't think why they're bothering in 2009.

One last thought: presumably, this scheme had been gestated under Douglas Merrill. The low-key launch suggests that the new team at EMI might be less keen on the plan.

You get a free gift and your Nickelback

If you wanted to give away a free Nickelback video, you'd probably be hard put to find anyone who'd want it. You'd need to find some way of identifying those odd souls who might actually think it delightful. Luckily, though, US phone company Sprint have come up with a foolproof way of finding Nickelback fans. Actually, you wouldn't want foolproof, would you? It'd be like make a butchers carnivore-proof.

What Sprint are going to do is tickle Nickelback fans' mobiles as they arrive at gigs, using wifi and bluetooth to offer the download, and to slap it on if they say yes.

Not quite sure how the bandwidth would cope if everyone said 'yes' at the same time - I have a happy fantasy of Chad Ogre trying to start the gig while the audience are saying "hang on, mate... the download is only 3% completed..."

The technology has been used at Def Leppard gigs, too, but the interesting point is that is could also be used for good purposes.