Ignore Illegal Download At Your Peril:  Music Business Tells TV~ 

Major players in music industry say television must work out how to monetise its content rather than controlling it.

Television must learn from the mistakes of the music industry and adapt its business model to focus on monetising content rather than controlling it, senior industry figures told the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival

Peter Jenner, president emeritus of the International Music Managers Forum, said that the television could have a better time than the music industry.

He said: “If they learn from what we’ve done and look at the reality of the situation in an analytical way rather than just thinking ‘how can I protect my old business model’.”

Technology has made copying uncontrollable – so instead of trying to prevent peer-to-peer sharing of content, the television industry should be developing platforms for compensation.

Will Page, the chief economist at the Performing Right Society (PRS) said “television is waiting for a silver bullet”, but he added that the TV industry must address illegal downloading. Doing nothing will see the problem getting “worse and worse” – but, Page said, “neither is disconnecting people from the internet a good way of increasing revenues.”

Peer-to-peer filesharing means that it is more difficult for television to create artificial scarcity by selling programmes to different territories at different times. “The idea that you can create artificial scarcity in certain territories has gone now,” said Eric Garland CEO of BigChampagne, which monitors download and bit torrent traffic.

In the first half of 2009, Heroes was illegally downloaded 54,562,012 times, according to data from BigChampagne. Also among the most downloaded shows were Lost with 52,151,396; 24 at 34,119,093; Prison Break at 29,283,591; and House with 26,277,954. Even when broadcasters streamed shows for free as in the case of the CW’s Gossip Girl, bit torrent traffic was still high at 19,706,870.

Source: The Guardian

Monday Inspirations—Here are 3 weekly ideas for song lyric, poems, instrumental titles, photos, video, short story or anything they inspire you to create.  Use the title if you like & make something!

Is this a Country song title or what+

excerpt from Strategic Planning For The Small Business by Craig S. Rice

Books jump into my hands at the right time.  While cruising the books for sale shelf at the local library, the above book jumped into my hands.  Best value for 25cents.  I also bought a book of poetry to send to two songwriters who are getting married tomorrow.  But back to business. 

Life is a business you know.  Each of us is our product that we sell.  We sell our time we sell our skills.  Some of you are songwriters and sell your songs, your performances, your art.  So it is good to have a plan of what you want to get in return, when you’d like to get it and how you will get it.  Here’s the excerpt:

“You may be wondering, “What does a business plan do for me?”  You are asking a sensible question that deserves an answer.  You get six strong benefits.

First - A plan favorable impresses your key people.  Your investors, owners, bankers, and employees often will say, “I like a person who has a good plan worked out!”  Investors are more willing to put in funds - and employees will invest more of their time, effort, and enthusiasm.  Programs motivate, and a person with a careful plan often has a certain attraction and influence.

Second - A plan increases your income.  Famous consultant Peter Drucker says, “What gets planned, gets done.”  So if you build a good, sensible program for increasing your sales and profits, you have a much better chance that those profits will come to you than you would if you had no such plan.

Third - A plan saves you time, work, and stress - and that’s not all bad.  You avoid wasted action, mistakes, and lost money.  The plan spreads and delegates the load.  (Why should you do it all?)  Plus, a plan anticipates problems and turns them into advantages before they hit you.  So it cuts your stress.  Good planners get more fun out of life.

Fourth - A plan applies your strengths, skills, abilities, interests.  Everyone and every company has talents.  Yet these are sometimes unrecognized, unappreciated, and under-employed, even though these very things are the activities that people most enjoy doing, and often will generate the most results per day or week.  A good plan helps find those valuable resources and applies them in contructive ways - like making money.

Fifth - A plan gives you a track to run on.  A railroad train, racing car, or running athlete moves better, more efficiently, more effectively, when on a track.  All can see where they are, where they are going, and the direction they want to take.  And a track is usually smoother than fields, streams, and woods.  Your route is well laid out.  Now you can concentrate on your own progress, speed, excelling over competitors and winning, rather than getting past every aggravating puddle, rock, and rut in the road.

Sixth - A plan sets priorities.  This can be very important and mighty handy in these days of limited resources and modest budgets.  We simply can’t afford to do everything.  Some things must be postponed.

But other projects are essential.  And even among these preferred projects, not everything can be done at once.  With a plan, you know what to do first and what’s coming next.  It not only saves you from unpleasant surprises, but lets you focus all your skill on each step, so you are more likely to succeed.  And by taking things one at a time, not in one horrendous load, your stress factor is much lower.  Life is hard, by the yard - but life’s a cinch, by the inch.”

He goes on to give “… one of the best and easiest kinds of plans …” which has only four steps.  I’ll post that next week.  Here’s to good planning!!!  Cheers+  

Here’s the deal – Music Dealers out of Chicago is a new and growing music licensing company that we like.  So we’ve opened an Artist’s Rep account at their website and have had much correspondence with our account manager.  We are currently building profiles of several Songs2Share (S2S) artists at their website. 

Soon their clients will be able to search their website music catalog and license songs/music directly from the website.  As an Artist Rep account we are only uploading music we’ve screened and consider saleable.  This way repeat clients will know the S2S music catalog has quality music. 

Artists can upload their music directly if they like and all music is accepted into the general catalog.  If you do this, you will have to spend time over at the website working your account and hope you get noticed.  With a variety of artists and genres of quality screened music, Songs2Shsare will get noticed.  By both the Music Dealers company and their clients. 

To represent your music at Music Dealers and other music licensing companies, we charge 10% commission on licensed placements.  We make a dime when you make a dollar – well almost.  Our main objective in administering your music is to build the Songs2Share company’s value so we can attract a larger company who will take S2S to the next level.  To do this we need something of value.  Our song catalog. 

Every song we sign on a non-exclusive basis goes into our song catalog for the life of the company.  That means while you can continue to perform and market your song, sell downloads and CDs of any song we accept, we can and will continue to market your song as long as our doors are open for business. 

What We Need Now = Holiday Music.  Music Dealers has put out a call for holiday music.  All genres and instrumentals of original music.  Any holiday celebrated from Halloween through New Year’s is what we need.  Please go to the website, LOGIN and make a free account and you will be taken to the Song Upload feature.  Upload your MP3 submissions.  We will e-mail response all submissions. We look forward to marketing your music. ~

Unlikely as it may seem, since other ad-supported music sites are finding things challenging lately, Spotify may actually be bringing record labels a big pay day - well, at least in its native Sweden.

“In five months from the launch, Spotify became our largest digital source of income and so passed by iTunes”, according to Per Sundin, managing director of Universal Music, the world’s bigget major, in Sweden (via SwedishWire). “It’s a fantastic development, explained by the fact that Spotify really has exploded”.

Spotify’s arrangements with royalty collectors are closely guarded, at least in the UK, so it’s difficult to say exactly how much it’s paying out. But bear in mind that Sundin referred to Spotify’s streamed service itself, not the white-label affiliate music retailers like 7Digital that power its buy-to-own downloads…

If true, this begins to pose some problems for Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), and begins to validate Spotify’s business model - if it can pay out more money from ad income than iTunes is from a la carte purchases prices, that would be a watershed.

But it would also be surprising - bit by the ad downturn and ongoing royalty outgoings, Last.fm has introduced radio subscriptions in some countries, YouTube has pulled premium music in the UK and Germany while baulking at royalty outgoings; We7, too, is experimenting with premium offerings on top of its core free. So we’ll keep our eyes peeled for now. Spotify has been courting labels for other territories and hopes to roll out in the U.S. in Q3 or Q4.

Source: Paid Content UK

The four big record companies are to compete with Apple’s forthcoming Cocktail project by developing their own format called CMX

Format war .. the four major labels are to go head-to-head with Apple

Forget WAV, MP3 and M4A – major labels have something new in mind, and it’s called CMX. Sony, Warner, Universal and EMI are reportedly preparing a new digital album format that will include songs, lyrics, videos, liner notes and artwork.

The news comes just weeks after reports of a similar project, Cocktail, being developed by Apple. According to the Times, Apple rejected CMX and instead began work on an in-house alternative. It is not clear how Cocktail and CMX will differ, other than ownership.
“Apple at first told us that they were not interested, but now they have decided to do their own, in case ours catches on,” a label rep told the Times. “Ours will be a file that you click on, it opens and it would have a brand new look, with a launch page and all the different options. When you click on it you’re not just going to get the 10 tracks, you’re going to get the artwork, the video and mobile products.”

However, this may be of little interest if CMX isn’t compatible with iTunes, the default music software for iPods, iPhones and Apple computers. Whereas labels are eager to resuscitate the album format in an age of singles, Apple is concerned with selling hardware, including a tablet computer rumoured to be launching this fall.

The major labels plan to launch CMX, which is just a working title for the format, in November. It will reportedly be “soft-launched” with a few select releases. “We are not going out in force,” the industry source said. “What you are going to see is a couple of releases thrown out there to see what people like. We are working with the retailers now.”

Source: Guardian

From an email from New Music Strategies:

You’re looking at it wrong

Posted: 17 Aug 2009 02:23 AM PDT
This great data visualisation from the NY Times comes to us via a really fascinating website called Information is Beautiful. It represents the sales in billions of today’s dollars of the various music formats over time.

They claim it represents the dwindling death knell of the music industry. That’s not quite right (even leaving aside the nonsense assertion that the record business = the music industry). While put together in aggregate, the overall graph would show a larger, fatter, longer increase and decline, what this graph does not show is equally interesting.

The trailing tail to the right of the graph seems to indicate the death of music business. But look to the left. This graph does not start at the beginning of the music business. And nor does it start only a short while after the beginning of the music business.

It starts in 1973.

I don’t know about you, but I was around in 1973. I wasn’t very old, but I was old enough to be aware of music. It had been around long before I had. And even though the graph would have been tiny – at least in comparison to the uncharacteristically massive spike in CD sales around 1999 – there was no crisis in the music business then.

My guess, in fact, was that there was opportunity. In 1973, the small numbers meant that people who sought to do new and interesting things were able to do those new and interesting things. Less was at stake (at least, in aggregate) and so people took risks.

New and innovative kinds of music flourished in the margins. Funk, disco, punk, psychedelic, metal, and reggae all started to emerge as significant forces from that decade. Lots of tiny labels did amazing and sometimes incredibly profitable things. 

Risk-takers were sometimes massively rewarded. Those who kicked at the edges often flourished.

Skip forward to 1999 – ten years ago now – and you witness the height of corporatism in the recorded music business. A world of a few stars selling millions of copies of safe and frequently dull music. But most importantly, the business people who were teens in 1973 were able to take the music they loved from their youth and turn it into a multi-billion dollar industry.

And while the interesting new genres have been created in the margins all through that history, it’s the forms (and their often watered-down derivatives) loved by those execs that have massively prospered through the recorded music boom era.

Of course, music didn’t start in 1973. Or 1923 for that matter – and nor did the ability to make money from it. The last 35 years provides us with an interesting historical anomaly as far as that graph is concerned.

The boom and bust pattern of each recorded music format adds up to an overall rise and decline of corporatism in the recorded music industries. Culturally, this could well be something to celebrate.

Personally, I’m hopeful for new and interesting musical forms and genres coming from the margins and being able to reach a significant audience.

It’s cheaper to experiment now. It’s easier to reach an audience than ever before, and the economics are such that you don’t need for corporations to be making billions in profit in order to make a decent living at it.

I’m not saying that this is the best time in history for music. I’m actually hopeful that we haven’t yet seen the best time for music. It’s even possible that the biggest selling record of all time hasn’t been made yet.

My point is that the graph above only represents a crisis for a particular way of organising music business, and not for music business itself – and certainly not for music.

In fact, if we’re clever about it, this might be one of those golden ages for musical culture that seem to coincide with the skinny bits of that graph.

Source: New Music Strategies

Information is Beautiful: death of the music industry

Legendary Pictures will develop film and then look for approval from the guitarist’s estate

Jimi Hendrix plays at The Experience Marquee Club in London in 1967. Photograph: Marc Sharratt/Rex Features

Jimi Hendrix is set to become the latest in a string of musicians to have a biopic made about their lives – if his estate will only agree to it.

Previous attempts to make a film about the life of the legendary guitarist have failed to meet with the approval of Hendrix’s estate. In 2006, the high court prevented director John Hillman and Dragonslayer Films from making their proposed Hendrix biopic, ruling that the company had no rights to Hendrix’s music or likeness, while Hendrix’s estate, run by his stepsister Janie Hendrix, also refused to license music to a proposed film starring Outkast’s Andre 3000.

But Variety reports that Legendary Pictures is planning a feature film about the life of the man named the greatest guitarist in rock history by Rolling Stone. Legendary will develop the project first and then win approval from the estate, it says – discussions so far have been “loose”, with no firm rights deal put in place.

If it does make it to the cinemas, the Hendrix biopic would track the guitarist’s life from his stint in the US army through his journey to musical superstardom at Woodstock to his death in London in 1970. Legendary has made no comment on possible casting.

Source: The Guardian

Woodstock: The Summer of ‘69

Aug 24 2009 By Polly Weeks

The name Michael Lang may not sound all that familiar but his festival Woodstock will. To celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the legendary festival this month, the man who started it all recalls the hedonistic days of 1969.

In the summer of 1969, half a million people descended on a farm in upstate New York for four days of performances by the world’s most famous musicians.

With legends such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin on the bill, Woodstock went down in history as the most celebrated rock music festival the world has ever seen.

The brainchild of Michael Lang, the festival has come to epitomise the Swinging Sixties as much as Beatlemania, pot smoking hippies and student peace protests.

“What happened that weekend was that it became this community of people who were like minded and part of a cultural movement,” says Lang, 65.

“We were all very much against the Vietnam War and were all involved in human rights struggles. Because we were in charge, we were able to do it very much the way we wanted to.”

Although the hedonistic, ‘flower child’ days belong to the past, the memory of Woodstock still lives on and Lang has more reason than most to toast its legacy.

He was just 25 when he left Coconut Grove, Florida and returned to his native New York to make his music festival dreams a reality.

“I’d just had it with Florida. I’d lost a lot of money and while I’d had an amazing experience there, the Grove went from being this idyllic little arts community where dogs could sleep in the middle of the road all day without being disturbed, to high rises and condominiums,” Lang explains.

“It just seemed like a good time to move back to the New York area. I knew Woodstock from when I was a kid as we used to go there with my folks and it had developed into a nice music community. For example Bob Dylan and his band were living there. I was very much into music and the music scene and I thought, ‘Well that sounds like a great place to be’. It was near to New York and it was like what the Grove had been before the developments.”

So packing his bags and waving goodbye to the Sunshine State, Lang headed North to New York, where it wasn’t long before he had fully immersed himself in the city’s burgeoning music scene, and made some good friends along the way.

“When I moved to the town of Woodstock that summer I attended a series of concerts on a farm just outside of town, they were very low key, maybe 500 - 1000 people would come. It occurred to me it was just a beautiful way to see music. Just without having to deal with any authority figures and sharing that experience with friends under the stars. It was amazing.”

“I became friends with Artie Kornfeld and we talked about music incessantly and we kept on coming back to the idea of putting on a bigger version of the festivals we had been to at the farm - just putting it all together on one big weekend.”

It was at this time that fate struck. Two local businessmen, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, had money to spare and were looking for a worthwhile business venture. Lang and Kornfeld soon convinced the pair to invest in their festival.

For Lang though it was more than a business idea, in fact he was keen to make the festival not-for-profit in line with his political ethos. Something thousands of others agreed with.

“Segregation still was a big issue at the time. There were also issues against women and gays. We just felt everyone should be on the same plane,” Lang explains.

“When we introduced Woodstock we wanted it to be all-inclusive. Throughout the USA, there had been lots of violent events that year. At concert events people were crashing the gates and thought that music should be free. We wanted Woodstock to be very inclusive so when people arrived, if they didn’t have tickets they could still come in.”

It was for this reason that instead of an anticipated 200,000 people turning up to the event, 500,000 decided to make the trip - with thousands more stuck in traffic, clamoring to get into the festival.

Woodstock set a bench mark to which many future events still aspire. From Glastonbury to the Big Chill (Lang even opened the Herefordshire event this year) festival organisers around the world have attempted to emulate the success that Woodstock had in 1969. The rise of these events and the ever-growing diversity of the format is something close to Lang’s heart.

“It’s nice to see they still continue with more than just music. They have other arts and cultural pursuits still going.”

Can any other festival compare to Woodstock though? “I think Coachella in California is a great event and Glastonbury - ever since the early days it has been wonderful. There are many festivals around Europe that seem to work on the Woodstock Model and that’s very gratifying to see.”

While many festivals may have taken on board Woodstock’s cultural attributes, some things had to stay in the Sixties. While people at modern day festivals are likely to let their hair down, at Woodstock they took it a step further and whether it was the warmer climate or the well-reported drug use, thousands decided to strip off and go skinny dipping in the grounds.

Given Lang’s prominent role in the festival, he was unable to join the action but that doesn’t mean he didn’t witness it.

“I was running around organising everything but I was also going all over the site so I saw what was going on. I’d say it was expressions of freedom right? That’s really what the overall message was of the festival, it was about freedom.”

With such a mammoth task behind him, Lang wouldn’t let Woodstock take over his life.

“I knew there was a danger that having done something so big and dramatic when I was young that it could have made a terrible impact on my future. I just made sure I got away from it and I just put it behind me and moved on so I wouldn’t be trapped by the fame of it.”

During those few August days in ‘69, Lang had experienced more than most 25-year-old Americans could ever dream of, and now 40 years on he can safely say that he helped make history.

Extra time - Michael Lang

Before Woodstock, Michael Lang was responsible for putting on the 1968 Miami Pop Festival.

Lang is still just as political. He’s now got his attention firmly focused on addressing climate change.

Sly & The Family Stone was Lang’s favourite act at Woodstock.

At the festival, Lang was always calm. He says: “When things get weird I just get calmer, I’ve never panicked.”

Michael Lang lives in Upstate New York.

Story from The Flintshire Chronicle.

Monday Inspirations—Here are 3 weekly ideas for song lyric, poems, instrumental titles, photos, video, short story or anything they inspire you to create.  Use the title if you like & make something!

48.  Concrete Principles
Your Concrete Principles are banging in my head.  Dang Bang Rang = I heard what you said = from your ivory tower where you put your head full of concrete principles.  Perhaps you also know an egoist who knows everything and does no wrong.