musicNeutral’s Blog

Josh Freese is selling himself to sell his new album. He is best known as the drummer for A Perfect Circle, The Vandals and Devo, but just yesterday Freese released Since 1972, his second solo-album.

Taking off from Trent Reznor’s tiered pricing scheme on the album Ghosts I-IV, Freese’s new album is available online for $7, but for those willing to pay $50 Freese will call you up to say “thank you” and you can “yack it up”, or for $250 he will show his appreciation by taking you out to The Cheesecake Factory.

Above the $250 mark? The incentives are hilarious/bizarre and it is really worth checking out the site.

Every package above $50 includes a signed CD and a t-shirt: For $2500 Freese will give you a drum lesson and let you pick any member of the Vandals or DEVO to go with to the “Hollywood Wax Museum”. For $5000 Freese will write a song entirely about you and put it up on iTunes.  And (limited edition for 1 person) for $75k Freese will join your band for a month and the two of you can take shrooms and cruise Hollywood.

While Freese doesn’t actually believe that anyone will pay for these more expensive packages, he is ready to fulfill his part of the bargain.

Of course, this is bizarre – but it’s an interesting way connect with fans (and no, you don’t actually need to give them a foot massage).

Freese is giving his fans something that can’t be copied, and give something unique. I’m sure that some crazed fan of The Decemberists or (insert popular band name) would pay more than $12 for the CD if it meant that there was an after-show-party and the band would be there hanging out (I know I would have, I remember going to great lengths once when I was a teenager to party with The Smashing Pumpkins).

I have a feeling that bands are going to start getting more creative with how they make money, even if means selling themselves to sell their music.

*More info can be found on Josh Freese’s website or in this recent interview

Amazon has been experimenting with digital music prices by offering an array of full-length albums for less than $7.99. Each week they pick five albums to sell for $5.00, and for a limited time U2’s latest album “No Line on the Horizon” was available for only $3.99. Similarly, up until recently all the music in the iTunes catalog was priced at $0.99 per track, but in April iTunes will also adjust the price of their MP3s: $0.69, $0.99 and $1.29 depending on the record company.

Why the change?

• Amazon might be using the low prices to entice new customers; potentially to take market share from Apple.
• Cross-subsidies: Amazon.com might be selling cheaper music with the hope that customers will buy something else in their online store. Wal-Mart has been doing this for years by offering DVDs below cost in order to lure customers into their store.
• A response to shifts in the digital-music market. (ie. to stay competitive)
• A decrease in the price point may make music reasonable enough to buy. Remember that on Amazon the bestselling album of 2008 was being sold for $5.00.

The market price for music continues to fall towards $0.00 like an inverted Moore’s Law. I’ve drawn up a price comparison for a few of the popular music distribution channels to illustrate a gradual decline in the price of digital music downloads.

*I’ve omitted streaming audio sites like Last.fm in order to visualize the market price for owning one digital music file.

“Newspapers Fold. At least 120 newspapers in the U.S. have shut down since January 2008”, reported CNN. Some newspapers like the Ann Arbor News are being superseded by their online identity, while employees at the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune are holding on for life after news that their parent company has declared bankruptcy.

Earlier this week Clay Shirkey wrote a related piece about the cosmic myopia of the newspaper industry:

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several.

Shirkey goes on to explain the options that were considered by the industry early on:

• educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law
• new payment models such as micropayments were proposed
• they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported
• sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.

Yet the “unthinkable scenario” that they never considered was that the ability to “share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow” because we were in the middle of a revolution.

When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

So now is not the time to push old models of media distribution, it is the time to experiment. I don’t think anyone really knows whether if in twenty years all online content will be freely accessible, behind someone’s walled garden, or another alternative we have yet to think up. But we do know there will still be journalists, photographers and musicians.

Techdirt’s Michael Masnick has put together a case study on Nine Inch Nails’ business model and gave an excellent presentation discussing his conclusions. Throughout the video he argues that the new music business model comes down to this formula:

Connect With Fans (CwF)
+ Reason To Buy (RtB)
= The Business Model ($$$$)

Masnick exemplifies Trent Reznor’s tactics in relation to his equation:

1) NIN ‘Connects with Fans’ (CwF):

• NIN dropped a USB stick with a new NIN song in the bathroom at a NIN show
• NIN highlighted letters on the back of a NIN shirt that led fans to the secret site (iamtryingtobelieve.com) where they could take part in an alternative reality game
• Reznor leaked their own music on BitTorrent sites
• NIN made their 2008 release The Slip available for free – the release coincided with an announcement for their upcoming tour
• Information visualizations were made available, mapping where NIN fans who downloaded The Slip were located
• The NIN site aggregates Flickr photos and YouTube videos tagged by fans
• The band released 400GB of live HD concert footage for fans via torrents
• NIN gave away free concert tickets in a cryptic treasure-hunt game, for example one fan found tickets in an Los Angles drainpipe

2) NIN Gives Fans ‘A Reason to Buy’ (RtB):

• The Year Zero album came with a color changing disc – something that can’t be replicated by an MP3
• Ghosts I-IV was a free download, but NIN also made available 2,500 copies of a $300 “Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition Package” that included two CDs, a Blue-ray disc and other goodies all in a package signed by Reznor himself. The package was a huge success and all 2,500 sold-out within two days, amounting to $750,000 in sales.
• NIN has connected with their fans to such a degree that NIN fans respect Reznor and want to support his initiative. This can help explain how Ghosts I-IV brought in 1.6million in the first week and was Amazon’s best selling album of 2008.

It would be great to see more case studies like this being written about musicians that follow the CwF/RtB logic. Masnick believes this model can and is working for both large and small musicians – he doesn’t mention any of these findings, but additional case studies can be found on the Creative Commons website. In conclusion Masnick adds, “there is a lot more music to be made, a ton of new fans to make very, very happy — and, yes, through it all, an awful lot of money that can be made as well.”

Almost a year ago Creative Commons launched the Case Studies Project with the aim of qualitatively measuring the impact of CC licenses on the world. The project lives on the CC wiki and everyone is invited to contribute by adding “interesting, innovative, or noteworthy uses of Creative Commons.” As of this writing, the project showcases around 500 Case Studies of people using a CC License for photography, music, film, literature and education.

Unfortunately, the CC wiki (IMHO) is slightly awkward to navigate: you can browse through the case studies, but since most of us aren’t looking for a specific case study it is difficult to get an overall impression. Luckily, Creative Commons Australia recently completed a book entitled Building an Australasian Commons that highlights sixty-five of the case studies (a pre-print PDF version of the book is now available online). Building an Australasian Commons is an amazing first step for aggregating this information and presenting it in an easily digestible and persuasive manner. The 195 page PDF lifts the project from the website, and with the magic of good design techniques, reworks it into something that tells a larger story – and something that is fashionable enough to put on your coffee table.

How To Improve the Case Studies
In order to spread CC beyond the walls of the free-culture movement and into mainstream society CC needs more evidence that demonstrates whether it has been successful for artists. So in addition to the book, what other ways can the case studies be presented such that they have the power to influence the general public?

Is there additional data that we could be collecting from the CC licensed artists?

The first thing that comes to mind is that the case studies need to include more hard data about artists’ income and listenership. Among the participants in the music study, a few of the more generous participants have disclosed the following:

• Nine Inch Nails provided some of the most detailed information on their pricing model and revealed that they took in 1.6million in the first week from sales on their website.
• Musician Jonathan Coulton was “unable to give statistics” but did say that 45% of his income in 2007 was from paid digital downloads.
• Jamendo, the online music platform promoting CC-licensed music, has made all of the site’s donation statistics publicly available. Economist Aaron Schiff tabulated the data and published his findings that, “Over the 22 months there were 1,454 donations made, for a total value of US$21,150. So each artist is receiving very little money, if anything.”

While these numbers are interesting, they aren’t enough to conclude anything about the Creative Commons licenses as a whole. For instance, there isn’t a constant metrics that I can rely on to make comparisons between the musicians. And further, how can I relate these results to musicians that aren’t using a CC license?

As a parallel think about how Billboard Magazine has been reporting on album sales and popularity for the past 60 years. Their rankings are publicly available and provide the industry with a standard for measurement. What standards of measurement can we use in the CC case studies?

I’d also like to learn if there are people who feel that their work has been hindered by the use of a CC license. What went wrong? What can we learn from this? Considering that the only “negative” conclusion was drawn from one of the few participants that had disclosed the largest amount of hard-data (Jamendo’s finding that “each artist is receiving very little money”), there hasn’t been enough research into the true consequences of using a CC license.

If CC could collect more data about each musician then perhaps the “musicians, music professionals and record execs” (Billboard’s audience) would pay more attention. And more importantly, Creative Commons would gain the ‘stickiness’ necessary to penetrate mainstream culture.

I wrote a simple PHP script that queries the Internet radio site Jango and allows you to play any song they have in their database. Jango is already far superior to other Internet radio sites when it comes to finding a particular song. In contrast, Last.fm and Pandora are more like traditional radio stations: you can pick the band or genre you want to hear, but you have to wait around if you want to hear any particular song. At Jango half of songs are available to be streamed (check out The Arcade Fire’s page to see). But if you notice, a song like “No Cars Go” is listed as not available. And so this script makes a link that accesses the entire library.

It’s really easy to understand the pattern, here is “No Cars Go”:

http://www.jango.com/music/arcade+fire/no+cars+go

Try out the search tool and let me know how it works. I’ve made the code available on this site, so feel free to build upon it and make it better. Also, here is a stand alone Jango Search example.

Songbird 1.1 Is Now Available.

In the latest update the team at Songbird have added one-click album artwork retrieval, bug fixes and a long list of performance enhancements (most notably a  reduction in memory & CPU usage).

One of the things I’m excited about is the new Songbird protocol handler (songbird://) which allows Songbird to be accessed from a URL. For example, click this URL in Firefox and it opens Last.fm in the Songbird browser:

songbird:open?url=http%3A%2F%2Flast.fm

This helps blurs the line between finding music on the web and playing music in a music library.

Songbird Bookmarklet
One example of the protocol at work is this bookmarklet by Trent on Lifehacker. Simply bookmark this link below. Then when you come across downloadable music on the web, click the bookmarklet and the files are ready for download in Songbird:

javascript:document.location=”songbird:open?url=”+escape(document.location);

I’d like it if Songbird offered this as a default during installation – like delicious does. It’d be a lot easier for newbies who might be intimidated with anything that is related to javascript code.

South by Southwest (SXSW), one of the largest and coolest Music/Interactive/Film conferences in the world, is about to start up again in Austin, TX later this week. Hundreds of bands from around the world will showcase their music on over eighty stages.

In an effort to promote new music, each year MP3′s from artists that are scheduled to play SXSW are made available on the SXSW website.

The past few years Greg Hewgill collected the MP3s and released them via a torrent on his site. For 2009 Ben Stolt did the same thing: all 1267MP3 files (6.15GB) of music are available in three torrents posted on his site.

As digital audio files continue to flow freely on the Internet, music itself mimics certain inherent characteristics of the web best understood through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (D&G) rhizome metaphor. In A Thousand Plateaus, D&G introduce the concept of a “rhizome” to describe a representative model that extends in all directions and has multiple entryways; since then it has most commonly been used as a metaphor to represent the Internet. Understanding digital music as rhizomatic is important because it interprets the transformations of the digital music culture as a natural progression towards rhizomatic qualities – and provides us with an insight into what might be the future of “the music industry”.

A few of the defining characteristics of the rhizome are connectivity, heterogeneity, multiplicity and cartography. Music can be understood as rhizomatic when its characteristics mimic those of the rhizome; thus music becomes more rhizomatic when those characteristics are amplified. According to D&G, any point of a rhizome “can and must be connected to anything other”. So we might think of anything that blocks connectivity as a contributing factor in making something less rhizomatic. Firewalls and 404-errors are just two examples of obstacles that fulfill this role. Digital music is also subject to a large set of infringing obstacles, some of which include DRM, other restrictions due to copyright laws, and pay-only access for downloads. As we see these barriers disappear, we also see digital music becoming more rhizomatic.

While highlighting the defining characteristics of the rhizome…
I’ve suggested 5 examples illustrating how music has become more rhizomatic:

1) Music search engines

Over the past few years we’ve seen music search engines like seeqpod and skreemr increase our level of connectivity to music. These sites crawl the web for music and provide links to the MP3s they find. Songza is a music search engine that goes as far as to search YouTube and strip out the audio tracks from uploaded videos. Music search engines look for data already present on the network and create new lines of access. If we think of the Internet as a large map, then by uploading music to the web we extend the map; and by using music search engines we create more connectivity. And because on the web music is “unbundled” from the album, we are free to connect directly to the music that interests us the most and ignore everything else.

2) Music Is Becoming Free

The price of music continues to approach zero. This theory is supported by Michael Arrington in his post “The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free”, as well as by Seth Godin, British economist Will Page and myself on musicNeutral (to name a few). As music moves towards free, the pay-to-download price barrier is eroded, fostering greater connectivity between users and musicians.

3) The Persistence of File Sharing

The persistence of file sharing spreads more music around the web, thereby extending the territory of the rhizome. According to D&G: “a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed.” This trait is defined as “asignifying ruptures”, and it is exemplified in the persistence of music file-sharing sites. When one file-sharing site is shut down, two more turn up to replace it. The RIAA may have helped shut down popular music file sharing sites like Napster and Oink, but ultimately they can’t shut down P2P and BitTorrent technology.

The characteristic of cartography is also present in the spread of music files online. We can draw a parallel of music “leaking” on the Internet to D&G’s depiction of the rhizome plant: “Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil’s weed plants that are growing in between are yours.”  The most recent example of this phenomena is with the new U2 album No Line On The Horizon: it was mistakenly available for download on the Universal Australia site two weeks before release and since has spread around the Internet (for example, here on the pirate bay).

4) Remix Culture

D&G in their description of the rhizome state that “Music has always sent out lines of flight” and it is because of these “ruptures and proliferations “ that the musical form is “comparable to a weed, a rhizome”. The “lines of flight” may refer to the fact that a song can never be re-played exactly the same by a musician (e.g., no matter how minuscule, there will always be some variation in tempo or timbre), but in addition the lines of flight also encompass all of the derivatives. ‘Remix culture‘ is closely associated with DJs that cut-up, rearrange and sample music tracks, but it also extends to the many derivative works sung by amateurs on sites like YouTube. Remix culture thus expresses the rhizomatic qualities of heterogeneity as well as multiplicity*.

5) Songbird

The open-source music player Songbird allows you to browse the web for MP3s and download music to your local library. The remarkable thing about Songbird is the set of add-ons that instantly connect your music to relevant data called from around the web. Within the Songbird interface you can match upcoming concerts, lyrics, photos and reviews to the tracks you are listening to. Songbird’s add-ons facilitate direct connectivity and re-use of data that–in comparison–frames iTunes as a music prison.

In conclusion…the interesting thing about these five examples is that they’ve all emerged within only the past decade. Looking forward to the next ten years, musicians should embrace trends that support connectivity, heterogeneity and multiplicities if they want to stay ahead of the evolutionary curve of digital music, which in my opinion means supporting initiatives like Creative Commons and the free culture movement. Evidence has shown that digital music follows the path of least resistance – and ultimately it strives to be more like the rhizome.

*multiplicity includes not only the multiple, but also the variations of the original

Nine Inch Nail’s Ghosts I-IV is the Amazon’s Bestselling album of 2008! Ghosts was released last March under a Creative Commons license: allowing anyone to legally copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. The first nine tracks of the album were, and still are, available for download on the band’s site. So despite the fact that Ghosts could be legally downloaded (Trent Reznor himself even uploaded the album to bittorrent sites), it is shocking that it was able to sell so many copies on Amazon.

Here are some possibilities for why Ghosts might have done so well:

• The reasonable $5.00 album price for 36 tracks?
• The immense publicity surrounding this free release last March?
• The band’s reputation?

Further, I would be curious if Amazon’s data is based on units sold or total earnings? But even if the $5.00 album price is responsible for selling a greater number of units, similarly interesting is Radiohead’s In Rainbows coming in at #11 ($8.99 for 10 tracks).